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- The Bad Girl by Mario Vargas Llosa (translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman, 2007)
| She’s a bad girl, but fascinating. An incredible survivor, she rises from nothing and presses ahead with verve and drive, using and abusing those around her. Underneath it all is a vulnerable soul. One man can’t stop loving her. |
- Silk by Alessandro Baricco (translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein,1997)
| A subtle story, almost hypnotic in the telling, of an 19th century, provincial Frenchman who slips repeatedly into a Japan still sealed to the West in order to clandestinely purchase silk worms. The warlord contact with whom he deals, and more so that man’s mysterious mistress, cast the overwhelming lure that propels the tale between two opposite worlds. |
- An Iliad by Alessandro Baricco (translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein, 2006 )
| This presents as different a work as night to day from the novel noted above. Baricco longed to retell the Iliad aloud, but to abbreviate its performance to one sitting rather than the 40 hours the original required. His cuts intensify and humanize the story in astonishing ways. He removed all interference of the gods (non-credible anyway to modern sensibility) to reveal Homer’s underlying ear for emotion, human agency and stance. He sheared away redundancy. Most important, however, he altered the narrative voice of passages from third person to first—Achilles speaking, or the Trojans, or Hector’s nurse—which change injects extraordinary immediacy. The reading played to two sell-out (paying) audiences of 10,000. Drivers, who heard it simulcast on Italian radio, stopped their cars to listen on for hours. This reader could not put it down. (Seek out the English paperback edition because of its beautiful cover: a haunting, androgynous Man Ray portrait.) |
- The International Book of Trees by Hugh Johnson (1973, revised 1993)
| Plenty of books provide data. This one, hugely informative as well, adds aura. Johnson remarks, for instance, that beech forests (because they cast shade too dense for undergrowth) reverberate with the longest echo of any woodland; or that American beech’s pale trunk has the cast of old aluminum; of magnolias, each “is the apple of someone’s eye;;” of gingko’s 200 million year riff, “one feels a certain respect for a creature which has simply declined to evolve.” This same Hugh Johnson enjoys great fame as a writer on wine. |
- Memory edited by A.S Byatt and Harriet Harvey Wood (2008)
| A marvelous, thought-provoking compendium that plumbs the mystery and import of memory from every angle: how the ancients kept their recollections in order by hanging them in vividly appointed mental rooms; the science by which memory actually lodges in the brain; memory as a essence central to humanity; beautiful rembrance excerpts that fire poetry and literature. |
- Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson (translated from the Norwegian by Anne Born (2007)
| Lest you missed this story among last year’s praise, cherish it now. Per Petterson’s northern light style, like Bergman in films, imparts nuance and layering entirely different to ours. Subtle, incremental, spare, each turn of the tale obliges one to revisit and revise what one understood before, to peer deeply into human feeling. |
- The Story of Blanche and Marie by Per Olov Enquist (translated from the Swedish by Tinna Nunnally, 2006; in paper 2007)
| The strangest of conceits, based on true characters, of bodies eaten up by radium and hearts by love: Madame Curie; her assistant Blanche; the late nineteenth Parisian asylum Saltpêtrière stuffed with 6000 women “hysterics” under Dr Charcot who took steps to cure them and who displayed their cataleptic state in public performance; Jane Avril (Toulouse-Lautrec’s dancer muse); Freud… The story unfolds by means of diary snippets, extrapolated into vignettes. It won the Independent’s Foreign Fiction Prize in 2003.. |
- Skies in Bloom: The Nature Poetry of Emily Dickinson edited by Jonathan Cott, illustrated by Mary Frank (1995)
| Rarely are Emily Dickinson’s poems paired with illustrations equally exquisite. Mary Frank’s, literally, are drawn in light: her razor cuts through brown paper, illumined by a light source behind, depict form as glowing line or against spilled radiance. Because her pictures omit further visual context, each figure or animal seems to hover within eternal time or space. |
- Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History selected and introduced by William Safire (2004 )
| From Pericles’ eulogy to fallen soldiers, to Jonathan Edwards’ hell and brimstone sermons, to Dwight Eisenhowers’ on the "military-industrial complex", to George Bernard Shaw in praise of Einstein, open the book anywhere and hear cogent powerful thought. |
- Christmas Roses and Other Stories by Anne Sedgwick (1920)
| World War I swept away in devastating waste the flower of British youth, and left as shards many of those who survived. Both the recent Pat Barker novel, Life Class, published to some acclaim, and Anne Sedgwick’s old cluster of stories, focus on that ache. But there is no comparison in quality. Barker’s book feels self-consciously back-dated, stilted, mannered. Sedgwick, by contrast, lived among the British gentry at that time. She saw the men go, the effects of shattered lives on mothers and sweethearts and housemaids, how ordinary people tried to coax back tranquility to the shell shocked minds of those who returned. Her keen eye and proximity resulted in subtle observation, fine detail, living breath. The tales become more piquant yet as we view them from the present era’s heap of wasted lives. |
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