Book Pairings?

A note at Book Beast got me thinking about drink pairings with books. Why stop at cheese, when a fabulous cocktail can help you uncover subtleties in great books?

F.S. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby – Mint Juleps: Gatsby, Tom, Jordan, and Daisy drink these at the hotel anyway – don’t they? – but I think these sassy, classy, slightly indulgent drinks will highlight some of the main issues of the book.

David Fulmer’s Valentin St. Cyr series – Bourbon: These absorbing mysteries set in New Orleans have all the fabulous elements of the Big Easy. Sip your bourbon slowly and turn on some jazz.

Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice – Pim’s Cup: This favorite drink of aristocrats everywhere is a perfect complement to Jane’s great novel about life, love, and the pursuit of marriage in Regency England.

Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo – Malbec: This spicy, complex red wine holds all the passion of Dumas’ classic novel about a prison break and second chances.

Antonia Fraser’s Marie Antoinette – Chardonnay: Marie Antoinette’s life story is the ultimate tale of the highs and the lows. This multi-layered, dry white wine – with hints of sweetness – will highlight the good and the bad of the French Queen’s story.

Knitted Verses

I found this poem on the Guardian site (love it) and thought it was too interesting to pass up. I love knitting and I love language, so putting the two together sounds about right to me. I finally discovered that books on tape solve the issue of trying to meld together the mutually exclusive activities of knitting and reading. This was a great discovery. I have a friend who is still trying to wed driving and knitting. We'll see how that goes.

How to Knit a Poem – Gwyneth Lewis

The whole thing starts with a single knot
and needles. A word and a pen. Tie a loop
in nothing. Look at it. Cast on. Repeat

the procedure until you have a line
that you can work with.
It’s a pattern made of relation alone,

my patience, my rhythm, till empty bights
create a fabric that can be worn,
if you’re lucky and practiced. It’s never too late

to pick up dropped stitches, each hole a clue
to something that might be bothering you,
though I link mind with ribbons and pretend

I meant them to happen. I make a net
of meaning that I carry around
portable, to work on sound

in trains and terrible waiting rooms.
It’s thought in action. It redeems
odd corners of disposable time,

making them fashion. It’s the kind of work
that keeps you together. The neck’s too tight,
but tell me honestly: How do I look?

Copyright 2007, BBC
From: How to Knit a Poem
Publisher: BBC Radio 4, London, 2007

Big Name Authors Publishing Books this Fall

Margaret Atwood – The Year of the Flood
A.S. Byatt – The Children’s Book
J.M. Coetzee - Summertime
E.L. Doctorow – Homer & Langley
Kate Grenville – The Lieutenant
Sarah Hall – How to Paint a Dead Man
Alice Munro - Too Much Happiness: Stories
Audrey Niffeneger – Her Fearful Symmetry
Joyce Carol Oates – Little Bird of Heaven
Phillip Roth – Indignation
William Styron – The Suicide Run (published posthumuously)

Perkerson's White Columns of Georgia

Gone With the Wind is one of the most popular movies and books of all time, and many are surprised to hear that Tara in the movie doesn’t exist – that it never existed – not even in Margaret Mitchell’s mind. When Selznick Productions optioned the book for the film, they were forced to choose between the romanticized myth of the Old South and the South Mitchell wrote about in her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Mitchell was hands off when it came to many aspects of the production, but she did take the movie historians to Clayton county to show them what she had in mind when she envisioned Tara – and the place didn’t have white columns.

There is a great picture of Mitchell, not totally dissimilar to Scarlett O’Hara in aspect, pointing to a ramshackle log cabin with a dilapidated roof. Her face seems to say “yes, THIS is right. They lived here, not in some gallant brick house with graceful columns.” (Mitchell was noted for her sauciness.) For those of you who have seen the movie, Selznick decided to choose the romanticized version, supposing that movie-goers would be more interested in the myth – however unkind – than the real life experience of wealthy planters living in less than refined circumstances. (Selznick also added the poem at the beginning of the movie that set the stage for the notion that GWTW is a racist movie, book, etc. Mitchell was annoyed at this and wanted it known that these words were not her own. She said that she had written a book about “people with gumption,” and one can assume from her philanthropic pursuits and interest in African-American dialect that she included African Americans in this group.)

The O’Haras didn’t live in a beautiful columned house – at least in the book – but there were some families in Georgia who did. Georgia is not as well known for her beautiful houses, like Mississippi or South Carolina, but there were some families that were wealthy enough (and inclined enough) to build large antebellum mansions.

Medora Perkerson, a friend of Margaret Mitchell, wrote a charming pastiche called White Columns of Georgia that takes the reader inside many of these elegant homes. The writing style is old-fashioned, clumsy, and often over the top, but the stories of some of these houses are really quite good. One tale concerns a house in Covington that the Yankees plundered. Perkerson includes quotes from the mistress’s diary and the fear and loathing of the invading army is palpable on the page. Some of the sections read like a ‘who’s who’ of furniture designers, but on the whole it is interesting to read about the histories of these places. Perkerson’s work was published in the late 1950s, and many of the homes still lived in by private citizens – many of them descendents of the original owners.

This is worth a flip-through if you’ve an interest in old homes, Georgia history, what life was like in the antebellum South, or if you just want to look at the cool pictures.

Anita Diamant's The Last Days of Dogtown

Anita Diamant was inspired to write The Last Days of Dogtown to give voice to “the voiceless,” the spinsters, widows, orphaned children, Africans – both slave and free – whom “history has forgotten.” After finding a small pamphlet in a Gloucester, Mass. bookstore, she began to wonder about who Judy Rhines, Black Ruth, and Esther Carter might have been. These three inspired the cast of characters that would comprise The Last Days of Dogtown.

Diamant’s third novel is more a series of vignettes than a novel, and the narrative arc pertains more to the decline of Dogtown than to any specific character. There is love, loss, disease, triumph, and hardship, but the desire to find out what happens to the characters is far more compelling than the desire to find out what happens, as there is little plot beyond the humdrum events of daily life and the background stories of the characters.

The chronicle opens after the death of a town elder, and it is clear that this is a bellwether moment for the town. With Abraham gone, many of his family will leave, and there will be few left in the settlement to argue for its legitimacy. This funeral sets the dismal, “death at the door” atmosphere that permeates the entire novel, but it also introduces us to the group of people that we will drop in on, observe, and grow to love – or hate – over the next few hundred pages. Diamant sets up camp in the middle of this dying town and takes each character in turn, explaining their personal histories, how they came to be in Dogtown, how they survive, and what their secrets are. The result is a patchwork quilt of a chronicle, one that takes the reader to the heart of small town New England life in the early 1800s.

If you liked this, you might also like:
The Crucible by Arthur Miller
The Scarlett Letter by Nathanial Hawthorne
The Heretic’s Daughter – Kathleen Kent

Books and Movies

Interesting article:

Audrey Niffeneger discusses her newest book, The Time Traveler’s Wife's incarnation as movie, and her art.

Julia Leigh's The Hunter

I have discussed Julia Leigh’s brilliance before, and her first novel The Hunter did nothing but compound my thinking that she is one of the best writers working today. Her prose is like broken glass – sharp, precise, clean – and the premises of her two novels are jarring and insightful at once. Her ability to take relatively few plot points, a handful of unique characters and paint a vibrant landscape of human emotion is awesome. Leigh isn’t easy to read, but everyone should. All the MFA kids should take a leaf from her book.

Characteristically, The Hunter is a simple story. A man, Martin Davis, called M., is hired by a pharmaceutical company to hunt the last thylacine cat, an animal that many believed is extinct. When rumors begin to waft down from the high Tasmanian hills that a female thylacine is on the prowl, the pharmaceutical company wants its blood and hair for medicine. The thylacine takes on a mythical properties, like that of a unicorn, as the stories spin that this animal’s body has properties that can save humans from life-threatening disease.

M., who, as he traverses the jungle landscape to find the big cat, becomes the archetypical man and the consummate hunter, is deeply troubled. His past is mottled with broken relationships and casual sexual flings. When he thinks of his parents, he immediately dismisses their memory, as if they were no more important to him than any random wild animal he sees during his nightly watches. In fact, he doesn’t know if they’re alive or dead. Clearly, despite the defensive bravado, he craves a family, or at least a place to belong. The family that he stays with during his breaks from the hunt is broken in every way that a family can be broken: the father, himself a hunter of the thylacine, is presumed dead; the mother, a drug-addict, neglects her children; and the two children barely hold themselves and the house together. M. must rely on the memory and organization of the little girl, Sass, to make sure the authorities are called if he doesn’t return on time. Although, he realizes the profound dysfunction of the house and thus the great danger to him (what if he breaks a leg up in the hills and Sass is too busy playing to call the authorities?), he nonetheless repeatedly returns to this house, rather than find lodging elsewhere. This isn’t a perfect family, but it’s something, and he can visualize himself with them.

However, the most significant relationship in the novel exists between M. and the thylacine. He pursues her, tempts her like a lover, and towards the end his entire existence is consumed with longing for his prey. He imagines himself a god, searching out the delicate mortal. At points, the reader is unsure of whether M. has seen the cat or if he has gone crazy, imagining shadows and sounds in his desperate loneliness. However, as he closes in on his target, it is clear that he is the only one who understands this creature and will prevail where other hunters have failed.

This is not a redemptive story, though M. experiences some change by the end, but rather an investigation of pathological experience. What happens when a man – lonely, broken, bloodthirsty – goes deep in the Tasmanian darkness to hunt a prized creature? What will the conclusion be and who, ultimately, is the hunter?

If you liked this, you might also like:
The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Disquiet by Julia Leigh

A Talk with Sarah Dunant: Part II

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Red Room Library sat down with Sarah Dunant on Tuesday, July 28 after her lecture at the Margaret Mitchell House in Atlanta. This is the last of a two-part interview.
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Read Part I
Despite the fact that Dunant’s books are fiction, there is still much to learn from them, and Dunant hopes that her readers will finish the last page having learned something but “without feeling like they have been taught anything.” Her books are not didactic history, but after spending time in the Renaissance world she has created, it is clear that there is much that can be learned about Renaissance society and the lives of women during this period. Some of the vignettes – like the bit in Sacred Hearts about the priest at a convent in Venice who treated the place as a brothel with himself as the only customer – and many of the details are true, but the story and the characters are completely fictional.
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The Renaissance captivates her so much because of “its momentous role in history. Here,” she says, “was a time when everything was exploding – art, literature, politics, religion – and people were beginning to stand a little taller. It also was the time for the advent of Humanism, which was a tremendous development.” Dunant’s focus on women during this period allows the reader to view these critical developments from a unique point of view. “Under ‘the Great Narrative’ – that of men and politicians and wars – is another story, one that is just starting to be told, one that I focus on in my novels.”
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The notion of there being multiple histories is a recent academic development, borne out of the 1960s when women and other minorities began looking for themselves in the historical record. Their research brought them to documents that historians had traditionally overlooked as not being substantially important to the “main story.” Dunant argues that perhaps these new perspectives on the past have made historical fiction popular over the past few decades. “There are more stories now because we know more. For example, women archivists started doing work on convent necrology and noticed that all the nuns died with the same types of accomplishments: ‘She was pious, a devoted nun, etc.’ This consistency was enough to spark questioning – where was the variety? When the archivists started to dig, they found stories in diaries, letters, about all sorts of interesting things, like two nuns digging a tunnel under the floor of the storehouse for their lovers to get in. It makes sense, doesn’t it? After all, fascinating things always happen in hothouses. Prisons, convents, country houses – all hothouses.”
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Dunant’s final installment in her Renaissance trilogy enters the hothouse of a convent in Ferrara, Italy to investigate life under the veil. In total, her three historical fiction novels traverse the standard triptych of female stereotype: whore, virgin, and wife. She says that about half way through Courtesan she "knew she was going to end up in a convent," and Sacred Hearts grew out of her interest in finding out what “one did in a convent.” Much of the notion that life as a nun was closed, quiet, away from the bustle of life is true, Dunant explains, but she is also quick to say that women were often able “to live quite a bit more of life in a convent than in other places.”

For most women in 16th century Italy, life meant marriage to someone they didn’t know beforehand and “almost certainly didn’t like afterwards,” baby after baby and no time to pursue any of their creative passions. Young girls who showed talent as painters or writers or singers were forced to leave these interests aside so that they could take care of their houses, raise their children and be proper wives. However, marriage by the mid-16th century had gotten very expensive, and most families would be unable to marry off more than one of their daughters. For the daughters not sent to marry, there was only the convent. Some women, particularly the widows and women who were older and had led hard lives, entered their vows willingly, while others, particularly the younger ones, entered with little pleasure at the prospect.

Although life for most nuns was rigid with a strict schedule of prayer, work, and fasting, there was also significant time to develop talents that they would have been forced to forget had they been married. Women who were interested in music could sing in the choir or write music for performances. Women who were interested in writing could work in the scriptorium or write plays about the glory of God; they were also able to act in these plays, an activity that was strictly forbidden in the outside world. Much was given up, to be sure, but there were opportunities of another kind if one had the right perspective.

This “right perspective” lies at the root of Dunant’s investigation of life in a convent in her absorbing new release Sacred Hearts.

A Talk with Sarah Dunant: Part I

Red Room Library sat down with Sarah Dunant, international bestselling novelist of The Birth of Venus and In the Company of the Courtesan after her talk at the Margaret Mitchell House on Tuesday, July 28. Her latest novel, Sacred Hearts, also set in Renaissance Italy, hits stores this month.

For Sarah Dunant, history begins with stories. She came to historical fiction early, but admits that what she read when she was in her teens was mostly the light, romantic stuff. Her interest in the past brought her to Cambridge, where she read history for three years and “the romance was beaten out” of her, though she admits it was a very pleasurable experience. Her training in historical method would come to good use years later when she began to write historical fiction. However, it would be a few decades and six novels, three of which are crime thrillers, before Dunant began her Renaissance trilogy. One could say she was inspired by Italy.

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Dunant’s first trip to Florence was eye-opening, but when she started to explain the beauty and mystery of old Italy to her two daughters, she realized that all of the people she would mention were men. This observation prompted her to think about where women were in the Renaissance story. Her inquiry brought her to the archives and libraries of England and Italy, where she studied for a year before beginning The Birth of Venus. In total, she has spent 9 years researching the Renaissance. (She has become such an expert in this period that she will teach a Freshman seminar titled The Birth of Venus--Inside Renaissance Florence, Venice, and Rome at Washington University in St. Louis this fall.) Though her research is critically important to her work, she interestingly puts it aside when she begins to write her novels “lest the historian in her pull at her too much.” The notebooks are opened again when she needs to polish her prose with historical details.
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Though her books are based in history, Dunant is adamant that these are stories only based in fact. She is quick to mention that few “actual people” turn up in her novels. Here, the historian in her pulls too much. She finds it difficult to create what cannot be substantiated by historical record, and writing about real people poses too many problems: “Who’s to say that they know exactly what Anne Boleyn was thinking on a certain day at a certain time. I certainly don’t. No one does.” However, she has been forced – twice – to include real people because the story demanded it. She was able to minimize the fact stretching by making one character, the Renaissance painter Titan, drunk in one scene (clearly little ability to talk coherently here) and painting in the other (again, little ability to talk). For the other character, a lesser known Renaissance satirist, she was able to make educated guesses about what he might say and think after sifting through piles of his letters. Laughingly, she admits, “I was very relieved to find that he was such a prolific letter writer. I was able to get a good sense of his voice and motivations through those. The job would have been very difficult otherwise.”

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Read Part II.