The Book Doctors Are In

To Read In Case Of: Heartbreak

We’re asking our favorite authors and readers to make recommendations for those moments when a good book is the only cure. For the month of Valentine’s Day, we’re asking: what’s the best book (or books) to read in times of heartbreak?

Larry Smith is editor of SMITH Magazine (smithmag.net) and co-editor of Six-Word Memoirs on Love & Heartbreak, and Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous & Obscure.

"These books revive my heart every time:

If We Ever Break Up, This is My Book by Jason Logan

I kept this bizarre book of hand-scrawled doodles, pie charts, Venn diagrams, and lists in my bathroom for years. At least, I figured, the folks who had to pee in my apartment would know about Jason Logan’s genius little book about love and how it messes with all our heads. To be sure, the author’s brain does not work like all the others. But his outward expressions of his internal musings about his relationship ought to be somebody’s Bible; on some days it’s mine.

Here is New York by E.B. White

Once a year I check in with E.B. White’s well known, much loved, 56-page love letter to New York, a girl I’ve been crushing on my whole life; and one who can bring you back from your lowest depths just by stepping outside to see her.

Mortified: Love is a Battlefield by David Nadelberg

From the Mortified web and print project, a collection of old diaries and love letters, with reflection by the writers’ "adult self." We’ve all been there, and watching others go back there is an instant de-funkifier.

Twenty Love Poems And A Song of Despair by Pablo Neruda

There. I said it. Pablo Neruda. The most obvious person possible to include on a love list. And at the risk of obviousness to a crowd in the world’s top 1 percent of lit-i-ness, I’ll just say this: Each time I look across the room and see that my wife keeps the book I sent her during a time when we were separated (unwillingly) for 13 months by her side of the bed (or maybe she’s moved it next to the computer for a few days), it makes my heart grow a little bigger."

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The Book Doctors Are In

To Read In Case Of: Heartbreak

We’re asking our favorite authors and readers to make recommendations for those moments when a good book is the only cure. For the month of Valentine’s Day, we’re asking: what’s the best book (or books) to read in times of heartbreak?

Daniel Bergner is a staff writer for the New York Times Magazine and the author of two books of nonfiction:In the Land of Magic Soldiers, a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year and winner of an Overseas Press Club Award and a Lettre Ulysses Award for the Art of Reportage; and God of the Rodeo, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Bergner’s writing has also appeared in Granta, Harper’s Magazine, Mother Jones, Talk, the New York Times Book Review, and on the op-ed page of the New York Times.His most recent book is The Other Side of Desire: Four Journeys into the Far Realms of Lust and Longing (Ecco), which he reads at McNally Jackson on February 2.

"Literary antidotes for heartbreak? The Catastrophist by Irish novelist Ronan Benett — it never got much attention on this side of the Atlantic, but it’s a story of tortured love set in the Congo that is impossible to put down.

"And then there’s Greene’s The Quiet American – how to have your rival rubbed out and reclaim your lost lover.

"And Wharton’s Ethan Frome – a gorgeous little book that we all read in high school when we’re too young to recognize how perfectly it’s made…

"As the author of The Other Side of Desire, I should probably be recommending something kinky, but I can think only of books that are beautiful and sad."

Here’s a shameful fact of bookselling: I’ve not read all of the books in the store.  I’ve not even read all of the books that I press into your hand.  I rely on written reviews and the advice of others to know what you should be reading as much as my own personal impressions.  Even then, when I pass you a book that I myself have enjoyed, I’m not always so rigorous about the basis of  that judgement.  By which I mean to say, sometimes I haven’t actually finished the book that I’m recommending you read.  Certainly I won’t lie to you and tell you I’ve read something that I haven’t, but my god, there are just too many books and I’m too much of a damned literary dilettante.  It’s no slight to the book that I haven’t finished it.  Perhaps I just haven’t had the time, or I’ve grown distracted by some other shiny bit of lit and put a book down with every intention of getting back to it soon.  Sometimes that "soon" can mean years.  If I weren’t so greedy about buying new books, or perhaps if I had better willpower, I’d be more likely to read a single book straight through.  As it is it’s like I get to taste every dish at the table, but it’s a long table and I’m eyeing the next plate even before I get a mouthful from the first.  Honestly, even as I type this I keep glancing up at an Agee collection on my shelf I got as a gift this past year from my mother (thanks Ma!) and a used edition of some of Michael Walzer’s criticism, both utterly unread.  So easily distracted, I am. 

Anyways, I’d like to mention some of the books I’ve started in the past three weeks or so but still haven’t finished for whatever reason, but which I’d feel comfortable recommending to readers, even on the strength of a dozen pages. 

Fast Ships, Black Sails
Edited by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer (Night Shade, $14.95)
I just began this one today and may finish it by the week’s end.  It’s a fast thrilling read.  This is an anthology of pirate stories, which, I was just about to type, is not really my sort of thing except that after a quick thought to how fun these were, I guess it is.  I’ve only read two of them, but those two (by Justin Howe and Paul Batteiger) featured fifty-knot broadsides between ice skiffs,  a man whose innards are held in a tarred barrel-shaped corset,  a greasy skillet named Robert, swordfights (natch), Leftenants, and plenty of cannibalism in both.  I recommend it if you have ever, even once, said "Arrr."  And I know you have.

Here are two I started yesterday:

Conversation in the Cathedral
by Mario Vargas Llosa (HarperPerennial, $14.95)
I’ve never read Vargas Llosa, and don’t know which of his novels or essay collections is considered the best stepping-off point, so I picked up the one that appealed to me most (nice job, faceless jacket-copy writer!) and haven’t been disappointed.  Vargas Llosa blends thoughts, dialogue and narration, but keeps our impressions of people, places and images fairly brief.  The novel is from the seventies, but set in the fifties in Peru, and the resultant socio-economic morass is quickly becoming apparent.  Also, bootblacks and brutal daschund murder.

Ghosts
by Cesar Aira (New Directions, $14.95)
This slim novel doesn’t hit the streets until the end of February, so I’m not sure why I picked it up already.  It’s good though, if puzzling.  The attention to behavioral detail is satisfying, but not much has happened yet.  I think I caught a glimpse of the eponymous ghosts, however, in a single sentence, and I left off with a young construction worker standing on the edge of a dumpster looking at something intently, so maybe he’s seen them, too.  The fact that I’m so haunted (har) by that possibility indicates to me that this is a book I’ll enjoy, maybe even love.

A Book of Memories
by Peter Nadaś (Picador, $18.00)
How much of a book must I read before I declare it a masterpiece?  Is thirty pages enough?  Probably not, but let me say that this book has given every indication of being one of the most observant, well-written, indeed one of the best novels to come out of the last half-century.  It’s set thus far in Germany and Hungary, in neighborhoods and seaside towns I couldn’t pick out on a map but could safely describe to you just on the strength of Nadaś’s writing.  There is, as the title promises, some memory involved, and some romance, and hints of emotional turmoil to come.  It reads like a strange mix of Sebald and Proust, which is close to the strongest praise I’ve ever given a novel.  So why then haven’t I devoured it yet?  I dunno, I think I got distracted by Bacigalupi and Oppen.

Small Lives
by Pierre Michon (Archipelago, $15.00)
This is the first novel, of an apparently illustrious and prize-festooned French author who I’ve never happened upon before.  Ah well, I’m nothing if not provincial.  I’ve never read Le Clezio either, and may have to print a t-shirt to declare as much.  The book is a series of vignettes, eight actually, describing the lives of various people known to a central narrator at various points in his own life.  I’ve read only the first, and that was in the middle of a strange late-night literary glut so perhaps my judgement is not to be trusted so implicitly, but I thought it was beautiful and a bit funny too.  The plotting is very European, or at least nostalgic for what it might mean to write about French lives.  Again I haven’t read very much, but it feels a bit like Stendahl, but with fresher language.  I do wish Archipelago would get over their strange romance with severe serifs, though.

What else?  Oh, here:
The Art of Memory
by Frances A. Yates (Chicago, $29.00)
I actually found this book because a customer had ordered a copy and I was tasked with letting them know it had arrived.  The handsell cuts both ways, you see.  I absolutely love Jonathan Spence’s The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, which introduced me to the ancient mnemonic arts, and then Ann Carson discusses them  in her Economy of the Unlost, another of my favorite books, so I couldn’t pass up the chance to get this, the classic history of the topic.  It hasn’t disappointed yet, and promises to get even wilder and more fun when Yates gets to some of the more esoteric memory methods used in pre-renaissance Europe.  Plus it’s full of crabbed diagrams and, ah, I just remembered, a whole chapter on Giordano Bruno, everyone’s favorite polymath heretic.

So, maybe these books get very terrible very quickly once you’ve read beyond where I have, but I doubt it.  I’m determined to finish each of them, sometime very "soon."

My favorite joke from Attila Bartis’ third novel, Tranquility goes a little something like this.  What did the drunken middle-aged whore who lives in a converted closet near the public toilet in a dingy cinderblock apartment with her broken-winged birds and a portrait of her mother say to the tormented teenage twin who’s just left home to avoid the growing desperate insanity of his mother?

“Hurry up then,” she said, and I tried to hurry up.  I got hold of her wilted guelder-rose breasts and kept jabbing her womb like a dog.

That, you might think, falls somewhere short of humor, and normally I’d agree with you, but Bartis’ book is so over the top in scene after scene of squalor and loathing that even by this point, which is only about a quarter of the way in, I found myself rolling my eyes.  That has much more to do with my own sensibilities, I think, than any given misstep in Bartis’ book.  Zola and Bataille make me giggle, too. 

Tranquility  is Attila Bartis’ first novel to be translated into English, though it’s the third he’s written.  Archipelago Press, Brooklyn champions of small literature in translation, released it just recently in a translation by Hungarian-Israeli Imre Goldstein.  Goldstein is an admirable seneschal for the work of contemporary Hungarian writers, having translated Konrad and most recently and admirably Peter Nadaś (about whom there is an excellent article here).  He gives Bartis a gothic archness that well complements his descriptions of the vulgarly human in a nation struggling to slough off the cruelties of a corrupted and inhumane bureaucracy.  He preserves Bartis’ agglutinative jumble of words and sometimes incoherent tense changes, even his irritating attempts at fugue-like stream of consciousness (“This was my best pair of pants, I thought, well, nothing to be done about it, tomorrow I’ll put on a thicker pair, I thought, actually it would be good to know something about my father, I thought, at least what he looked like, I thought, tomorrow I’ll ask that slut, I thought …”)  My only quibble might be with an overuse of the word “loins” which I have a particular distaste for, but then there is very little in the book that is not pointedly distasteful.

The novel follows Anthony Weer through a wash of violent memories as he recalls childhood with his twin sister Judit, a violin prodigy, and his mother Rebecca, an actress and, later in life, a shut-in (though at more than one point she is portrayed as a prisoner of her son).  Benjamin wrote that “the birthplace of the novel is the solitary individual , who is no longer able to express himself by giving examples of his utmost concerns, is himself uncounseled and cannot counsel others.”  Benjamin meant this to describe novelists, and it does, but it is also apt to those subjects of novels, such as Anthony Weer, who are alien and frustrated  and forced to write, not as salve to their frustration but a pursuit of it.  Anthony is prone to dramatic proclamations and profound acts of self-sabotage.  But Anthony, for all his turmoil and voice in the novel, is little but that, the voice, the inky lens, if I can imagine such a thing, for the women in his life, all of whom are silenced by circumstance and occasionally by Anthony himself.  He is precocious and terrified of his mother as a boy, a slave to his sexual drive and her barbs as a young man and finally, as an adult and published writer, hateful and condescending toward her.  His sister  is  an embodiment of every extreme he wishes to see in himself, more brilliant, more persecuted, more experienced and adult and finally, after her emigration, more silent and free and dead.

The main course of the book, though it jumps around more or less deftly, concerns Anthony’s romance with a mysterious and hurt young woman, met after his sister has gone, after his mother has descended into her squalid unspectacular madness.  In one of the better scenes in the book, he approaches her while on a date with another woman, lists for a full page the things he forgot in that moment (nearly all of them sordid and sad) and says to her simply “Let’s go then.”

Sex is fraught, for Anthony, with memories of incest and post-coital disgust, not to mention his hatred for powerful women, and Eszter is complicated by a series of illnesses, so their romance is a strange one.  For readers, however, those moments of discomfort at his rage and infidelities, her insanities, are infinitely preferable to their times of happiness, which feature not a few ridiculously overwrought descriptions of sex and orgasm.  They are often marbled, of course, with veins of hesitancy and near-rape and mention of much-inflamed loins.  How could they be otherwise in this book?

If it is typical of Jameson’s so-called second world literature – that is, literature written in nations, cultures, that are not privy to the tropes of colonization but nonetheless fall under the restrictive tutelage of an ascendent power – to treat in issues of transgression, confinement, escape and their concomitant emotional tags: disgust, relief, guilt, bitterness, then Bartis’ Tranqulity is certainly a work of the second world.  More than that, however, it  takes it’s digusts to such extremes (secretions on shirtsleeves, anyone?) that it must be seen not just as an example of the form, but a critique of it.  It’s certainly a more fruitful and self-reflective example of subversive violence than Victor Pelevin’s work, and Bartis’ voice is less sanguine than many other former Bloc novelists of his generation.  This work is inarguably well-written, insightful at times, and damned memorable.  In spite of my laughter at his descriptive extremes I can only hope that it will inspire someone, perhaps Archipelago, to bring us more.

Here’s a book I’d like to mention briefly.

 Harry Mathews may not be as widely read in the states as he deserves. At least, fewer customer in our store walk away with his Cigarettes than do copies of Marias, Sebald or Aira, fellow dabblers in intertextuality and toe-scuffers at the line between fiction and non. And he is likely less well known than fellow Oulipoan Georges Perec. And that is a shame. In spite of such impeccable literary credentials, and time spent as an expatriate, Mathews is very much an American writer, and can deploy a clear fluid prose that would mark him as, in some eyes, a better stylist than any of the above, even when he is indulging in a penchant for games.

 That style is apparent in Singular Pleasures (Dalkey Archive Press, $12.95), Mathews’ extended tribute to the sticky, human, act of onanism. Go ahead, giggle. I did, all throughout the book. Parts of it are pointedly absurd. But I also fell in love with a few characters, with their desires and quiet paragraph-long lives.

 The book is a series of short vignettes, each describing one single act of masturbation, sometimes with a bit of background on the person or people involved. Described are two men - perhaps lovers - in Iran, an Inuit man using grease, a pair of elderly brothers competing in their virility, an “ascetic sensualist” brought to climax by poetry, and on and on, in sixty-one iterations. The scenes are paired with simple illustrations of objects by Fransisco Clement, which slow down the pacing of the book and emphasize, perhaps, it’s lyricism.

 They are often silly, but not so much that they could not be true to life. There are no windows onto the private lusts of Santa Claus or George Bush, as in Robert Olen Butler’s latest. If some scenes are more ridiculous than our positivist experience might let us call true, others are more poignant and sweet. It is a depiction, an aware fictionalization of the act. Roth aside, masturbation is not so often discussed in such variety, but the book is not simply some Bataille-esque exploration of transgression, either. If anything in the book smacks of the provocative, it is the frequency of observers present during the subjects’ moment of release. These people tease and reassure us about our voyeurism.

 This is a small book, and less textually playful than his other work, but too lovely to be dismissed as a simple novelty.

 The Complete Review has another look at Singular Pleasures, with a hilariously disappointed last line. You can get a taste of Mathews’ more Oulipoan fiction over at the Boston Review.

Here’s a quick review of a book I polished off last week. Steve had the folks at Fantagraphics send one my way. Steve, I may have told you that I liked it, but I think I forgot to mention that it is a new classic.

Our Events Coordinator and resident bookselling crusader Jessica (she’ll sell you books even if she has to pillage your fields and raze your walls to do it) has some more of her pithy reviews up at The Written Nerd. This time she gets to Lethem’s You Don’t Love Me Yet - also a staff pick - and two by Agatha Christie. Now I get to make fun of her for the latter two when I see her this afternoon. Reading Agatha Christie is like eating lowfat vanilla frozen yogurt. If you’re going to eat ice-cream at all you may as well go for the kind with Oreos and lard marbling and enjoy yourself. Likewise, if it’s a murder mystery you want, why not give it some gritty noir sprinkles on top?

Jessica, our own Events Manager and Gushing Font of Bookselling Optimism (that’s on her business cards, honest!) has a long-running and excellent blog – The Written Nerd – that I’ll be linking to occasionally. Her latest post is the first in a planned series she’s calling the Handsell. It’s essentially a brief excited review of Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, about what you might get from one of our booksellers at the store if you stopped us to ask about it as we carried an armful of glossy (heavy) photo books down the stairs. Enthusiastic, but necessarily short.

As a side note, for those of you who’ve read the book and thought, as I did, that Luna Moth might have been a bit too strange to be a realistic golden age comic character, Chris Sims, comic historian extraordinaire, has shown me just how wrong I was.   

The temperature’s been dozing somewhere around ninety degrees (that’s 15.7×106 K to the scientifically inclined among you) these past few days in New York.  And even though today may be a bit cooler than yesterday, I’ve still got enough dehydration-induced mania to want to discuss a few of my favorite stories set in circumstances of extreme cold.  I may make a display out of these for the store at some point in the future, but for now it’s purely recreational.  Remember, if I begin to ramble it’s only the parched mind talking.

The prototypical example here, regardless of actual chronology, is of course Jack London’s “To Start a Fire.” I first read this story back in middle or high school, as I’m sure many of you did (and really, does anyone read London beyond then?), and I still cannot pass a cold winter’s afternoon without it coming to mind. If so little as a brisk breeze happens to string its way between my reddened fingertips I begin to look around for a handy (obedient) dog. Maybe it’s London’s fairly transparent writing, maybe the vivid simple imagery, but this story is, for me, the idiom of a frozen-spittle tale. Of course there is the mandatory lesson about man’s hubris in the face of an indifferent Nature, but considering that the entirety of my life will be consumed with learning that moral again and again, I think I can be forgiven for glossing over it a bit here.

More recently I read A Dream in Polar Fog, by Yuri Rytkheu. In this beautifully written story it is, paradoxically enough, fire that first proves dangerous. A young Canadian sailor is terribly burned while trying to blast his ship free of closing pack ice in the seas north of Siberia. In exchange for guns a nearby community of Chukchi agree to tend to the young man and see him to a doctor while his crew remains stranded. Unfortunately for young James, the ship is freed before he can be brought, handless, back to his crew, and they leave without him. There is, of course, plenty of bitter cold in this tale, and Rytkheu, himself a Chukchi, does a masterful job describing it. It is less a book about survival, however, than community and the creaking knots of sinew that both strengthen and bind one. To this end, the majority of the book takes place in tight areas of shelter from the elements, first in the hold of a ship and then in a series of smoky tents and icehouses. The lasting impression is one of claustrophobia rather than London’s unsheltered terror. Those scenes that do take place outdoors are often without the characters’ already terse dialogue, and become meditations on the role of humanity in such expanses – to create and maintain the pedestrian, the necessary ordinariness of a knot well-tied, in the face of a numinous and inhuman Nature. I too am skeptical of novels that would do little else but scold readers about the inevitably corrosive effects of colonialism on native societies, but Rytkheu manages to make his Chukchi petty enough, and at the same time give us enough Men’s Adventure scenes that the story manages to be politically engaged without becoming saccharine or boring.

Another story that I can’t get out of my head is Alastair Reynolds’ “Glacial”, first published in Spectrum SF 5 back in 2001 and most recently collected in his anthology Galactic North. In case you don’t know the author and those two titles haven’t clued you in, Mr. Reynolds writes science fiction, or perhaps more accurately Science Fiction, replete with hive minds and Near-Light drives and cold atmosphereless dawns over cratered alien worlds. In fact, he’s one of the best writers in the field at the moment, in many ways a younger John Varley. “Glacial” takes place wholly on an icy world, a galactic backwater of sorts where a colony established by humans born of genes carried in the bellies of space-faring von Neumann machines has died off under mysterious circumstances. The characters, themselves half machine and refugees from a war of attrition in our own solar system have landed in search of a new viable planet but are forced to investigate the ruins of their predecessors first. Do you smell a thriller? I can’t smell much through this breathing mask (alien atmospheres being toxic and all), but I’m certainly catching a whiff of Crichton. A sheen of frozen condensation covers every surface of the abandoned colonies, including corpses, an Ozymandian touch that goes unremarked upon by the characters. Reynolds is more explicit, however in his emphasis of the blessed solitude that a moment on the ice might provide, aloneness so absolute that it seems to seep beyond the limits of the body and slow even our thoughts. It’s a quietness particularly welcome for Nevil, the story’s protagonist, who is still uncomfortable with the seething machines that replace a portion of his brain and allow him to communicate instantly with any one of the Conjoiner refugees. If this sounds a bit ridiculous to you, I promise I’m not even giving half a taste of how strange this story gets. Reynolds is a highly thematic writer, and one of the most transparently Freudian in the genre. Nevil’s wish for relief, for slowing, is mirrored in evidence among the outpost’s ruins of a creeping idiocy or carelessness that may have led to many of the colony’s deaths. His powerful deathwish is tied to his lust for Galiana, a mother/lover figure, as well as the counternatural renewal of his body by that same woman from what would otherwise have been a deservedly lonely senescence. He is a man suffused with a quiet guilt throughout the story and is driven by that guilt to obsession.

Reynolds has used the ice of an alien world to highlight the crevassed desires of one old man, and gives readers another prime theme of these deep-freeze tales, and of science fiction or nature fiction in general: namely, he shows us just how reflective a frozen waste can be.

Those are just three that I’ve particularly liked, but this is not a new or rare setting, and I’m sure there are thousands more out there. What about Mary Shelley, or, well, Scott or Amundsen for that matter?  How about Simmons’ The Terror, or Dostoyevsky’s icy poverty? A Public Space even had a whole issue devoted to Antarctica recently. What are your favorites? Let me know so I can cool down some more.

.Dustin