Summer Books
By Nancy Weber
Books are portable. We love saying this over and over, especially up against those who glue themselves to wingspan-wide TV screens. But portability doesn’t mean that reading places are fungible. Where one chooses to read a certain book materially affects one experience of the words, and of course the converse is true.
Cartoonist Drew Dernavich puts it into a dozen words in the New Yorker. Convict to his mother on the other side of the glass: “I don’t need good beach reading, Ma. I need good prison reading.”
Back in 1975 I was seized by the improbable notion that I might want to make a life in Los Angeles. There was a guy, and I was also swept away by the daily prevalence of raspberries. But it happened that I was on a Dorothy Sayers kick that spring; poolside at the Chateau Marmont, I started Gaudy Night. Five days later I was on a plane headed back for New York.
It wasn’t just that the expensive hotel fantasy came to an end. Gaudy Night, with its casual literacy, the temperate cadences, the civility and the civilized angst -- a crisp reminder of what I wanted in life and how little likely I was to find it in Southern California.
My lovely friend Maria Teresa Chermanne, the Belgium-born manager of the Sonia Rykiel boutique on Madison Avenue, vividly remembers the importance of her compatriot Georges Simenon’s Trois Chambres a Manhattan, which she read in the original French 14 years ago when moving to New York. (New York Review Books Classics has reissued it as Three Bedrooms in Manhattan with an introduction by Joyce Carol Oates.) Maria Teresa says that with his eye for telling details and his sympathetic approach to human foibles, Simenon greatly eased the way for her, made the city feel less foreign. On the other hand, Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy, with its chilly, neurotic prose, almost scared her off of Gotham. Why, she wonders, do Europeans revere Auster? (I wonder, too.)
Her American-born husband, David Mosier, at work on his own thriller, believes that sometimes only an outsider can really see a place and its people. “We see cops on the street and we think: cops. Simenon sees New York cops” – thus conveying the particularities in a way a native writer cannot do. David remembers starting Innocents Abroad in preparation for a trip he made to Europe with his mother some decades ago. Mark Twain made him laugh so much, he had to keep passing the book over to this mother, and ended up buying a second copy so they could each have one to savor on their flight. Nothing could better have set them up for a rich experience.
Before I pack my suitcase, I head over to Partners in Crime on Greenwich Avenue, announce my destination, and ask for mysteries set there. Andrea Camilleri for Sicily, Paco Ignacio Taibo II for Mexico, and always hope of a previously unread Bartholomew Gill before going to Ireland. I never leave home without science fiction in my carry-on bag, as well; nothing better for dealing with my fear of flying. (My favorite panacea when turbulence rumbles: Phillip Wylie’s When Worlds Collide, in which humankind’s only hope is for escape via rocket before an unanchored planet crashes into Earth. If that rocket can land safely, so will my Delta flight.
Am I supposed to counsel you about beach reading? I can’t. I don’t understand lying, or even sitting, on beaches. A walk, a quick swim, ice cream, collecting stones, but not reading. No combination of dark glasses, umbrellas, or thatched huts can make the beach book country for me.
But summer does bring the hope of porch reading, or finding a warmly lit common room or tavern in the perfect hotel in the mountains, any mountains. This year, for once, I’ll be reading a travel writer as I travel: Ryszard Kapuscinski, who died last winter, and whose work I first encountered at a stirring Live at the New York Public Library event, where my dear friend the glorious actress Elzbieta Czyzewska read from his work.
Paris Review editor Philip Gourevitch described Kapuscinski that evening as “perpetually disoriented,” which suggests to me that K. writes about what it is like to be human, anywhere. So in Maine I will read The Emperor, about Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, and The Shah of Shahs, about Iran, and I think I will thereby have a richer experience of Maine.
