Jhumping In

Just read Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth, a collection of her short stories. Some had already been published in the New Yorker. She's a beautiful writer, as always, although her characters remind me of Anita Brookner's: isolated and removed from life and the humans around them . Too much prolonged exposure to them makes you start to feel itchy and claustrophobic. Makes me long for E.M. Forster to march in and slap them on the side of the head and yell "Only connect!".

Speak Nabokov

Just finished Speak Memory yesterday. Slow going with sentences like "nor am I alluding to the so-called muscae volitantes--shadows cast upon the retinal rods by motes in the vitreous humor, which are seen as transparent threads drifting across the visual field." to liven things up just when I'm nodding off in bed. (I love how he thinks that's a helpful explanation.)
For a lover of straight narrative: there is none. For the eschewer of the lyrical: stay away. But then there are some lovely bits where he describes how real memory becomes eaten up by our narratives until it is no longer a real memory but a part of a story. "houses have crumbled in my memory as soundlessly as they did in the mute films of yore, and the portrait of my old French governess, whom I once lent to a boy in one of my books, is fading fast, now that it is engulfed in the description of a childhood entirely unrelated to my own."

Books For Children?

Billed as a Young Adult Novel, How I Live Now by Meg Rossof won all sorts of awards in Britain. I think Adult is the operative word since right as our 15 year old anorexic American heroine gets off the plane in England she meets her cigarette smoking 14 year old male cousin, they hop in a car with him driving and a few chapters later they are having sex. What's so young about that? Anyway it's actually quite a good book set in a very vague future World War situation where the heroine ends up having to survive off the land.

Speaking of actual children's books Olivia and are reading The Penderwicks on Gardham Street and really enjoying it. They're quite good, both the first one and the second. The author obviously read a lot of the same fiction that I did when I was young. It has shades of Elizabeth Enright or E.E. Nesbit, not too trendy or pandering. Very satisfying.

Kennedys

Just read very quickly Laurie Graham's Importance of being Kennedy. I enjoyed the similar book she wrote about the Duke of Windsor. This was not so good. It just reminded me what an unattractive and calculating people the Kennedy's were. Teddy is seen as a nasty little tubber, old Rose Kennedy was a total shrew and all the dead ones were ok. Apparently young simple Rosie Kennedy was tolerated until the hormones kicked in and then she was given a botched lobotomy and sent off to lala land. It's all told through the eyes of the Irish nanny.

The Young Picasso

So I finished that big biography of Picasso last night, it ends right before he painted the above at 26. Although I did feel the book was a bit tedious in all the details of minor figures who came and went in the space of a paragraph, I also felt awe at the speed with which Picasso worked through an idea, conquered it and moved on. Blink and you miss the Rose Period or the Blue Period. You can see other artists near Picasso being left behind still puttering around with something he left years ago. It seems he always had that single minded purpose to create art, everything else in his life is incidental.
It was fun to hear of some of the art you have to peer at in a crowd being so accessible in the early 1900's. A friend of Picasso, no one special or rich, had a Gauguin hanging in his living room that Picasso used to go visit frequently. A lot of Picasso's early work is lost since he had to paint it over because he couldn't afford new canvases. The level of his poverty was a surprise fror me but even in those days grown up sons apparently moved back in with their parents and brought their dirty laundry home. Some things never change.
I plan on reading the next 2 volumes.

Picasso

With the pile next to my bed teetering close to collapse I thought it was time to eliminate the fattest offender so I'm reading the Picasso biography by John Richardson. Not exactly a page turner. And I'm only half way through it but I am sorry that the photos are not in color---black and white doesn't do justice to the Blue Period and I think to tell the story visually you need that progression of color in the work. Richardson seems to be a bit petty in the begining hinting that Picasso rather than acknowledging his juvenalia instead destroyed it all to preserve the myth that he sprang fully formed as an artist from the head of his very mediocre artist father.
But it reads a bit like a social diary recounting names of everyone he ever crossed paths with and all his addresses and mistresses, most of them described by Richardson as "Cecilia, a whore, Rosita, a whore...".
It's fun to read about Picasso's supersticions about age, he would never let old people sleep in his house in case it rubbed off. So when an 80 year old bosom friend visits, the 80 year old Picasso makes him stay in a hotel just in case death enters the house. Apparently he would also steal his son's clothes and keep his toys near him in case "the youthfulness might still cling to them" and rejuvenate him . I have taken to carrying a couple of Liv's Hamtaro's in my pockets. I'll get back to you on the results.

Why Did I Read This?

Because I got it at the best damm booksale in North America...that's why! Marblehead Public Library for some reason has a fantastic booksale every 3 months or so. It is a blood sport however with agressive dealers elbowing aside the more timid or...bookish customers. I have gotten some great books there though. A week or so though ago I got confused and thought the booksale was on and parked in front of the library right at 10 am on the dot. I marched boldly downstairs and towards the sale room armed with steel nerves, sharp elbows and two tote bags. A grey haired woman looked at me questioningly and I saw no one else was there....it turns out they had booked the room for a memorial service (perhaps for a timid book consumer from last quarter's sale?) and the book sale was actually not until the next month. Whoops.
The book, instantly forgetable, had charm only that it reminded me faintly of my mother since the author was in the same era as she, with gardenia corsages and a newsy sort of voice. Don't bother though. But go to the booksale. It's at the end of this month. Or maybe that'll be my memorial service...