Rumors of Delirium

I’m going to Sicily for a week to see championship fencing. In my carry-on bag are the following titles:

• Peter Robb: Midnight in Sicily
• Leonard Sciascia: The Day of the Owl
• Giuseppe Di Lampedusa: The Leopard

The Robb title is nonfiction, about the history of the Mafia on the island, literature and art as well. I read a similar book of his on Brazil (A Death in Brazil), which was riveting. Sciascia is a heralded crime novelist, also dealing with the Mafia. For light reading, I’m packing Lampedusa’s classic, The Leopard, about Sicilian life and aristocracy during the Risorgimento, the unification of Italy during the mid-nineteenth century.

In honor of my daughter and Mina’s daughter working and studying in India, the book club has decided to read Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire by Alex Von Tunzelmann.

It helps that I’ve already read it*, so I can whole-heartedly recommend this vivid history of end of the British Raj and the founding the modern states of Pakistan and India. It’s a panoramic portrait of the tricky politics of religion, caste, anti-colonialism, and British attitudes toward imperialism.

Juiciest — and what sold my picky fellow readers — is the sex. Namely, the romantic triangle featuring the last Viceroy of India, Dickie Mountbattan, who presided over the partition and the British exit, his glamorous wife, Edwina, and her passionate love affair with the handsome, lonely, and brilliant Nehru, India’s first prime minister.

Gandhi and Jinnah, the fiery Muslim who insisted on a separate state, the conflicts and violence among Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs, and the British incompetence and indifference that led to horrific violence as the British left are described with cinematic flair.

It’s a great read, and should produce lively discussion.

*I prepared the index

One of the nicest experiences during my travels in Ireland was a rainy day. After ten days of nonstop hiking, biking, and sightseeing, it was delicious to have an excuse to cuddle up with a good book and lose myself in someone else’s adventures instead of having to sweat them out on my own.

While Paul went searching for a prehistoric burial mound in the downpour, I curled up in bed and allowed myself to be swept away by Dickens’s Dombey and Son. Every so often, I paused to stare at the gray skies, the sheets of rain blurring the picture windows, the soft green pastures and rocky hills. What a luxury!

The plot unfolds slowly, but once it starts chugging, it is hard to put down this long novel. While the raindrops pattered and splashed, I wandered through the mean, labyrinthine streets of nineteenth-century London with its teeming crowds, unscrupulous villains, and wizened eccentrics. The novel relates the trials and tribulations of Florence, the neglected daughter of the proud and wealthy Dombey, who is furious because a daughter is unable in his eyes to carry on the name of his firm–Dombey and Son. When Florence’s mother dies giving birth to the much desired son, poor Florence must fend for herself in a cold, unloving household.

A reader does so want her to survive the many cruel twists in the plot. These include a kidnapping by the evil “good Mrs. Brown,” the illness of Florence’s beloved but frail little brother, her father’s loveless marriage to a haughty but beautiful stepmother, and the treachery of her father’s assistant, a scheming, catlike man, who contrives to divest her of her true love, Walter, by sending him off to the Barbados on behalf of the firm, where he is lost at sea.

Here’s a taste of Dickens’s description of the effect of the railroad on the layout of the town and people’s lives. The Charles Dickens Page, where I found this excerpt, is a wonderful resource.

The first shock of a great earthquake had, just at that period, rent the whole neighbourhood to its centre. Traces of its course were visible on every side. Houses were knocked down; streets broken through and stopped; deep pits and trenches dug in the ground; enormous heaps of earth and clay thrown up; buildings that were undermined and shaking, propped by great beams of wood. Here, a chaos of carts, overthrown and jumbled together, lay topsy-turvy at the bottom of a steep unnatural hill; there, confused treasures of iron soaked and rusted in something that had accidentally become a pond. Everywhere were bridges that led nowhere; (more…)

My fiction group met last week for some chat on our summer travels, critiquing our manuscripts, and sharing the good, the bad, and the ugly about careers and writing.

We got to talking about my trip to Ireland and Finland, Bruce’s upcoming trip to Italy, and Dina’s cruise to Alaska, where she traveled close to a glacier which had big chunks falling in a cascade. Disturbing, first-hand evidence of global warming.

Among the good writing news is that Jeannine’s new book, Anne Hutchinson’s Way, just out from FSG will be named one of the”Top Ten Religion Books for Youth” in the October 1, 2007, issue of Booklist. Plus a great review from Kirkus, which calls it a “complex story of faith and freedom with clarity and strength.”

Way to go Jeannine!

In the early 1980s Ritva, newly arrived from Finland where she had trained as a pharmacist, appeared at my pottery studio in New York. She was looking for a place to pursue her lifelong dream of becoming a ceramic artist. One of my first students, she was a testament to the Chinese proverb: Teachers open the door, but you must enter by yourself. As soon as I opened the door, she was off and running…and quickly left me in the dust.

After graduating from student to apprentice to studio manager while I took time out with my newborn daughter, she moved to Houston, Texas. There, she received her MFA in ceramics and made a name for herself as an artist.

Then, I left New York and she returned to Finland, and for a decade we lost track of each other.

Last March, as I was planning a summer vacation in Ireland, she phoned–out of the blue–and invited me to visit her in Lappeenranta, where she has a studio and a lovely though tiny apartment.

Here are some photos I took of our reunion.

A feast…on Ritva’s handmade ware

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