Recommended Reading: Stir, by Jessica Fechtor

June 23, 2015June 22, 2015 / Carolyn O / 7 Comments

One of the pleasures of reading, the truism goes, is the pleasure of recognition. We see in characters or settings or allusions or experiences something we know, which opens up into a whole host of secondary associations. And this is in addition to the delights of reading, in the first place, the text on the page, which the author has written without knowing just what kinds of associations it will call up in readers.

This brings me to Jessica Fechtor’s moving memoir, Stir: My Broken Brain and the Meals That Brought Me Home*, which is out today, and which was so peppered with moments of recognition for me that I kept nodding in appreciation (more on this in a little while).

When she was twenty-eight, Ms. Fechtor’s calm, happy life veered quite suddenly off course. On a run one morning, an aneurysm in her brain burst, and suddenly the Harvard graduate student found herself close to death. Over the next few months, she endured multiple surgeries and infections (which left her with a facial deformity), lost the sight in one eye, and found she couldn’t taste anymore. Her plans to start a family with her husband were put on hold, as was her dissertation.

This is one of the best narratives of illness (and recovery) that I’ve ever read, in part because Ms. Fechtor gives readers not just the story of her illness, but of her life before it; a bit about her childhood, more about her time in college, and most of all about the charming love story she shares with Eli, her husband. Her family and friends make this book come alive, their support for Ms. Fechtor a testament not only to their loyalty and steadfastness, but to the love she inspires in them.

As a narrator, she’s a careful, unflinching examiner of both joy and pain, and her own thinking:

I was furious with myself […] for ever thinking that health was something I could count on. I’d always had excellent luck and my genes were enviable. No broken bones, maybe one cold a year, great-grandmothers and great-great aunts who lived into their nineties. I took care of myself. I ate oatmeal and kale. I flossed. I followed the rules that were supposed to keep me safe.

Don’t get me wrong–I’d imagined illness. Critical, devastating, out-of-nowhere illness. I was right there in the imagined hospital rooms of my worst nightmares, alongside Eli or a parent or a friend. Only I was never the one in bed. I was the big-hearted helper, the devoted cheerleader. I brought the cookies. (148)

When it turns out that she’s the patient in the bed, it was eating and cooking that helped Ms. Fechtor pave a way forward from the terrifying experience. Food and illness are always linked, of course; food helps us get well, or signals that we’re well, or tells someone we wish them well (who hasn’t delivered a casserole?). In Stir, Ms. Fechtor shares more than twenty-five recipes that have been meaningful to her, from a simple tomato soup, to her mother-in-law’s cholent and kugel, to pan-roasted salmon and baked apricots with cardamom pistachios. I loved the recipe-writing here: there’s enough backstory to give a sense of connection to the recipe’s origins, and enough detail to be precise and helpful, but they’re never overwrought.

And you know the recipes are going to be good, because Ms. Fechtor is the force behind the blog Sweet Amandine, which she started during her recovery as a distraction from all the trappings of illness (as she points out, “Being sick is like walking around with a microscope strapped to your face at all times with your own body squished beneath the slide” [187].). It’s a gorgeous blog (this is coming from someone who used to be a food blogger), and I highly recommend it, unless you’re hungry and lacking the prospect of a good meal in the near future.

The recipes are part of the recognition I was talking about at the beginning of this review; there’s a cookie recipe from the Hi-Rise Bread Company in Cambridge (one town over from where I live), a recipe for a gorgeous golden-clear chicken broth that reminds me of the matzoh ball soup my best friend’s mother makes (Hi, Mrs. Klein!), and—wait for it—Corbo’s cassata cake.

Cleveland readers know what I’m talking about: an unbelievably decadent white cake with layers of custard, strawberries, and whipped cream. It’s a cake that has bittersweet associations for me, but I’d still never turn down a slice.

The cake makes an appearance in the book because Ms. Fechtor grew up in Cleveland; I did too, as you’ve probably gathered. And our graduate student years overlapped in adjacent towns, so all the Boston landmarks, culinary and otherwise, resonated with me, as did quite a few other details. And her meditations on what it’s like to be sick struck a nerve for me as well.

I loved Stir for all those pings of recognition, for the recipes, for Ms. Fechtor’s charming, serious, and thoughtful voice. And I’m grateful to have read it because she articulated something I’ve wanted and failed to say for years. Predictably, she started hearing “everything happens for a reason” from well-meaning people trying to offer solace. But, she writes,

I don’t see it that way at all. To me, only the first part is clear: Everything happens. Then other things happen, and other things, still. Out of each of these moments, we make something. Any number of somethings, in fact.

What comes of our own actions becomes the “reason.” It is no predestined thing. We may arrive where we are by way of a specific path—we can take just one at a time—but it’s never the only one that could have led to our destination. Nor does a single event, even a string of them, point decisively to a single landing spot. There are infinite possible versions of our lives. Meaning is not what happens, but what we do with what happens when it does. (106)

Stir is a wonderful book, one that I highly recommend. One day, almost certainly, we’ll all find ourselves as the patient in the bed, or the one bringing the cookies. This book will help either way.

*I received a copy of this book from the publisher for review consideration, which did not affect the content of my review.

“Then he unlocked the back door / and stepped out into the garden”: Paula Meehan’s “My Father Perceived as a Vision of St Francis”

June 18, 2015June 14, 2015 / Carolyn O / 8 Comments

Photo courtesy Breno Machado via Unsplash

A few weeks ago, I was reading about contemporary Irish poetry (living life in the fast lane, as always), and I learned a little bit about Paula Meehan, named the Ireland Professor of Poetry in 2013. The Irish Times had a feature about her this winter, in which Ciaran Carty wrote,

“It’s more than 40 years, and nine books, since Meehan emerged from childhood in the inner city Dublin tenements to give voice to the disenfranchised everywhere, less in anger than with compassion and an intuitive understanding that, through verse, imbued their lives and memories with mythic dignity.”

Sounds pretty good to me.

Professor Meehan’s poems are a little tricky to find–she doesn’t have an entry at The Poetry Foundation, which is my go-to poetry site, but you can read “Ashes” at Poets.org. The poem that really caught my eye was this one: “My Father Perceived as a Vision of St Francis,” over at The Poetry Project, which is a site devoted to Irish poetry. It’s a lovely poem, anchored in everyday detail, but transcendent all the same.

Off the Reading Path: The Library at Mount Char, by Scott Hawkins

June 16, 2015June 14, 2015 / Carolyn O / 11 Comments

The title sounds promising: The Library at Mount Char*. I’m bookish; naturally I love libraries. This book should be right about my alley. Right? photo (50)

Well, no—but somehow Scott Hawkins’s debut was pretty fun reading.

The protagonist’s name is Carolyn, which is my name. It’s not a particularly unusual name—I’ve met a half dozen other Carolyns in the last thirty years—but it’s not Jessica or Emma or Katie, names I run across in books pretty frequently, nor is it a strange enough name that authors often choose it to set their characters apart. What I’m trying to say is that it is really weird to keep reading your own name when not accustomed to doing so, especially when the book’s first sentence is: “Carolyn, blood-drenched and barefoot, walked alone down the two-lane stretch of blacktop that the Americans called Highway 78.”

See? Oh, and don’t worry: it gets worse for Carolyn. Much worse.

The Library at Mount Char is a book that’s way, way out of my reading comfort zone (it might be in Rory’s, for those of you, like me, who love being vicariously scared through Fourth Street Review): it’s very violent, and the genre is a cross between horror and contemporary urban fantasy, with quite a bit of Jacobean revenge tragedy thrown in. It’s a bit like Neil Gaiman’s American Gods (which I loved), I suppose. Maybe that’s why I simply could not stop reading it.

It’s disturbing and horrifying, sure, but it takes place in a world that is not ours, which makes the violence almost theatrical. Think Titus Andronicus. It is also a deeply bizarre book; it went in directions I certainly didn’t anticipate, and while I had one major plot point figured out in the beginning of the novel, it’s a testament to Mr. Hawkins’s power of invention that the book managed to surprise me in almost every chapter.

By now you’re probably wondering what this deeply bizarre, inventive, and violent book is about. It’s tricky to give you a plot without giving too much away, but here goes: Carolyn is a very special kind of librarian, one of twelve people taken in as children by Father after all their parents died. Each of them is an expert in his or her own (strange) catalogue, but Father is master of them all, and his power is unmatchable: he can bend the rules of time and space, and to disobey him is to suffer.

When the book opens, Father is missing, and the library that contains his secrets and his power is up for grabs. Carolyn wants in—very badly.

The Library at Mount Char is not for the faint of heart, but if you want a wild ride, some serious thinking about family, nature versus nurture, cruelty, and love, you might want to give this book a try. I didn’t love all of it—quite a bit is downright unpleasant, and I have some issues with the ending, which I would love to talk about with somebody—but I kept turning pages in surprise.

What’s the last book that took you out of your reading comfort zone?

*I received a copy of this book from the publisher for review consideration, which did not affect the content of my review

Visiting the South: Gwendolyn Knapp’s After a While You Just Get Used to It: A Tale of Family Clutter

June 15, 2015June 14, 2015 / Carolyn O / 5 Comments

No offense intended toward its residents (the vast majority of those I’ve met have been delightful), but as a general rule*, but I visit the South (meaning here the deep South, east of Texas) only in books or recipes, leaving the living there to souls braver and sturdier than I. I dislike heat, humidity, large flying insects, large crawling insects, the prospect of encountering reptiles capable of swallowing me or my limbs whole, swamps, Confederate flags, and okra.

However, I do like tales of swamp adventurers, almost anything fried, stories about terrifying fauna and rare flora, regional idioms, and the idea of warm weather in the winter.

This is why reading about the South is so enjoyable: all of the interest, none of the sweat. And I tend to read nonfiction about the region: Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, The Orchid Thief (original, I know). And now After a While You Just Get Used to It: A Tale of Family Clutter** by Gwendolyn Knapp. Strictly speaking, this memoir isn’t about Florida, where Ms. Knapp grew up, or New Orleans, where she now lives and works, but her writing is so evocative of place that I could practically feel the boggy heat blowing through the window.

Ms. Knapp’s world is populated by colorful characters, many of them her own family members, including her mother, Margie, who can’t stop accumulating stuff; her Aunt Susie, an addict with a good-for-nothing boyfriend; and her sister Molly, who can’t wait to escape their house. There is all sorts of drama of the holiday, funeral, dating, and interstate-move variety, framed in Ms. Knapp’s observant and wry voice.

The book is a series of chronologically ordered vignettes, often jumping quite a few years in time, which makes for easily digestible, fast-paced reading, if an incomplete picture of the author’s life. After a While You Just Get Used to It, as its title suggests, tends toward the matter-of-fact acceptance of the way things are, even if the way things are is a pretty horrible state of affairs. It’s Southern Gothic as life-writing, essentially.

While mostly I cringed for Gwendolyn as she deals with her family, her own health problems, difficult jobs, and a series of unfortunate boyfriends, I also laughed. I’m glad Ms. Knapp is inviting readers to visit her world.

*I have made exceptions for one beach, several airports, and one wedding (worth it, J & P!)

** I received a copy of this book from the publisher for review consideration, which did not affect the content of my review.

“a way to attain a life without boundaries”: Juan Felipe Herrera’s “Let Me Tell You What a Poem Brings”

June 11, 2015June 11, 2015 / Carolyn O / 4 Comments

Photo courtesy Modestas Urbonas via Unsplash.

The new Poet Laureate of the United States has just been announced! Juan Felipe Herrera will take up the post in September, the first Chicano poet to do so. He is also the former poet laureate of California. You can read more about him in this Los Angeles Times piece and in this Poetry Foundation profile.

In honor of Mr. Herrera, this week’s poem is “Let Me Tell You What a Poem Brings.” Poetry on poetry can be a bit fussy and pretentious, but here the poem takes readers on a sort of breathless tour, and we end up someplace completely different from where we started, a place where we are “thirsty” but where we are drawn into “alarming waters” that nonetheless invite us to “bathe” and “play.” It’s an inventive, exciting poem that conjures up the best of what poetry can do.

A Tale of Two Cookbooks

June 9, 2015June 8, 2015 / Carolyn O / 15 Comments

Before I was a book blogger, I was a food blogger.

It’s true. Mr. O and I ran a humble blog (not modesty—the photography was mostly mine, which is to say, poor) about our cookery for a couple of years, which we both loved, but eventually fell by the wayside (baby, digestive disease, the usual).

Point is, I love food, so I hope you’ll indulge a turn from the literary and toward the culinary this week. I read cookbooks for fun, and the only thing I truly miss about having cable is the cooking shows. So when Susan Herrmann Loomis’s In a French Kitchen: Tales and Traditions of Everyday Home Cooking in France* arrived, I was ready to sink my teeth into it.

It’s a cheerful book about traditional French home cooking, accompanied by recipes that fit in with the theme of each chapter, like salad, cheese, grandmotherly cooking, pantry staples, even leftovers. The food sounds absolutely mouthwatering, but what’s even more fun to read about are the gustatory and cooking habits of Ms. Loomis’s friends and acquaintances in her adopted town. The French eat quite a lot of sugar, it turns out—which you wouldn’t think—and are very particular about cheeses, which of course you would think. And Sunday lunches last six hours, which sounds heavenly.

In a French Kitchen is not to be taken as prescriptive, I think; most of us do not have access to the kinds of gardens, markets, boulangeries, and state-funded daycare that make possible the kind of cooking Ms. Loomis describes.

In some ways, the book feels a little retro; Ms. Loomis notes approvingly how French women look great all the time, wearing high heels while they stir at the stove, while also noting, light as you please, that it’s the rare French man who cooks at home. Like I said, retro, and honestly a little grating when you factor in that Ms. Loomis never notes the social structures in France that (a) make it possible for people (read: women, mothers) to cook frequently and (b) make it seem like no problem that men aren’t expected to cook.

In the end, though, In a French Kitchen is a book that makes you dream about retiring to France, eating your way through every recipe, and making every lunch a French Sunday lunch.

My other cookbook reading of late has been Pati’s Mexican Table: The Secrets of Real Mexican Home Cooking, by Pati Jinich. Ms. Jinich has a cooking show on PBS of the same name, which I’ve loved watching; her recipes look intoxicatingly good and Ms. Jinich is friendly, welcoming presenter. I’ve had my eye on the cookbook for months, and I happened to find a copy of it on sale at Sherman’s Books in Portland, Maine, much to my delight.

It’s a great read, because there’s so much to learn about Mexican culture and food (Ms. Jinich’s grandmother was a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps, who combined her own food traditions with Mexico’s), and because Ms. Jinich provides plenty of tips about using ingredients that might be unfamiliar, like how to char poblanos or how to make tamarind syrup. I’ve made three recipes from the book and they’ve all been exquisite, requiring not even an extra pinch of salt. I’ve never had so much fun with a food processor. Try the salsa verde, and you’ll be looking in your local bookshop for Pati’s Mexican Table too.

*I received a copy of this book from the publisher for review consideration, which did not affect the content of my review.

“painted like a fresh prow / stained among the salt weeds”: H.D.’s “Sea Iris”

June 4, 2015May 31, 2015 / Carolyn O / 1 Comment

From our landlady’s collection, which is also pretty great.

One of the many great things about our little corner of neighborhood is the parade of gorgeous, multi-hued irises that line our neighbors’ walkway. The blooms are huge, big enough for me to see the splotches of color from my kitchen window, and they always make me happy. Here’s H.D.‘s imagist poem called “Sea Iris,” which I love.

SEA IRIS

Weed, moss-weed,
root tangled in sand,
sea-iris, brittle flower,
one petal like a shell
is broken,
and you print a shadow
like a thin twig.
Fortunate one,
scented and stinging,
rigid myrrh-bud,
camphor-flower,
sweet and salt—you are wind
in our nostrils.

Do the murex-fishers
drench you as they pass?
Do your roots drag up colour
from the sand?
Have they slipped gold under you—
rivets of gold?
Band of iris-flowers
above the waves,
you are painted blue,
painted like a fresh prow
stained among the salt weeds.

You can read more from H.D.’s collection Sea Garden at Project Gutenberg, here.

Colorado Reading

June 2, 2015June 1, 2015 / Carolyn O / 15 Comments

I don’t know about you, but I find I hardly ever get as much reading done on vacation as I think I will. And that’s okay; usually it means there’s been sightseeing and visiting and talking late at night and eating and museum-going aplenty.

As I mentioned not too long ago, recently we visited family and friends in Denver, which was delightful. I brought along War of the Encyclopaedists, which I started and finished on the trip, as well as Annie Proulx’s Close Range: Wyoming Stories. I figured something with a Western vibe that I could read in short chunks would be a good choice, and it was, if grimmer than expected. Close Range includes Brokeback Mountain, the basis of the movie of the same name, and all things considered it’s one of the brighter stories in the collection. Close Range is visceral reading—Ms. Proulx has an extraordinary gift for rendering place, and her characters are both strange and real.

That’s two books, and extraordinary restraint in book-packing on my part, I must say. There’s a reason for that: I had a list of about a dozen bookstores I wanted to visit in Denver, Colorado Springs, and Boulder, but I only made it to two (guess I’ll just have to go back, darn).

First up was the Tattered Cover, Denver’s largest and most famous independent bookstore. It has several outposts, and I visited the store on Colfax, where I picked up Gregory Pardlo‘s Pulitzer-Prize winning Digest. I read it over the next few days and finished it on the plane, and I highly recommend it. The poems are about origins and identity, fatherhood and what it means to be American. They’re very, very good, and packed with intellectual energy; I want to re-read them all again.

Next I went to one of my uncle’s favorite bookstores, Colorado’s Used Bookstore in Englewood. It’s an unassuming store, with a huge selection of genre paperbacks, an eclectic poetry section, and a huge set of back rooms for nonfiction and trade paperbacks. The woman I met, who I believe owns the store, was very friendly and helpful, and pointed out that they sell books online, including hard-to-find books.

At Colorado’s Used Bookstore I found Ghost Ship by Mary Kinzie and On the Bus with Rosa Parks, by Rita Dove (both poetry), Moral Disorder (a collection of Margaret Atwood stories), Joseph Boyden’s Through Black Spruce (I loved The Orenda and Three-day Road) and Louise Erdrich’s Tracks (still can’t stop thinking about The Round House). I can’t wait to dive into these.

Next time in Colorado, I’ll be trying for those other ten bookstores, and I’d like to look up some Colorado writers before I go, to find their work in its native habitat.

And what about you, Dear Readers? Do you race through books on vacation, or pack more than you can read?

“When lo! a sudden glory!”: Oscar Wilde’s “Vita Nuova”

May 28, 2015May 24, 2015 / Carolyn O / 2 Comments

This weekend I was thrilled to cheer the happy news out of Ireland, and while I was going to write about a different poem this week, I think a little Oscar Wilde is called for here, don’t you?

VITA NUOVA

I stood by the unvintageable sea
Till the wet waves drenched face and hair with spray;
The long red fires of the dying day
Burned in the west; the wind piped drearily;
And to the land the clamorous gulls did flee:
‘Alas!’ I cried, ‘my life is full of pain,
And who can garner fruit or golden grain
From these waste fields which travail ceaselessly!’
My nets gaped wide with many a break and flaw,
Nathless I threw them as my final cast
Into the sea, and waited for the end.
When lo! a sudden glory! and I saw
From the black waters of my tortured past
The argent splendour of white limbs ascend!

(from the 1881 poems)

Rosemary and Reading Glasses

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