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This month at indiaplaza.com
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New York Review Books has an interesting set of reprints of books from the forties through the eighties, which went more or less unnoticed after an initial hoo-ha at the time of release, but later acquired a reputation for varied reasons. These are all available online.
White Walls
Tatyana Tolstaya
New York Review Books
$16.95
White Walls is the most recent and comprehensive collection of Tolstaya’s (Yes, she is related to that Tolstoy) stories in English, with stories from two earlier collections as well as previously uncollected stories.
Tolstaya’s stories are intense: they appear to scratch away a layer and reach their sting to parts of one’s reading self that are unprepared, unschooled. These stories are all a curious mixture of the most realistic physical details and the most fantastic emotional nuances. The combination is lethal because one is so taken in by the light note of irony and clinical self-observation of the characters that one is completely knocked out by the sudden explosion of uncontrolled feeling, not just of the characters, or of the author, but of the reader as well. It’s difficult not to be charmed by the people in Tatyana Tolstaya’s stories, because they are charming, doing things that many dream of doing: giving themselves completely to love, to the idea of finding love, making extraordinary gestures of companionship, finding grace in dreary/squalid living, oh the things they do!
Absolutely riveting reading, the translation works very well and one can taste the original through the new language.
The Slaves of Solitude
Patrick Hamilton
New York Review Books
$14.95
The introduction to The Slaves of Solitude, by David Lodge goes over a quality that all four books in this column share, that they were all well-received when they appeared, even hailed as masterpieces, but then disappeared for a while to then be red
iscovered.
The Slaves of Solitude tells the stories of Miss Roach and her fellow boarders at a boarding house in the England of World War II. The terrible stifling that the heroine experiences permeates the novel oozing out of every situation, till it becomes a bit thick and one has to put the book down.
Not something I would recommend.
The Dud Avocado
Elaine Dundy
New York review Books
$14.95
“It is the destiny of some books to be perpetually rediscovered, and The Dud Avocado is one of them...it bobs to the surface every decade or so, at which time somebody writes an essay about how good it is and somebody else clamours for it to be returned to print” writes Terry Teachout in the introduction to this book.
So here it is again, in 2007. The Dud Avocado is about Sally Jay Gorce, a 21-year old American girl who sets out in the 1950s to live Paris to the full. Her adventures hurricane around Paris’s most flashy quarters, sweeping up some curious people, including a diplomat and a slave trader, in its rush.
Racy, easy to read, this book is fun.
Memoirs of Montparnasse
John Glassco
New York Review Books
$14.95
John Glasco, if you’ve forgotten, is the young man who described Gertrude Stein as a “rhomboidal woman dressed in burlap” adding that it was impossible to conceive of her ever lying down!
John Glasco and friend Graeme Taylor set off from Montreal for Paris in 1928, and several of the people who appear in Glasco’s memoir are now famous figures: Gertrude Stein and James Joyce among them. Glasco’s adventures are the hedonistic, spontaneous adventures of youth; though the writing appears to be completely spontaneous, written as Glasco claimed, in 1928 and then in 1932-3, when he was hospitalized with tuberculosis, because he did not want to wait for the onset of middle age, in fact he actually wrote the larger part of it in 1958, after two long visits to a Paris that he had partly forgotten. The amazing thing is that you can be totally fooled – these memoirs read as if written in the first rush of memory. Good reading.
KALA KRISHNAN RAMESH
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