The Reading List - March 28th 2021
Hello everyone-
February was a bizarre month, but in between the winter storm and changing projects at work I was able to spend some great time skiing with friends and cousins.
Last month also brought my first advance review copy, 98.2 by Henley Alexandre, courtesy of the author (and the friend who introduced us). That review, some pictures from the mountains, and much more below -
Happy reading and stay safe!
The Red and the Black by Stendhal
“He was constantly giving hundreds of louis away and going to court over hundreds of francs. High-spirited, wealthy men seek entertainment and not results from their business transactions.”
The French novelist Stendhal was a veteran of Napoleon’s wars, including the catastrophic Russian campaign. As he watched the conservative reaction against the revolutionary and imperial excesses of his generation deepen under the restored French monarchy, he wrote this novelistic attack on the reign of vanity and pretension he saw among every class in France.
His hero, Julien Sorel, is a great commander whose only battalion is himself: his arms are merciless self-discipline and calculating hypocrisy. Every act is a fatal gamble and he steels himself for combat in the language of Napoleonic gloire. The eve of such calculated actions as daring to kiss Madame de Renal’s hand (inspired only by Rousseau) fill him with all the horror and anxiety of an imminent battle. He anguishes over his own accomplishments sought solely for the illustrious, glorious Career.
Along the arc of this career, sometimes hilarious and often surprising, Stendhal skewers the pretensions and psychological disorders of his time - and many of ours, too. I had a shock of recognition at Stendhal’s aimless, stultified culture ruled only by vanity and his heroic vaniteux “succeeding” through it. By showing a man so perfected to make a way through his own time, he can show us some of the ways we have over-adapted to our own.
Conquered City by Victor Serge
“If the human species could achieve a collective sensibility for five minutes, it would either be cured or drop dead on the spot.”
In 1919, the Bolsheviks seized the capital of Tsarist Russia and held it through a year-long siege - a dire, hungry time they survived by coercion and terror as much as idealism and political will. A decade later, revolutionary and writer Victor Serge sought to recapture the events and emotions of the Siege of St Petersburg, to distill a consciousness of what such a revolutionary time was like despite his disillusionment with Stalinist methods.
In short fragments set over the course of a year, Serge creates a chorus of perfectly-crafted minor characters who each testify to the myriad experiences of revolution and chaos. He does the same justice to the motivations of Cheka inquisitors and Party leaders, bandits and mercenary opportunists, meagre gardeners and housekeepers trying to survive. Most striking of all are Serge’s idealist fanatics, young revolutionaries blinded to the horrors they perpetrate on their fellow men by their waking dreams of the Future of Man.
Umberto Eco wrote that “the most terrifying quality of purity is haste”. In Conquered City, Serge demonstrates how the pressures of a desperate cause will drive true believers to every expediency. Chateaubriand wrote that the French Revolution taught him how, surrounded by the intrigues of Leaguers and Huguenots, Montaigne could “live in such times”. Serge’s sympathetic eye for how people live in such times brings us one of his most poignant scenes. Amidst disappearances, war and famine, a ballet teacher asks after one of his pupils - may she come to practice tonight? “This hurricane will pass, no? But the dance will go on. And the child has talent.”
Bonus: The Case of Comrade Tulayev, my introduction to Serge, was one of my favorite books of 2020 and is a profound exploration of ideology and the chaos of life in Stalinist Russia, where everything must be explained and a coincidence is inconceivable.
A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold
“Our biases (towards nature) are indeed a sensitive index of our affections, our tastes, our loyalties, our generosities, and our manner of wasting weekends… I am content to waste mine, in November, with axe in hand.”
The pioneering naturalist Aldo Leopold created the modern discipline of wildlife management and taught at the University of Wisconsin Madison for many years, but he is best remembered for this beautiful book. The first section is a chronicle of a single year on his farm in the Wisconsin Sand Counties (an area stripped of its delicate fertility by pioneers exploit-farming cash crops - much like the Texas Hill Country). The later portion of the book includes his essays on environmental ethics and a series of short impressions of other forests, mountains, and wild places from Leopold’s time with the US Forest Service.
Reading this at the end of the winter was a timely command to observe the small, local changes of the seasons with all the cyclical patterns they bring to animals, plants, and atmosphere, even in our urban second-nature. Each time I run on my regular trail route, I listen a little more carefully for the local varieties of Leopold’s “goose music” - dovesong, mockingbird ballads, the gratings of bluejays, and the electrical zaps of grackles. In Richard Nelson’s An Island Within, he claims that any place is made beautiful, turned into an aestethic experience, by the quality of attention we bring to it. I think Leopold would’ve agreed, and his work is a lovely example of how “making your presence a question” can change our lives and our relationship to the land around us.
The Hungry Soul by Leon Kass
“However fleeting, partial or self-indulgent, the experience of taste manifests an openness to the world, tinged with wonder and appreciation.”
Dr. Leon Kass’s meditation on the human condition begins by investigating the most elementary constraints and facts of our existence. He asks how our senses, our upright posture, our feelings of hunger and satisfaction, our omnivorous nature, might shape our personal lives and culture, even though these questions are far from our everyday concerns. From these simple foundations Kass builds an intruging work of philosophy: concerned with the ways that humanity has elevated itself above other forms of life, not through assumed superiority but through ethical necessity. At the heart of his argument is the idea that man’s omnivorousness demands limitation - that, for instance, we will not eat other humans. By tracing the proscriptions and refinements by which man differentiates himself from his animal nature, he attempts to draw a path from necessity towards ‘the good life’ and even the sacred.
Bonus: Kass’s fifth chapter is built around Isak Dinesen’s short story Babette’s Feast, a beautiful celebration of how a truly great meal creates the space for communion and fellowship. It was made into a lovely movie as well.
My Life in France by Julia Child
“No dish, not even the humble scrambled egg, was too much trouble for him. ‘You never forget a beautiful thing that you have made’, he said. ‘Even after you eat it, it stays with you - always.’“
Mrs. Child is the inescapable doyenne of American culinary culture, the giant(ess) whose Mastering the Art of French Cooking revolutionized American culinary writing and is still one of the gold standards of the industry. Knowing her posthumous reputation, I was surprised to learn that she was hardly a born chef, or even a natural gourmand. In the 1950s, her husband Paul received a diplomatic posting to Paris. Starting with their very first meal in the country (a sole in Normandy) Paul introduced her into the culture and cuisine that she would work tirelessly to make her own. In her mid-thirties she enrolled in cooking classes at Le Cordon Bleu, meeting her lovable mentor Bugnard (quoted above) as well as the fateful friends who brought her into the “cookery bookery” project that became her grand work.
Though this lovely memoir was written decades later, she recalls a vivid picture of postwar Paris, replete with memorable characters: the cheese woman who could time brie’s ripeness from purchase to meal with a pinch of her thumb; their landlady who had not removed a stitch of furniture since her husband le General dies in WW1; the wineseller who would come to pour his favorite wines personally at parties to prevent anyone collecting them – just to name a few. This book is suffused with a sense of the vitality, gratitude, wonder, and satisfaction Mrs. Child felt with the life she led. Even in the twilight of her life, even after Paul’s death, the beautiful things that she had made were with her, and will remain with her many, many students. Bon Appetit!
Heat by Bill Buford
“There were three essential principles of the kitchen: we were there to buy food, fix it up, and sell it at a profit; consistency was essential; and people should think that there are grandmothers in back preparing their dinner.”
Part restaurant diary a la Kitchen Confidential, part investigation of the prehistory of Italian cooking, and part embedded journalist’s report from the late night bull sessions of celebrity chefs, Heat is a romping, ridiculous, quietly serious book. In the 1990s passionate but inexperienced home cook Bill Buford left his real job as fiction editor for the New Yorker to become a “real” cook, one misadventure after another. Along his journey as a ‘kitchen slave’ at Mario Batali’s Babbo, a pasta making pilgrim in the Appenines, and an apprentice to a “Dante-quoting” butcher in Tuscany, he introduces the reader to colorful characters and a the ways in which we relate to food. More than anything else, I found myself admiring Buford’s willingness to risk any embarrassment to become a better chef - and his wife’s superhuman forbearance along the way.
Bonus: Two of his great research passions are the theory that Catherine de Medici brought haute cuisine to France (unsubstantiated but intriguing); and the mystery of the first Italian tomato sauce recipe. According to this book, he discovered the oldest recipe on record, which the National Pasta Museum of Italy didn’t know about.
Bonus II: One scene I can’t get out of my head is Buford returning from Tuscany to Manhattan and deciding to buy an entire pig (can’t let your butchery skills deteriorate, right?). Accompanied by his mortified wife, he manages to get it across Manhattan on the handlebars of their moped and up the elevator of their apartment building…
Wine and War by Don and Petie Kladstrup
“To be a Frenchman means to fight for your country and its wine.” - Claude Terrail, owner of Restaurant La Tour d’Argent
The philosopher Roger Scruton once wrote that “Without intoxicants we see each other as we are, and no human society can be built on so frail a foundation.” In this small social history, the Kladstrups show how wine, the intoxicant par excellence, served as a pillar of French culture through the darkest years of WWII.
By interviewing descendants and accessing family documents of some of France’s greatest wine houses, the Kladstrups are able to recreate an unusually intimate social history of the Occupation and resistance from 1940-1944. My favorite stories in this book were of captured French officers organizing a wine tasting for their men in a POW camp; a soldier writing France’s greatest national guide to food and wine from memory and interviews with other prisoners; the Resistance’s exploits to “hide, fib, and fob off” the Weinfuhrers tasked with taking France’s best vintages; and the chase to recover those wines from the cellars of Nazi leaders.
France is the only place I’ve witnessed businessmen halt their days to have a lunch of four courses, with a bottle of wine each, followed by ice creams. It is a culture that takes national pride in savoring good food, good wine, and good company. This book highlights that joie de vivre by showing the hopeful, defiant attitude that buoyed the French after the defeat.
If the harvest is poor, if there is no one to gather it, if the Germans take your best bottles, tant pis! There will be other years, and les vins grand cru will unite men of good will, even in the darkest times.
N.B. I would never have found this book if it had not been a gift from Kirsten for our New Year’s book exchange. So as always, thank you to the best editor / book scout / lady around. My Life in France was also her pick.
Bonus: I had never heard of von Choltitz, the German commandant of Paris, who rejected his final orders to destroy Paris as the Allies approached in 1944.
Bonus 2: I highly recommend the short documentary Sour Grapes - a great film about Burgundy, the collector’s spirit, and a wild fraud investigation.
My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
“There are no gestures, words, or sighs that do not contain the sum of all the crimes that human beings have ever committed and commit.”
Two summers ago, on the eve of our trip to Italy, Kirsten was enrapt in Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet and its “intimate, honest portrait of the female psyche”. I too was very impressed with this book. Ferrante fashions Naples and its poverty into a protagonist, summoning the feeling of squalor, frustrated dreams, and circumscribed experience that is life in ‘the neighborhood’. Lenu and Lila are intriguing, difficult, and true characters and I look forward to reading the rest of the series.
The Dispossessed by Ursula K LeGuin
“They had both suffered from it, and suffered a good deal, but it had not occurred to either of them to escape the suffering by denying the commitment… If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home.”
Two hundred years ago, the governments of Urras banished their rebellious anarchist Odonians to settle their inhabitable but arid moon, Annares. Now, the physicist Shevek is invited to lecture in one of the capitals of the “archists”. He is the first man to cross the space between their planets or their ways of life since “the Gift”, and both his scientific discovery and his “tyranny of a good example” bear revolutionary possibilities.
Alongside The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed stands as one of Le Guin’s greatest works, and therefore one of the pinnacles of . Though I found more logical flaws and sinister undercurrents of “Odonianism” than when I first read the novel, this book remains the most thorough attempt I know of to write an author’s Utopian dream. It is greatly to Le Guin’s credit that she follows the consequences of that dream, letting the light fall on the coercion and conformity that can result even from a radical attempt to live without such evils.
Mantel Pieces by Hilary Mantel
“They say that ‘there’s nothing the facts can do to change the myth.’ Still, one must keep trying: stating the facts as we have them, living with the myth while scrutinizing it.”
The perfectly-titled Mantel Pieces collects nearly thirty years of Ms. Mantel’s essays for the London Review of Books, accompanied by a few short autobiographical piece and some charming communiques between Mantel and her editor, Mary-Kay Wilmers. My favorite pieces were on Christopher Marlowe and spycraft in Elizabethan England; Danton, Robespierre and the French Revolution; and Margaret Pole, Charles Brandon, and Jane Boleyn. (These biographical pieces are great tie-ins to her fiction masterpiece, the Wolf Hall trilogy, completed last year). This collection also includes “Royal Bodies”, possibly Mantel’s most infamous piece, a critical but humane attempt to ask what a modern society ought to do if it finds itself with a royal family.
Sponsored(ish)
98.2 by Henley J Alexandre
Alexandre’s authorial debut is an ominous blending of our own world and a dystopian Other, unfolding two parallel lives a half-century apart. Sam is a college student living through the onset of last spring’s pandemic; Emily is a high school student in a command society rigidly organized by the pandemic and its aftermath. Alexandre relies too heavily on his audience’s visceral personal experiences of the past year, painting the conditions of his characters only in allusive strokes; nevertheless, I am impressed at his ability to reckon with his own feelings throughout the beginning of our plague year fully enough to venture such a story so soon. As this year progresses and we overcome the suffering and fear that COVID and the public response to it wrought, I am optimistic that his pandemic duration will be “wrong” by at least fifty years. Yet his book will remain an admirable attempt to capture the dreads and sinking disorganization of the moments when all our easy assumptions of normalcy and the pursuit of happiness evaporated into calculations of risk, safety and “social distance”.
That’s the list! Here are a few of my favorite photos from the month:
Denver with (some of) the boys for Ryan’s bachelor weekend Skiing Taos with Emily, on top of New Mexico Testing a theory that the best Mondays are spent drinking Coors in a snowy forest (it checked out) In the last two weeks, spring has come to North Texas
Thank you for reading. If you have a friend who you think would enjoy this, please feel free to forward it along.
Alex
These books, and those from previous lists, can be viewed or purchased here.
Some of my other writing can be found here.
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