R.C. Sherriff, The Fortnight in September **** 1/2

When I first unwrapped this Christmas present from Evelyn, its cover design (pastel colors, New Yorker-style drawing, insouciant font) led me to assume it was a contemporary "beach read" featuring a first romance, a mystery, or both. Then I looked closer: the recommendation on the cover comes from Kazuo Ishiguro rather than Reese's Book Club, and the author was born in... 1896! The paperback is a 90th anniversary edition disguised as light contemporary fiction.

The Fortnight in September follows the Stevens family on their annual two-week vacation at the English seaside town of Bognor Regis. It starts on the evening before their departure, with each family member completing their "Marching Orders" to prepare the house, travels with them through the mingled excitement and anxiety of the train journey, and settles in at Mrs Huggett's increasingly rundown boarding house.

It is quite a relaxing read, perfect for when you're on vacation yourself. The story has no real conflict in it, so it doesn't build any narrative tension. Every concern of the characters gets resolved within a few pages. The men of the family display a stereotypically British status anxiety, but it's nothing a nice walk across the downs can't help. The details are dated and/or British –– no electric lighting on the third floor, blazers for strolling the beach, playing cricket in the sand –– but the concerns are universal. Did we remember to leave the scullery window ajar for the cat? Is the better to return on Saturday, leaving a day at home before work, or Sunday, giving an extra day at the beach?

It turns out the cover was not misleading after all: The Fortnight in September is an excellent beach read! As Kazuo Ishiguro said, "The beautiful dignity to be found in everyday living has rarely been captured more delicately."

Bathsheba Demuth, The Floating Coast *** 1/2

The Floating Coast is billed as "an environmental history of the Bering Strait," which means that the author wants to provide a history of the region that transcends the distinctions between human and natural accounts.

 My expectations were disciplined by an education that explained nature's past ––geology, biology, and ecology––separately from human history, from culture, economics, and politics.

Demuth attempts this synthesis by describing all of the actions of living beings in Beringia as transformations, as conversions of energy from one form to another.

The work of plankton is the ... cumulative transformation of light into starchy tissue [that] fills the sea with energy, the calories that sustain over three hundred species of fatty, swarming zooplankton. ... The work of the whale is to turn this diffused energy into hundred-ton bodies.

Most of what is an arctic fox begins as a lemming.

I am impressed by the idea of considering ecology and sociology as a continuum. It provides an interesting perspective on, say, whaling when you think of it as just another link in the chain of energy transfers that started with the sun striking the ocean. Booms and busts occur in the fox fur market due both to fluctuations in the fox population and to changing enthusiasms in New York and London.

An interesting perspective, but too frequently an abstract one. Most chapters start with a vivid description of an animal or human activity, but the telling details are gone by the end of the first paragraph in favor of overly intellectual language. In the end, I felt as if Demuth was using Beringia as a stock character in a Soviet-style drama, where every character stands for an idea rather than an actual person.

Throughout their migration, walruses stir nutrients into the water column, especially nitrogen, that help photosynthetic organisms bloom. ... In the icy summers of the early 1870s, walruses began transforming into something new: money.

I lost enthusiasm for the book somewhere during the section about mining.

Olga Tokarczuk, Primeval and Other Times ***

To carry me over until the American publication of Tokarczuk's "richest, most sweeping and ambitious novel" The Books of Jacob (scheduled for February), I picked up this earlier novel of hers in a very nice edition from Twisted Spoon Press.

Primeval and Other Times takes place in a Polish village from the beginning of the First World War through 1990 or so. It is divided into four- or five-page vignettes from the point of view of one of the inhabitants, often written in a fairy-tale style. Some of the vignettes come from non-human characters, such as the trees, a guardian angel, or God.

Surely some enterprising literature student has written a thesis about the interaction between Catholic imagery (God, guardian angels, human spirits) and animist imagery in this book. The combination provides a full-bodied portrait of Primeval.

In March, when the ground becomes warm, the orchard begins to vibrate and digs its claw-like, underground paws into the earth's flesh. The trees suck the earth like puppies, and their trunks become warmer. 

Even at this early stage in her career, Tokarczuk provides forceful images that shift the reader's perspective. The book remains anchored to everyday life. We never travel outside of the village and see world-changing events from its limited perspective; for example, Genowefa witnesses the Germans rounding up the Jews as she is washing her laundry in the river. 

The book is more successful at creating a meditative mood than at telling a compelling story. Its fragmentary nature causes it to lack narrative momentum. Periodically the language felt awkward –– such as the misplaced modifier in the sentence below –– but I suspect it's an artifact of translation.

In the spring they found the half decomposed body of Bronek Malak in Wodenica, whom everyone thought had gone to America.

Eula Biss, Having and Being Had ***

Like Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, Having and Being Had inspires me more with its form than with its content. The book consists of short (two to five page) essays about the value system we internalize in a modern capitalist society. Most of them are personal essays or anecdotes that illustrate an idea rather than explain or argue for it. For example, Biss and her husband buy a house in a gentrifying neighborhood, and she alludes to her conflicting feelings about it by describing conversations with her neighbors.

The first several essays really grabbed me and got me excited about the possibilities of the format. Unfortunately, Biss wasn't able to sustain the performance. The later parts of the book include more didactic entries, and her insights become more jejune.

Nathaniel Ian Miller, The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven ***

In a college class I attended, Professor Stephen Booth taught us that the task of literary criticism is to explain the ways in which Hamlet is better than a plot summary of Hamlet. I find it difficult to perform this task for The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven because it reads like its own plot summary. The book has all the trappings of an adventure story –– an exotic locale (Svalbard/Spitsbergen in the years from WWI to WWII), colorful characters (Scandinavian miners and trappers), intense incidents (avalanches, bear attacks, wars, murder) –– but dispatches the major events perfunctorily, especially in the first half. The avalanche that disfigures Sven occupies two sentences; the Finnish trapper teaches Sven the skills of his trade whatever they may be; it is eminently unclear how Sven survives alone in the far north. Perhaps the author believes this terseness to be Scandinavian or Hemingway-esque?

I felt the sketchiness most keenly as it applies to Sven's character and his relationship with other characters. We're told, in the early going, that he has a close kinship with his sister Olga, but we don't learn enough about their bond to understand the nature of their falling out or feel the joy of their reconciliation. Sven purports to be something of an intellectual, but we never see him reading. What motivates his years of isolation, since he so clearly values his friends and family?

With one more layer of descriptive detail, The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven could be an excellent study of the nature of human experience, the push and pull between depression and joy and between solitude and sociability. In the words of beginning creative writing teachers: More showing and less telling.

The one descriptive detail that stood out:

The first thing I heard was the wind. A very strange sort of wind to someone who has lived the first part of his life among trees and buildings, since up north there are few impermeable surfaces against which the air can whip and abrade itself. The Arctic wind has more of the sound of someone breathing with his throat entirely open.

A vivid and unexpected insight giving a nice sense of the character's experience of place. More of this please!