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Rummaging around in my TBR mountain (books waiting To Be Read), I came across this slender novel. I don’t remember where it came from; I’ve never heard of it, and I’m pretty sure I didn’t buy it. However, once it jumped into my hand, I was intrigued. The cover unsettled me; an interesting collage of Persian rugs, rather jumbled, with the title text pushing out of its box and just a corner of an owl’s head, it hinted at secrets and mysteries and dark things just outside your field of vision.

The story is indeed dark. The narrator is a Persian man living—if you can call it that—just outside the city of Rey. With the first line we are plunged into his maelstrom: “There are sores which slowly erode the mind in solitude like a kind of canker.” He goes on to talk of the agony of his disease, which I at first assumed to be depression or youthful alienation, but turns out to be much worse.

He tells us he is writing this story to capture what he remembers of a series of strange events. “My one fear is that tomorrow I may die without having come to know myself . . . I am writing only for my shadow,” he says, reminding me of Jung’s archetype.

The story is divided into two parts. The first part, chapters one to three, tells how he, a man who makes pen-cases, always painting the same scene, sees a woman, sees in fact that very scene. After this coup de foudre, he goes out walking, looking for her, although he has already told us that he has not been the same since losing her. The second part, chapters four and five, go back over and over the story, adding more information, changing details, swapping personas, building in intensity.

The story is an unsettling journey in the mind of a man going mad, as dark as something out of Poe or Kafka. That he treats his “disease” with copious amounts of wine and opium only makes what he observes even more obscure. The ever-shifting reality, the surreal happenings leave the reader reeling with vertigo, unsure of what is true and what is not.

While this is not usually the sort of story I like to read, the power of the prose held me rapt until I turned the last page. It is a bit flowery for our modern reading tastes—the book was first published in 1941—but it is irresistible.

The night was departing on tip-toe. One felt that it had shed sufficient of its weariness to enable it to go its way. The ear detected faint, far-off sounds such as the sprouting grass might have made, or some migratory bird as it dreamed upon the wing. The pale stars were disappearing behind banks of cloud. I felt the gentle breath of the morning on my face and at the same moment a cock crowed somewhere in the distance.

Also, the puzzle addict in me was kept busy trying to untangle all of the motifs and themes that the story kept spiraling back to, finding them changed each time, such as the two months and four days turning into two years and four months or the origin and composition of the mysterious bottle of wine metamorphosing.

I have seen so many contradictory things and have heard so many words of different sorts, my eyes have seen so much of the worn-out surface of various objects—the thin, tough rind behind which the spirit is hidden—that now I believe nothing. At this very moment I doubt the existence of tangible, solid things, I doubt clear, manifest truths.

Once I finished it, I set out to learn more about the book and discovered that The Blind Owl is considered the foremost work of twentieth-century Iranian fiction. Hedayat wrote it between 1925 and 1941, the last years of Reza Shah’s reign, and so is assumed by some to be about Iran’s tug of war between tradition and modernity. Yet the story is so deep and passionate that one can read it many ways. I suspect, too, that on each rereading, it will appear to be a different story.

What Iranian fiction have you read?

Edna Pontellier, a 28-year-old wife and mother, is on vacation with her two small sons. They are at a pension on Grand Isle where other families have taken refuge from New Orleans’ August heat, husbands joining them at the weekend. We see her first through the eyes of her 40-year-old husband, a prosperous businessman, as she returns from bathing accompanied by Robert Lebrun, the son of the pension owner. Mr. Pontellier criticises her for getting sunburnt, “looking at his wife as one looks at a valuable piece of personal property which has suffered some damage.”

Yet there is clearly an understanding between them as she, laughing, holds out her hand and he knows she is asking for her rings which she asked him to hold for her. Edna has a certain reserve that sets her apart. “Even as a child she had lived her own small life all within herself.” Although she does have friends among the other women on Grand Isle, she does not feel at home among them because she alone is not a Creole, with their freedom of expression and absence of prudery. Also, she is not a “mother-woman . . .They were women who idolized their children, worshiped their husbands, and esteemed it a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals and grow wings as ministering angels.”

Almost imperceptibly, through one small scene and then another, Edna begins to recognise herself and “her position in the universe as a human being”. She begins to do the things that she wants to do rather than the things she is supposed to do, spending her days painting in an atelier she has created at the top of their town mansion, not attending her own “at homes”. I love that rather than defining herself by those around her, she tries to define herself from within, to become her authentic self, although at first she does not know what that is.

First published in 1899, The Awakening is as relevant to women today as it was then, when women—and men—were struggling to free themselves from Victorian tradition and authority. In her introduction, Sandra M. Gilbert places the novel in the context of fin de siêcle writers and their predecessors, such as Oscar Wilde, Gustave Flaubert, Walt Whitman, Emile Zola, and Guy de Maupassant. As Gilbert points out, though, Edna differs from George Eliot’s Dorothea Brooke and Emily Brontë’s Catherine Earnshaw Linton in that their struggle ends with them "accepting their own comparative powerlessness." Edna never does.

Gilbert also points out the sensual images of the sea that permeate the book and suggests that Edna’s story may be a retelling of the story of Aphrodite. I had not considered these ideas when I first read this book in the 1970s. Reading it now, it seems deeper and richer than ever, and I appreciate more the structure and the subtle changes Edna undergoes.

Chopin achieves these almost imperceptible transitions by leaving some mystery around Edna’s feelings: she cries after being awakened and reproached by her husband, but "She could not have told why she was crying." This is appropriate since Edna herself does not understand for a long time what is happening to her. Her statements and the close third-person narration gradually become stronger as her feelings and goals become clearer. Also, much of our understanding of her feelings comes from what others say about her and from the descriptions of her surroundings. These seem only loosely linked to her journey at first, more obviously reflect her feelings as we go on.

The water of the Gulf stretched out before her, gleaming with the million lights of the sun. The voice of the sea is seductive, never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander in abysses of solitude. All along the white beach, up and down, there was no living thing in sight.

What book from the past have you reread and found better than you remembered?

This compulsively readable novel is about a handful of people at a small college in Michigan whose plans, dreams and ambitions are thrown off course. Mike Schwartz is more than the captain of the baseball team; he is its heart. Acting as the assistant coach the school can’t afford, he pushes his teammates to do more and better than they ever thought they could. He discovers shortstop Henry Skrimshander at a summer Legion game and, impressed by the boy’s astounding fielding ability, engineers a place for him at Westish College.

The best part of the book for me is the description of Henry’s first days at this place that seems to him like something out of a movie. “If he’d been able to imagine the students of Westish College in any specific way, he imagined twelve hundred Mike Schwartzes, huge and mythic and grave, and twelve hundred women of the sort Mike Schwartz might date: leggy, stunning, well versed in ancient history. The whole thing, really, was too intimidating to think about.”

He hesitates outside the door of his dorm room, wondering how many roommates he will have and what kind of music was trickling out of the room. Henry’s roommate turns out to be Owen Dunne, sophisticated, gay, totally cool, and compulsive about cleanliness: Henry first meets Owen as the boy is scrubbing the en suite bathroom grout with a toothbrush. The unlikely duo become friends. Owen too has a well-thumbed copy of Henry’s Bible: The Art of Fielding by a fictitious Aparicio Rodriguez, supposedly the greatest defensive shortstop ever. Rodriguez’s book is filled with snippets of advice and epigrams that border on the enigmatic.

The other two characters we follow are Guert Affenlight, the president of the college, and his daughter, Pella, who shows up at his home fleeing from an intolerable marriage and ready for a new start, though she has forgotten to bring any socks. All of these characters are afflicted by sometimes crippling self-doubt as they pursue their dreams. All but Owen, rather, who seems untouched by such mundane concerns.

I have to say that, although I enjoyed the camaraderie and mutual support of the baseball team and appreciated the various baseball metaphors, I found the main characters uninteresting, if not repellent. Although we spend a lot of time in Mike and Guert’s heads, I cannot muster enough sympathy for them to overcome my dislike of their actions. The two sad sacks, Henry and Pella, seem pretty impenetrable to me, and Owen is just too perfect to be real.

Still, I could not stop reading. I’m not even sure why. I certainly wasn’t interested in the fate of the baseball team or the characters. Certainly, the prose is addictive, easy to read, and often funny. The voices of the five are well-differentiated. One thing I particularly like is that Harbach is able to write about deep emotions in his male characters without either gruffness or sentimentality.

I had to laugh at the climax; it was not at all what I expected from a baseball novel. The ending, though, seemed contrived to me, as though the author had dug himself into a hole and didn’t know how to get out.

Yet I’m still scratching my head trying to figure out why I couldn’t stop until I had read every single word.

What book have you read recently that you couldn't put down?

The Sleeping Dictionary is the best sort of historical fiction: an absorbing story with plenty of detail to immerse you in the time, all supported by an historically accurate framework. Set during the turbulent last days of the British Raj, this is the story of a child who is orphaned when a tsunami sweeps away her village and her family. We follow her struggles to make a place for herself in a world that is not kind to women or to Bengali peasants.

Our narrator's name changes with her circumstances, but her voice is strong enough that we never lose sight of who she is. She starts out as Pom, beloved Didi (older sister) to her siblings. Massey weaves in the foreign words so naturally that I had no need of the glossary provided. There are lovely descriptions of her Hindu family's life on the land that they farmed but did not own.

We had potatoes and eggplants and tomatoes and greens from our own vegetable garden. Fruits beckoned from old abandoned orchards and from neighbors who did not mind sharing. To buy foodstuffs we could not grow, my mother raised a small amount from selling the brooms [she made] in summer and catching fish during rainy season.

As the monsoon approaches, she says, “Stillness precedes the rains: a kind of energy that holds you and everything else motionless. It was holding us then.”

When the flood comes, she happens to be in the woods and survives by climbing a tree. Afterwards, several boats of survivors pass her but are not willing to pick her up, saying they had no room for another. Finally one family grudgingly lets her climb into their boat, but refuses to share their food and water with her and abandons her as soon as they reach land. This is a portent of things to come as she finds sometimes reluctant help, a few generous people, and many more who want to make use of her.

I enjoyed the section where, renamed Sarah and ordered to be a Christian, she works as a servant in an Anglo-Indian school. There, through the kindness of a teacher and a student, she discovers a love of reading and languages. The school's name of Lockwood of course reminded me of Lowood, not the only reference to Jane Eyre. But our heroine finds herself more adrift in the world than prim and passionate Jane. She makes more mistakes, poignantly believing in the kindness of strangers and the lure of appearances.

When she finally makes it to Calcutta and renames herself Kamala, she finds a job but also becomes caught up in the movement to free India from the British Empire. Tempting as it must have been for the author to tell us all about those tumultuous and thrilling times, Massey never loses the story. She limits herself to only what Kamala might know and encounter in the course of her daily life. Thus the historical detail remains organic and never intrudes on the story.

I highly recommend this novel. I've enjoyed Massey's earlier books, award-winning mysteries featuring Rei Shimuri. This big novel reads just as fast and fluently as her mysteries. I loved watching Pom/Kamala remake herself over and over, adapting to new worlds, but never losing sight of what's most important. It's a complex story, giving the flavor of many of the smaller worlds within India during the last days of the Raj, always from a woman's point of view.

What historical novels have you enjoyed?

Zucchino is a journalist who in this extremely well-written book sets out to explode the stereotype of the welfare queen that Ronald Reagan promulgated to persuade the public that all welfare recipients were cheating the system and driving around in gold Cadillacs collecting checks to which they were not entitled.

This was also the motive that drove me to write a memoir of my time on welfare, Innocent: Confessions of a Welfare Mother. I closed it with an epigraph from George Herbert: “Poverty is no sin.” I wrote not just about myself, but also about many of the other people I knew. The Writer's Almanac recently had a quote from Frank Capra: “I wanted to glorify the average man, not the guy at the top, not the politician, not the banker, just the ordinary guy whose strength I admire, whose survivability I admire.” I, too, admired the strength and survivability of the people around me who were bravely trying to get out of poverty despite overwhelming odds.

I also wanted to show that we were just parents and, like any other parent, only trying to do the best for our children. Zucchino does this as well by focusing his story on two Philadelphia women: Odessa Williams and Cheri Honkala. Despite ill health Odessa is the bulwark of her large extended family, the person everyone turns to for help. After taking in some of her grandchildren, she was forced to go back on welfare after many years of supporting herself and her family. Cheri is a activist for the homeless. She herself is able to rent a place for her son and herself out of her welfare check, but is dedicated to finding new ways to shame the city into providing help for the city's most vulnerable citizens.

Although the story takes place 15 years after I went off of welfare, there is much that I recognise. Odessa's daughter Elaine has tried repeatedly to get the training that would give her the credentials necessary to securing a job. When her latest training program is cancelled due to budget cuts the day before it is due to start, she says: “‘Seems like just when I start to rise up, . . . something comes along and—bam!—it knocks me back down.'”

When Odessa tells her grandson's therapist that she sometimes feels like giving up, the woman reminds her of what a good job she is doing of caring for her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. She says, “‘There's something good inside you—a big heart.'”

Rebecca's kind words had warmed her. It occurred to her that what she needed was acknowledgment, from someone in the world beyond Allegheny Avenue, of her deprivations and sacrifices. She did not expect it from her family; she took care of them because she loved them and because it was her duty. But to receive such reassurance from an outsider afforded her a sort of absolution for all her dark thoughts about abandoning her responsibilities.

This incident reminded me of how important my contacts with the world outside of other welfare moms were to me in my struggle to get out of poverty.

Cheri starts a tent city on the city of a former lace factory that has been burned and bulldozed. As winter falls she moves them into an abandoned church. We get to know several of the homeless folks, particularly two women with young children. Cheri's outrage reminds me of my own, especially when she is given some posters about corporate welfare, with photos of men from Disney, McDonald's and Lockheed Martin and the taxpayer money, ranging from $300,000 to $850 million, they received. “Below each man's photo were two paragraphs pointing out that AFDC accounted for less than 1 percent of the federal budget. The $14.4 billion spent on all social welfare programs in 1994, the message said, was dwarfed by the $104.3 billion spent on corporate welfare.” I especially liked the other message on the poster, which expresses a point I've often tried to make:

Everyone who drives on a toll-free highway, attends a public school or university, deducts mortgage interest payments from their income tax, or enjoys a national park is getting the equivalent of welfare from the federal government. In one way or another, we are all welfare recipients.

The truly sad part of the book is that Zucchino's portrait of the two women is just before Clinton signed the welfare reform act in 1996 that effectively removed the safety net; it “revoked the federal guarantee of welfare cash to low-income families with dependent children.” So as hard as the lives are of those portrayed in this book, we know they are about to get a lot harder.

It is almost impossible, unless you are a highly paid professional or a trust fund baby, for a single parent to make enough money to pay for even the barest living expenses plus child care. The way this country has turned its back on its children continues to shock me. Investing in our children is investing in the country's future.

What book have you read that helped you understand another way of life?

Last week I wrote about a rural family where a girl leaves home—because of restlessness and a desire to see the world, as we are led to believe—while her brother stays and tends his orchard. In this story as well, set some decades later, we have a sister and brother, but here it is the brother who has the wandering gene.

In a remote village in Ontario in the beginning of the 20th century Klara and her brother Tilman are taught how to carve by their grandfather, who emigrated from Bavaria as a young man in search of better wood to carve. He makes a life for himself, working at a gristmill and carving beautiful statues for the church that a priest arriving from Bavaria decides to build in what was then barely a settlement far off in the woods.

Of course, Joseph Becker never thought that his granddaughter would be able to master carving—better for the girl to learn to sew—but he lets her tag along while he teaches Tilman, the child he expects to carry on his work, the enormously gifted boychild.

But Tilman, even as a child, wants to be off and away. He does learn to carve, but only wants to carve the small background landscape, the road leading off into the world. at first he leaves and returns, traveling with hobos, learning to ride the rails, but eventually he leaves for good, while Klara stays. She makes clothes for people in the village and works on her statue of an abbess, living a quiet life, until a young man, a neighbor, begins coming to sit in her kitchen, watching her work but—to her fury—not saying anything.

Urquhart is one of my favorite writers, and this is one of her best books. I find it hard to summarize because of its complexity, though it reads like a dream. It’s about people with big dreams: to build a huge stone church with a bell in remote pioneer settlement in Ontario, to build a huge monument to the Canadian dead at Vimy Ridge. It’s about people with small dreams: to marry and create a home, to find the next meal, to preserve the names of the dead.

Canada suffered in the Great War in ways that the U.S. did not. While this novel is about the war, it is mostly about the effects of the war on those at home and those who return, too few, as Wilfred Owen said, “too few for drums.” The book made me think about memorials and what purposes, intended and not, they serve. My local parks are crammed with statues of generals and brave men on horses, but more important for me are those which bring home the cost of these wars: the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, the USS Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor, the Canadian National Vimy Memorial in France.

The book also made me think about the parents in Canada, on this Mother’s Day. I’ve read and thought so much about this war, I didn’t think there was a new perspective. Then Urquhart wrote about the reverse migration, the parents who left war-torn Europe for a hard but peaceful life in Canada watching their sons migrate back across the Atlantic to fight Europe’s war. And I thought of a song by singer-songwriter Josh Hisle, an Iraq War veteran: “Stay home . . .”

What war memorial has moved you the most or made you think?

This stunning debut novel was my book club’s selection for this month. William Talmadge’s life is a quiet one, tending his apple and apricot trees, selling his produce in town. His movements as he inspects his trees, grafts a branch, fixes coffee are slow and deliberate, well-suited to the pace of life in rural Washington State at the end of the 19th century. When two girls show up, both pregnant and starving, he feeds and protects them. They are feral, too fearful to come close, grabbing the plates of food and withdrawing to the woods to eat.

A nurturing man, Talmadge has created this orchard starting with the two ailing apple trees that he and his mother and sister found on the land back in 1857. His mother passed only three years later, and he cared for his sister until she wandered off into the woods only two years after that, and not found again. He searched for the 17-year-old, helped by his friend, Clee, a mute Nez Perce, leader of a band of horse wranglers who stopped in Talmadge’s valley a couple of times a year.

There are many silences in this book: Clee’s muteness, the sisters’ refusal to talk to Talmadge, the secrets later that blossom and spread. Later, when Talmadge has lost one of the girls, “a kind of vacancy, a silence, hung around him, like a mantle on his shoulders.” And later, sitting at a campfire with Clee, Talmadge reflects on the sound of the horses:

The sound was loud and soft at the same time, like the sound upon which other sound was built. You didn’t hear the horses until you listened for them; and then they were very loud. Already Talmadge was becoming used to them. How that presence equated with silence until it was gone, and then you understood what silence really was.

I was entranced by the beauty and power of the prose, feeling as though I could happily drown in the luscious paragraphs, the startling turn of phrase, the unexpected thrust. Part 1, the first 90 pages, simply blew me away. After that, the story loses some momentum, but by then I wanted to follow Talmadge’s story to the end. There are some flaws in the book, which I will mention since this is a blog about the craft of writing (usually), but let me reinforce that this is a beautiful book.

Though the members of my book club disagreed about some things—one person thought the girls’ background was preposterous given the time period while others of us found it believable—we all agreed that other than Talmadge the characters were rather flat. We just didn’t see enough of them beyond a single dimension. The one other character who seems to be developed, the younger of the two girls, struck some of us as inconsistent and not plausible.

We also found the remainder of the book, after Part 1, choppy. To some extent that came from the very short chapters in the later parts, some only a page or a half page or even a quarter of a page. Even the longer chapters are only 3-5 pages. The short bursts of text advanced the plot in flashes, without the sustained narrative of the first part. In some places, it felt a bit padded, leading me to wonder if the book started as a 90-page novella that was then stretched into a book. I also thought the last part should be cut entirely. A brief summary of the orchard’s life in the following decades, it raises many questions that it does not answer. I thought perhaps the author loved the place and the characters too much to let them go.

At a book release party today, several of us authors were talking about how essential a critique group is in the development of a manuscript. We need other eyes to tell us when we are being long-winded or too much in love with our own sentences. If I were editing this book, I would have trouble cutting it (other than that last part) because of being myself so in love with Coplin’s sentences. Still, I think it would have benefited from losing about a hundred pages. To our surprise, even the slack parts maintained the suspense, but one person astutely noted that the author shows us each character’s vulnerability and how each one is at risk, making us fear for them.

The Orchardist is not just a story of silences but also a story of solitude and how we communicate and what we owe to each other. In other words, exactly the kind of story I like. I especially loved the descriptions of Della learning to ride and to communicate with the horses. It reminded me of my struggle to learn to ride in my fifties and how the great benefit to me was learning to “listen” to the horse’s language.

Despite my few caveats, I recommend this book. It will take you away to another time and place, and you will be reluctant to return.

Have you read this novel? What did you think?

There are not enough hours in the day (or night) to read all the books I want to, as evidenced by the TBR (to be read) stacks threatening to take over a corner of my study. Reading one book leads me to read others, as The Rings of Saturn which I blogged about a few weeks ago sent me searching for a copy of Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial.

One area where my attention has been deficient is the Russian authors. I somehow missed reading them in school and, apart from Nabokov, never got around to reading them until recently. Prompted by my nephew, I did read War and Peace a couple of years ago, and now, driven by one of my book clubs, I’ve dipped my toe in Dostoyevsky’s oeuvre. Unfortunately I missed the discussion, but I’m grateful for the push.

This book precedes his famous novels. According to the Introduction (which, as always, I read only after finishing the story), it is a pivotal novel in his development as an author, leading him to find his own voice and themes. There is a brief chapter describing how the narrator meets a quiet, withdrawn man named Alexander Petrovitch Goriantchikoff. When the man passes away, the narrator is given the pages of the narrative that make up the rest of the book. It turns out to be an account of the ten years Alexander Petrovitch spent in prison in Siberia.

As a nobleman, Alexander Petrovitch fears the other convicts while envying their camaraderie. He thinks that now they have a nobleman within their power, the men will take out on him their rage at the whole social class. Yet, as he gradually gets to know them, he is able to distinguish good characteristics from bad. The joy of the story for me lies in these vivid portraits of his fellow prisoners and the people who run the prison. It was this appreciation of the value of the lowest of the low that gave rise to his later novels.

Though it is called a novel, this story is based on Dostoyevsky’s own experience. He spent nine years in Siberia after being arrested for supposedly being a member of a revolutionary group. According to the Introduction by Nikolay Andreyev, in writing this book “Dostoyevsky was circumspect in his descriptions.” He toned down both the brutality of the conditions and the hostility of his fellow inmates.

There are a couple of lessons here for memoir writers. Dostoyevsky called the book a work of fiction at least in part to avoid retribution by the authorities. Many memoir writers worry—as they should—that by telling their own story, they will hurt family members or others. I believe that telling someone else’s story, as we inevitably must in telling our own, is a huge responsibility, not to be taken lightly. One solution is to call your book a novel, changing names and recognizable details to hide the identities of the other people.

Another solution is to treat the other people in your memoir with respect and compassion. While I wouldn’t go so far as Dostoyevsky’s decision to hide the truth of his experience, I do think we owe it to the other people in our memoir to present them objectively. No matter how badly they may have behaved, we can try to understand why they did what they did. I personally found that making that effort benefited me as well. It made me see them with new eyes and wiped out any remaining resentment.

This book is a good example of an episodic plot. As we follow Alexander Petrovitch’s days (and nights), we meet various people and incidents, but there is no overall rising action that leads to a climax and resolution, the more common plot structure for novels. Nonetheless, it held my attention and introduced me to characters I will not soon forget. I’m looking forward to reading more of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and other Russian authors.

Which Russian novel do you recommend?

This poetry chapbook from Broadkill Press caught my attention at the CityLit Festival last week at the Enoch Pratt Free Library. Black Narrows is an oyster shack town on an island in the Chesapeake Bay, an island slowly being submerged by the rising water level and the erosion of its edges. It is a fictional island, but based on actual islands now lost beneath the Bay.

Whitaker’s spare and strong poems describe the people of Black Narrows, and a way of life that has almost disappeared.

At least at the edge of the land,
before ocean swallows all hope,
we know what we want . . . .

There are young boys skating on the ice on Narrows Marsh that cracks like “the snap of crab-backs over thumb”, joyfully racing down the sawgrass-lined channels. And Ally with her rum flask and cigar. There is John Max who “stole / the backside oysters off the beds laid by Smith, / Sharp and Floyd.” And Marie Countee who came as a new bride to live a fantasy of being a waterman’s wife, who has to learn to pry oysters from their beds and pace within the narrow limits of her walls. Folks so poor they save scrapes of material in Mason jars to use as patches.

There are work songs that capture the rhythm of the old sea chanties. And songs about unruly drunken nights. There are some poems about those who leave, going up the coast to cities where they can make their lonely money, and those who stay behind, “who will not leave the marsh until it is broken.” Those too old to leave light their stoves and drink chicory and make meal from horse corn.

Together the poems build a portrait of a place now lost, or nearly so, and its people. Whether they are yelling their drinking songs or quietly going mad, these people will touch you. You will not soon forget them.

What other books have you read about the Chesapeake Bay, its islands or its borders, such as Virginia’s Tidewater or Maryland’s Eastern Shore?

I’ve been meaning to read this book for some time. It’s ostensibly a travel memoir, a record of a walking tour of Suffolk, on the east coast of England, that Sebald took in August, 1992. However, the narrator sometimes seems to be someone else. The title comes from one of the epigraphs, a quote from the Brockhaus Encyclopedia explaining that Saturn’s rings are probably “fragments of a former moon” that was destroyed when it came too near the planet.

The image works on several different levels, not just his circuitous route around Suffolk but also the wanderings of his mind. Each location prompts a memory, some bit of arcane knowledge or history which Sebald shares with us. For example, sitting on the beach near Southwold, he is reminded of the Battle of Sole Bay, when the Dutch fleet attacked in 1672 and of the painting at the Greenwich Maritime Museum. He imagines the scene in rich detail, the powder magazines exploding, the hulls burning down to the waterline, the yellowish-black smoke. He says that the body of the commander of the English fleet, the Earl of Sandwich, washed ashore a few weeks later, “the seams of his uniform had burst asunder, the buttonholes were torn open, yet the Order of the Garter still gleamed in undiminished splendour.”

In another chapter, the bridge over the Blythe reminds him that the train that first ran on it was originally built for the Emperor of China. The story of how that came to happen is spun out through the Taiping rebellion, the Opium Wars, several emperors, Charles George Gordon (later of Khartoum fame), a scheming dowager empress and her silkworms.

In other chapters we learn about herrings, an Anglo-irish rebel, Joseph Conrad, Norfolk’s silk industry, and a housekeeper who obeyed her employer’s injunction never to speak to him and as a result was left a fortune, among much else—all of it fascinating. And almost all of it tinged with melancholy. He visits the once-thriving towns of Suffolk that are now run-down, remembering the luxury hotels and mansions that have now disappeared or become schools or hospitals. He walks across scrub that was once fields for the flocks of sheep required by the booming wool trade, now gone. His stories are illustrated by grainy black and white photographs, quirky evocations of a remembered past.

He ruminates about the things that are lost, things that have been destroyed or have disintegrated, such as the windmills “whose white sails revolved over the marshes of Halvergate and all along the coast”, dismantled after WWI. It is not surprising that he checked into a hospital at the end of his tour.

The narrator is working on a translation of Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial, a 1658 philosophical “Discourse” prompted by the discovery of some Bronze Age burial urns in Norfolk. While talking about various burial customs, Browne, a devout Christian, reflects on the transitory nature of our achievements in this life. References to Browne crop up in Sebald’s narrative, from his presence at an anatomy lesson in Amsterdam, recorded by Rembrandt, to his catalogue of remarkable books and other artifacts that Sebald believes were mostly imaginary.

The fashion these days is for memoirs to be built primarily of dramatic scenes, held together by as little narration as possible. This book is an interesting hybrid because, though it is all narrated by the author, he infuses his stories with plenty of drama, enough to keep me reading through the night. Even with his stories of what has been lost or forgotten, I loved this book. It is one I will long treasure and return to. Saturn’s rings made of fragments of a moon also make a fitting image for these themes of memory and decay.

What comes to mind when you think of the east coast of England?