An Embarrassment of Riches

Librarians' Private Reserve Stock - by Markrid Once in a while, if a librarian is lucky and judged deserving, a co-worker will recommend an especially treasured book. Different from our everyday title-swapping and book banter, these suggestions are usually made privately, with a kind of offhand gravity, and are intended as both gift and compliment. What are these personal favorites like? They're often highly idiosyncratic, and share a certain intensity. In some cases they are their authors' only works. They're always memorable, sometimes hauntingly so. Here are a few of the gifts received from librarians  over many years:

The Ten Thousand Things by Maria Dermout
Through the eyes of a Dutch child on her grandmother's sugar plantation, we see a beautiful, slightly menacing Java, alive with mysteries and scented with spices.

The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
Forget "The Godfather" - this portrait of the last patriarch of a great house in decline gives a deeper grasp of Sicily than any work of fiction has a right to do.

The Gipsy in the Parlour by Margery Sharp
A fey, ambitious Welsh interloper with a gift for hypochondria insinuates herself into an English country family. Charming and very funny.
    
The Bear by Marian Engel
Magic realism done right: There is Bear, the totem and archetype, and then there's an actual wild bear. Which turns up at the cabin of a lonely Canadian woman?
 
Just today, another gift-suggestion: The Blue Castle by L. M. Montgomery (of Anne of Green Gables fame). A meek young woman is handed a fatal (maybe mistaken?) diagnosis, so decides to live out her remaining days being exactly as outspoken as she feels. Sounds irresistible!
 
And from me? The Viceroy of Ouidah, Bruce Chatwin's fever dream of depravity. The Means of Escape, eight dazzling stories by Man Booker Prize-winner Penelope Fitzgerald.  And anything at all by Rose Tremain - her work is like the ideal box of chocolates, where each bite is a unique, exquisite surprise.

Finding that Special Book: Two Shortcuts - by Markrid Coming up with the perfect next read can feel like trying to scratch an itch just out of reach: sometimes there's a craving for something in that charmed middle ground - not genre fiction, not a series, not one of the warhorse classics - but how to find it?

Though most readers probably don't think much about specific publishers, and even less of searching the library catalog by publisher's name, here are two richly rewarding ones guaranteed to supply years of engaging and often offbeat reading: Europa (also Europa Editions) and New York Review of Books (search also New York Review Books, without "of", and the series New York Review Books classics.).

Perhaps best known for their bestseller The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Europa offers a wide array of sophisticated international literature, much of it, like Hedgehog, in translation. Jane Gardam's Old Filth (Failed In London, Try Hong Kong) is the sharp, funny, and moving story of an expat English lawyer and his wife dealing with retirement in the motherland after years abroad, and is just one example of the excellent choices on hand from Europa.

The New York Review of Books has undertaken to reissue wonderful but neglected older books, including novels, memoirs, travel writing, and children's literature. One not to miss is  Richard Hughes' deeply weird A High wind in Jamaica, a story of inept pirates and kidnapped children sometimes compared to Lord of the Flies, but Golding's book is bland as butterscotch compared to this disturbing little masterpiece. Gregor von Rezzori's unforgettable portrait of his family in the obscure corner of the Austro-Hungarian Empire called the Bukovina, Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, is one of those books which, once read, just begs to be passed along to a friend. And foodies will love Elizabeth David's A Book of Mediterranean Food, written during a time of gray post-WWII privation, which opened a sunny window onto views of olive and lemon groves for the ration-weary English.

Both of these publishers will steer the reader towards something completely new, or - just as fulfilling - towards one of those great, familiar-sounding authors one always meant to get around to reading.

A Voice Like Egypt - by Markrid

Here's a rare treat for music lovers, armchair travelers, and those who value the cultural background of current events: the 68-minute DVD documentary "Umm Kulthum: a voice like Egypt", narrated in English by Omar Sharif.

Umm Kulthum was an immensely influential Egyptian classical singer. For decades she performed to sold-out houses across the Arabic-speaking world, reviving and expanding the tradition of sung poetry. She was a patriot and a nationalist -"Music must represent our Eastern spirit", she said -  but she was an artist above all. Learn by ear, play by heart, she instructed her musicians; and like "a preacher inspired by her congregation", as novelist Naguib Mahfouz described her, her hours-long concerts would bring her audiences to a state approaching ecstasy. She has no counterpart in the West. She swayed kings and presidents; when she died in 1975, four million people came out for her funeral; and even now, every day at five o'clock Cairo radio plays a song by Umm Kuthum. This short, well-edited film is a fine portrait of a great singer, but it also provides a remarkably compact, insightful look at the evolution of modern Egypt.

I Love L.A. - by Markrid

A few things about Los Angeles.

The ocean is always cold and rough and full of riptides.

The backbone of L.A. County is made of steep wild mountains covered with sweet combustible chaparral, and sometimes also with snow, and within 20 minutes you can be right in among them from most of the 626 and 818 area codes.

Most of the movie-and-TV stuff happens in a very small part of the west side. “Everyone on the West Side is ‘on location’!” a friend said, describing the showbiz self-importance which tilts into the ridiculous.

In most of the county, though, there's a huge and vital kind of human plate tectonics going on: Latin America's cultures grinding against the Pacific Rim's. An excellent place to see this in action is at the Costco in Alhambra on a weekend afternoon.

No place else changes as fast. “I think I get it,” another friend said thoughtfully. We were sitting outside the Melrose Avenue Johnny Rocket’s, watching the highly embellished human parade. “You might as well have your art on the hoof.”

You are free to invent and re-invent yourself endlessly there, and people will mostly take you for whoever you say you are.

Poinsettias will grow into fair-sized trees, given the chance. If you spit a date pit over the side of the porch, a little palm tree might pop up. There are black widows in the garage, and in bad drought years tarantulas come out in the daytime. A flock of feral parrots can screech loud enough to blot out thought.

If you get off the freeway, you’ll find the most anonymous-looking suburbs have little time-warp Main Streets that will just break your heart.

A little more about LA:

Chavez Ravine is the area north of downtown where whole neighborhoods of Mexican-Americans were uprooted to make room for Dodger Stadium. It’s also the name of two great related works, the reissued 1949 album of Don Normark’s photographs documenting the vanished community, and Ry Cooder’s 2005 music CD on the same theme.

Nobody gets LA’s smudgy pink air and belief in magical possibilities as well as Francesca Lia Block. Her Weetzie Bat books for young adults, and Quakeland for grownups, have equal parts glitter, loneliness, hope, and strong female characters.

The electrifying documentary Rize shows African-American kids in South Central making beautiful community art - the dance form known as krumping - out of nothing but passion.

Follow the rise of the Crips in Monster: The Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member.

Carolyn See is one of those authors who immediately seems like a favorite friend.

Her look at family weirdness in her memoir Dreaming: Hard Luck and Good Times in America is so recognizable that we all might have grown up next door to her; yet her blue-collar 1950s Eagle Rock - little stucco bungalows, cracked sidewalks, brown grass - is pure LA.

She also gives us a terrific, racy fable about art, survival, and finding one’s vocation in The Handyman, which may be the perfect LA novel: funny, breezy, and wise.

Genocide and a Failure of Imagination - by guest blogger Markrid

Our guest blogger is Markrid, a librarian at the Central Library downtown. She has worked in school, university, and public libraries since the late 1980s. She agrees with Orhan Pamuk, who said he distrusts incident, because it interferes with real life.

"As we were huddled, naked and freezing, in the huge courtyard, we could hear the roar of the ovens. Ash was falling on us. And I thought, Oh, good - they're baking bread for us."

The voice is gentle, the manner matter-of-fact. The elderly Hungarian woman speaking at the Museum of Tolerance is wearing  a short-sleeved dress on this summer afternoon, so the audience notices the line of numbers tattooed on her forearm.

As she spoke, the impulse to deny the Holocaust began to make some kind of emotional sense. Hungary's Jews were somewhat spared until near the end of the war, so they'd heard rumors of the camps for years. Finally, they too had been rounded up, shipped off, stripped of their belongings, shorn of their hair, and torn from their relatives; the worst had come; but even in the moment itself, for this woman the enormity of the Final Solution was too great to grasp.

Maybe they're baking bread for us! This survivor's story shows that a profound difficulty in confronting genocide is simply being able fully to imagine it; but history demands that we make the effort because we cannot forget - neither we nor those who come after us. 

Sometimes fiction seems to move one closer to the truth than fact.  The claustrophobic fear of occupied Amsterdam is invoked with dark subtlety in Harry Mulisch's novel The Assault, which creates an atmosphere of almost unbearable moral tension: which neighbor is secretly collaborating with the Nazis, and who is risking everything to resist them?   W.G. Sebald, brilliant and completely original, manages, in his strange, hypnotic masterpiece Austerlitz to convey both the loneliness of the Kindertransport and the grotesque horror of Theresienstadt, contrived as the Third Reich's "model" concentration camp. This book is in a class by itself.

Other times, only fact will do, and if one had to choose just a single book about the Holocaust to help make that imaginative leap, that book could well be Primo Levi's classic Survival in Auschwitz. Levi, a 25-year-old Italian chemist, set himself the task of documenting with scrupulous accuracy his experiences in the notorious camp. This short book vibrates: a very young man's wholehearted moral outrage suffuses the scientist's commitment to exact observation.

An unforgettable scene in Levi's book has a fellow prisoner begging him to recite poetry, the Dante he'd memorized as a schoolboy. The original Italian title of Survival in Auschwitz is perhaps better, Se questo e un uomo, or If this be a man: if the atrocities of the camps are uniquely human, so too is the transcendence of art and language. The poet Peter Balakian writes movingly of this passage in his article Poetry in Hell: Primo Levi and Dante at Auschwitz. Armenian-American Balakian's own coming-of-age meant gaining a gradual awareness of the horrors of the Armenian genocide of the early 20th century and its profound effects on his family, from which his well-meaning parents tried to shelter him. His memoir Black Dog of Fate begins as the story of a suburban boyhood and works to a crescendo of righteous anger.

To most of us, the Armenian world in the time of the massacres of 1915-1923 is a very foreign one. It comes a little closer in the moving memoir Efronia: an Armenian Love Story, which vividly fills in an old and complicated corner of the map.  A classic of accurate historical fiction, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh,brought international attention to the destruction of Armenia with its story of heroic resistance fighters, .

Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, is April 21 this year, and Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day comes on April 24 - good occasions to re-examine our historical imaginations, or to prod them into absorbing something new, since, unfortunately, there is enough human tragedy to keep us all learning. This is the year this blogger will finally tackle The Master and Margarita, among whose many complex strands is the Holodomor, the terrible genocidal famine Ukraine suffered in 1932-33.