The Best Christmas Gift

How odd it was on Thursday to hear that everyone we know in the U.S.A. was celebrating Thanksgiving, while here in Paris we heard nary a mention of turkey or pumpkin pie.

But we celebrated in our own way with our usual daily gratitude for our work, family, friends, and our lives together in Paris.

Moving on to Christmas: what is your favorite Christmas gift? I mean besides love, money and creativity—something that can be wrapped and placed under the Christmas tree.

For me, it’s always been books. Even as a child, getting a new book was bliss.

Last week, Richard and I and our nephew, Jonathan Edwards, went to Shakespeare and Company Bookstore one night to hear the American novelist, Percival Everett, read an excerpt from his novel. We’d heard him before at Antioch University in Los Angeles. But here in the bookstore, I could immediately buy one of his books.

After the reading I asked him to recommend where to begin. He suggested his comic novel, “I am Not Sidney Poitier.” Both Jonathan and I bought it, and I had the sad experience a few days ago of finishing it. Sad because the world Everett creates in this novel is so rich, so real, I didn’t want it to end. It is about the journey of a young black man, Not Sidney (yes, that is his name) from his childhood with a smart, unsentimental single mother who, through her investments, makes her son staggeringly rich. After a period of living with Ted Turner (and glimpses of Jane Fonda), Not Sidney embarks on a farcical stint at Morehouse College and a terrifying journey through the South where—okay, can’t give that away, can I?

The book is full of absurdity, from a Morehouse professor named Percival Everett who teaches the Philosophy of Nonsense to his earnest students, to Not Sidney's way of handling the cruelty of frat house hazing, which made me laugh so loud I had to run into the kitchen so I wouldn’t awaken Richard.

But wait—it’s more than his humor that makes this novel so brilliant. It’s the mild temperament and voice of the narrator. While people around him are behaving savagely or absurdly, he simply observes. (Think Candide.) And slowly it dawns on the reader that this is the most eloquent telling of how it might feel to be black in the U.S.A., at least in the redneck states, of anything I’ve read. (I’m embarrassed to say I haven’t read James Baldwin’s work, but I’m going to get Giovanni’s Room next.)

Street art by Nice Art

But wait—it’s even greater than this. No one has put into words better than Marcel Proust the deepest purpose of reading. Here is what he wrote in a letter:

“It is one of the great and wonderful characteristics of good books…that for the author they may be called “conclusions” but for the reader “incitements”…That is the value of reading and also its inadequacy. To make it into a discipline is to give too large a role to what is only an incitement. Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it: it does not constitute it.” As Alain de Botton writes in his book, How Proust Can Save Your Life, “Even the finest books deserve to be thrown aside.”

There was something about the surreal sensibility of this book that incited the first pages of a new long story (novella? novel? not sure). Inspiration: the greatest gift any book can give us. 

And with that, I want to recommend a few of the most inspiring books I’ve read in the past year. Who knows, one or two of these might inspire you, or someone for whom you're looking for a gift.

Fiction

• The Certificate by Isaac Bashevis Singer (This novel was written in Singer’s sixties and is closely autobiographical, the story of a young Jewish man who arrives in Warsaw from his small Polish village in 1922. He has romantic adventures with three young women while waiting to get his certificate to go to Palestine. This is brilliant writing, the kind of voice that’s so vivid you can’t stop reading. It’s out of print, so you may have to track it down through some online used book store like Abe Books.)

• Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust, translated by Lydia Davis. (I can’t improve on Virginia Woolf’s words in a letter to Roger Fry in which she wrote, “My great adventure is really Proust. Well—what remains to be written after that? …How, at last, has someone solidified what has always escaped and made it too into this beautiful and perfectly enduring substance? One has to put the book down and gasp.”)

• The Blue Fox by Sjon (Such a strange and mysterious story told by the Icelandic writer Sjon. It takes place in Iceland and links the destinies of a hunter/priest, a blue fox, a naturalist and a girl with Down syndrome in a tale about compassion. It is a book that seems carved out of ice; it’s minimalist, poetic, and told in a distinctively Scandinavian voice that reminded me of my Norwegian-American maternal grandfather, Julius Heimark’s way of telling a story, colloquial and as simple and straightforward as The Eddas.)

• Self-Portraits: Fictions by Frederic Tuten (Imagine a series of short stories that combine the sensibility of Luis Bunuel's films with Andre Breton's writing, and you'll be half-way to the flavor of this writer's work. The stories seem to be telling an autobiographical dream narrative, sometimes erotic, sometimes hilarious (laugh out loud), and always as close to poetry as fiction gets.)

• N-W by Zadie Smith (stream of consciousness narrative of four characters, Leah, Natalie, Felix and Nathan, in present-day London. It made me think of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. This is one of those books that in the first few pages is slow to get going, then you are truly inside the characters in the most satisfying way, living their life minute by minute, including some surprises that you don't see coming.)

• This is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz  (Interlinked stories about various women in the life of Yunior, a young Dominican-American man whose Don Juan ways end up breaking his own heart. Diaz’s genius is high voltage voice! You can’t put the book down.)

Street art by Miss-Tic

Poetry

• The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches by Matsuo Bashō (Seventeenth-century travel writing that chronicles the great Japanese haiku poet's journeys through Japan, interwoven with his poems and his Zen Buddhist vision of eternity in the sensory world around him.)
  

• The Maximus Poems by Charles Olson (A free-verse epic poem that approaches the Massachusetts fishing town of Gloucester through its characters, its history, its ecosystem, and the poet’s inspired personal and mythical vision as well. It marked a new freer direction in American poetry. And strangely, it seemed to bring my own paternal ancestral history to life in me, though I haven’t lived in Massachusetts since I was three years old.) 

• The Iliad by Homer, both Robert Fagles' and Stephen Mitchell's translations  (The greatest epic poem ever written on war. My favorite part is always the way the gods and goddesses are characters as real as the humans.) 

Non-fiction

• The Goncourt Journals (1851-1870) (Two brothers, Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, wrote down everything that happened in their literary and social circles during mid-nineteenth century life in Paris. Casual mention of conversations with Flaubert and Turgenieff spice it up. I loved reading in George Painter’s biography about Proust’s self-pity after he read these journals. Why didn’t he know that many interesting people? And then it dawned on him that he did. Proust spent the rest of his life writing about them.)    

• Robert Duncan, The H. D. Book (This is a strange, visionary book, part apprenticeship to his beloved poet idol, Hilda Doolittle, part visionary and poetic musing as befits a book about this great visionary poet.)

• Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer (The best writing I know about religious fundamentalism and its intrinsic domination of women, carried right to its ultimate end in the murder of the most clear-thinking, "disobedient" woman, the brother of these two Mormon brothers, and her baby.)

• Eels by James Prosek (An elegant book about the biology and mythology of this strange fish, from New Zealand to the Sargasso Sea, illustrated with beautiful etchings by the author. Most fascinating are the Maori legends about eels as guardians and monster-seducers.)

Street art by Fred Le Chevalier

Biography & Autobiography

• Marcel Proust A Biography by George D. Painter (A bookseller at Village Voice Bookshop (sob) lent me his copy. I marked it up with so many colored flags that I had to order a copy for myself, and transfer all the markers in order to have all these treasured facts close at hand.)

• The Pillow Book by Sei Shōnagon (One of the greatest works of Japanese literature, Shōnagon weaves short tales, longer ones, lists, and poems about her life as a gentlewoman in the 10th century Court of Empress Teishi in Heian-kyō (present-day Kyoto). Fascinating for the way poetry, wit and okashi (that which delights) are a part of every aspect of life, and for the exquisite attention to sensory beauty, especially the clothes of both women and men.)

Comments

[Stuart Balcomb]

Every so often I will stumble onto (or into, as falling unexpectedly into the deep sea and being swept away) a book that turns my world upside down by its absurdity, cleverness, and strange appeal. One such book is "The Yiddish Policemen's Union" by Michael Chabon. From Wiki: "The novel is a detective story set in an alternative history version of the present day, based on the premise that during World War II, a temporary settlement for Jewish refugees was established in Sitka, Alaska, in 1941, and that the fledgling State of Israel was destroyed in 1948. The novel is set in Sitka, which it depicts as a large, Yiddish-speaking metropolis."

The book ended, to my chagrin, but all books must end somewhere, so I assuaged my grief by immersing myself, again, in another Chabon book called "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay"—another total romp.

A completely different little gem on my shelf is Alain de Botton's "The Art of Travel," a culturally rich tour of disparate locales such as Barbados, Sinai, Amsterdam, and Madrid, using as his guide the works of Baudelaire, Edward Hopper, Flaubert, Humboldt, Edmund Burke, Job, and Degas, to name a few.

Oh, and I can't leave out Huston Smith's newest, "And Live Rejoicing."
Or anything by Phil Cousineau.

[Kaaren Kitchell & Richard Beban]

Hi Stuart,

That is quite an alternative story! It would have changed history in the Middle East, wouldn't it. I've loved other books by Michael Chabon, but am having trouble getting into "Telegraph Avenue."

Alain de Botton's book, "How Proust Can Change Your Life" is magnificent. I will certainly read "The Art of Travel." Any tour guided by Baudelaire or Flaubert--or Alain de Botton--is one I'd be happy to take.

And I so agree with you about the work of Huston Smith and Phil Cousineau. Would have mentioned them both but I didn't read any of their books this year.

Love,

Kaaren (& Richard)

[Bruce Moody]

Dear K & R,

What a good Christmas present!

Richard, I am astonished and befuddled by your pictures and how come and where you ever found them. Don't tell me. I prefer befuddlement to facts in certain quarters.

Kaaren, thanks for your list. A book lover is what you truly are, as am I, as is John Waters whose hilarious Role Models has in it a list of five favorite books, all of them outrageous, I am sure, and a chapter on Roommates, by which he means the paintings on his walls. It is amazing to me how Waters knows every demolition by heart, but is really also quite innocent.

As to your fascinating list, which I shall crib, I see the Junot Diáz book, which I just returned to the library. I read all three books of him this year in a row.

I am also inspired to make a book list of my own for my friends. Also a list of 10 films on moviemoody.com.

You're such good ones.

Lova ya,

Bruce

[dawna]

Dear Kaaren & Richard,

Love this list. Yes, I, too, found The Blue Fox enchanting. Lovely writing and a wonderful and strange fable. (And, of course, Swann's Way is extraordinary...) Looking forward to reading the Junot Diaz, too.

I'm currently reading - and loving - a book I was not even aware of a month ago (recommended to me by Joan Dempsey for which I am grateful): Dancer by Colum McCann. It's a fictionalized biography of Rudolph Nureyev which is utterly beautiful and brilliant. It's a kaleidoscopic narrative with a wide range of points of view and place and time, a richly textured portrait of an incredibly complex and driven artist who was always searching for perfection. McCann's prose is evocative and often breathtaking. Definitely worth a read!

xo,
dawna

[Kaaren Kitchell & Richard Beban]

Hi, Bruce:

Thank you. I shan't unbefuddle you, merely say that it's all Paris street art, gathered at random in long walks. Such an alive metropolis, with such ephemeral art. Sometimes what you shoot on one day is gone the next, so that forces longer walks, and repetition. I think it's what's called a healthy addiction.

While it's fun to find a clean, pristine image by an artist like Fred Le Chevalier or Miss-Tic, my favorites tend to be the ones like the Proust in this journal, which was posted atop somebody else's works, then got the corner scraped off, and another handbill taped over the top left edge, and the piece became a collective collage--a form which my art history book says Picasso and Braque invented right here.

The more I shoot, the more I want to learn about art, so I read, and Kaaren and I go to the variety of museums we have available here. Paris play, the best kind of learning.

Hugs,

--Richard (I'm sure Kaaren will have a comment on the books.)

[Kaaren Kitchell & Richard Beban]

Dear Dawna,

I remember our Blue Fox adventure, going to Village Voice in Paris the last day they were open, and both of us buying Blue Fox. I don't think either of us had heard of Sjon before, but what a discovery!

Last year, Varda Ducovny recommended I read Colum McCann's book Let the Wide World Spin. And last year was the year I devoured every book I could find by McCann. I love his novels, but my favorite one was the biography of Nureyev. It is one of the best told biographies ever written. Just astonishing in every way---the writing, the dance and the outrageous and fabulous life.

Much love,

Kaaren (& Richard)

[Kaaren Kitchell & Richard Beban]

Bruce!

Love of books--one of the many things we have in common. And I like John Waters' name for his paintings. With books and paintings, one is never alone.

Dawna just recommended "Dancer," Colum McCann's biography of Nureyev, which reads like fiction. That is one book I know you'd love.

And I hope you'll send me your book list. Or post it here!

Thank you and much love,

Kaaren (& Richard)

[Joan Dempsey]

Wonderful list, thank you! And Kaaren, I'm so glad you'll finally read James Baldwin and love that it's "Giovanni's Room" that's top of your list. I also HIGHLY recommend you read his brilliant and moving short story, "Sonny's Blues," which is in my mind his fictional masterpiece, hands down. It's in a collection that's also well worth reading, "Going to Meet the Man."

Dancer by Colum McCann, yes!! As Dawna says, I just read this, while I was in Warsaw, and it quickly rose to my top ten all time favorites list. Brilliant, captivating, language and attention to detail astonishingly perfect.

My own list from 2012 can be found here: http://www.literaryliving.com/book-recommendations/.

Happy Christmas reading, everyone!

[Lorna Cunkle]

Dear Paris Play,

I agree with Joan Dempsey (saw her list) that Zeitoun is a shockingly good book. And I'm a big fan of Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Klay (liked it much more than The Yiddish Policemen's Union).

And speaking of Michael Chabon, the movie Wonder Boys, based on a Chabon book, is really good, too; it even includes some new songs Bob Dylan wrote and sang just for this movie. And speaking of Bob Dylan, this year I read and enjoyed his Chronicles (autobiography). All that said, the absolutely best books I read this year were Bel Canto by Ann Patchett and The Gift of Rain by Tan Twan Eng.

Thanks, Kaaren and Richard, for the ongoing Paris Play. It's nice to connect with fellow book & photography lovers.

from Lorna Cunkle, Sierra Foothills Play

[Kaaren Kitchell & Richard Beban]

Hi Joan,

Thank you! I had to order "Giovanni's Room," and I'll look up the short story, "Sonny's Blues."

"Dancer" was one of my favorite books of last year, might be the best fictional biography I've ever read.

And I cannot open your list of books. I'll ask you about this in e-mail.

Happy reading and much love,

Kaaren (& Richard)

[Kaaren Kitchell & Richard Beban]

Hi Lorna,

Great to hear from you. We book and visual art lovers are a tribe of sorts, aren't we.

We loved Chronicles, too, and are noting all your book suggestions, especially The Gift of Rain.

Good to stay in touch.

Love,

Kaaren (& Richard)

[Kaaren Kitchell & Richard Beban]

Hi Joan,

I just managed to open your link, and am thrilled to find that nine of these books are ones I haven't read. The only one I've read is "Olive Kitteridge," and I must confess, I'm the only person I know who didn't like the book. I loved its structure, but found the central character just plain irritating, and couldn't get beyond that.

However, since our taste in books is usually similar, I'm going to add your picks to my book list, beginning with "Zeitoun" and "Room, A Novel." And I have loved other books by Brad Kessler, so "Goat Song," too.

Thank you and love,

Kaaren (& Richard)