Summer Reading: Back to the hills with Ernest Hemingway, to London with Samuel Pepys, the Sudan with John McPhee, and much more.
Raymo, Chet
Chet Raymo Chet Raymo teaches at Stonehill College in Massachusetts and is science columnist for the Boston Globe. His newest book is Natural Prayers (Hungry Mind Press). S ummer is the time when ...
...I have also set aside the newest book from another author who has mastered the language of amazement, the American poet Mary Oliver...
...Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems (Houghton Mifflin, $22,144 pp...
...In short, he is Everyman, struggling with universal problems...
...I intend this summer to read Makine's new novel, Once upon the River Love (Arcade, $24.95,256 pp...
...What we read is relevant to any age...
...In 1987, in the springtime of perestroika, Makine, the boy grown up, left Russia for Paris...
...is a bit of a grab bag of items that have been published elsewhere, but those of us who are addicted to everything Oliver writes appreciate having it brought together every year or so...
...Back in the 1950s even kids in parochial schools were exposed to bits and pieces—mostly accounts of the Great London Fire of 1666 and the plague...
...But occasionally our literary good intentions find a book upon which they can comfortably rest, something with the literary merit of Proust but wrapped in a more digestible August-sized package...
...Such a book is Andrei Makine's autobiographical novel Dreams of My Russian Summers (Scribner, $12, 241 pp...
...By about page 800,1 was having Pepysian dreams, without being altogether certain whether they were his or my own...
...Caught between two languages—French and Russian— the boy imagines a kind of universal language, a "language of amazement," which might capture the longing, the love, the inexpressible ache of memory and desire...
...the indispensable introduction to this most amazed and amazing of American poets...
...The boy's summers on the Russian steppe are richly realized...
...Against this idealized world on the Seine are posited rumors of Lavrenti Beria, the chief of the Soviet secret police, cruising the shabby streets of Moscow, trolling for pretty women who are pulled into his dark limousine, perhaps never to be seen again...
...I wanted to build, in the other way," she writes, "with the teeth of the saw, and the explosions of the hammer, and the little shrieks of the screws winding down into their perfect nests...
...The diary is a portrait of Pepys's age in all of its nuances...
...These tattered documents become a magic carpet that carries the boy's imagination to a dreamlike France of cultural elegance and sensual pleasure...
...The story tells of a young boy growing up in Soviet Siberia with his French-born grandmother, Charlotte Lemonnier...
...seldom has a coming-of-age story been told with such exquisite refinement...
...What we saw then was severely edited, as I discovered this past winter when I plowed through the diary, edited and abridged by Latham, with almost ten years' worth of entries and what seemed even in abridgment a zillion words...
...I haven't been able to resist dipping into the first essay, which recounts Oliver's encounters with carpentry...
...That last phase captures the reason we love Mary Oliver—her ability to be astonished by the commonplace...
...He might move directly from an audience with the king at Whitehall Palace to a saucy performance by Nell Gwyn at the Duke's theater, from a demonstration at the Royal Society of one of the first blood transfusions to the spectacle of a public execution at Charing Cross...
...She regales him with tales of late-nineteenth-century Paris, and introduces him to the literary heritage of Balzac, Flaubert, Baudelaire, and Maupassant...
...Pepys is a man torn between marital fidelity and promiscuity, public integrity and private greed, religious tolerance and self-righteous faith, science and superstition, duty and pleasure...
...In her bedroom is a suitcase filled with papers—letters, newspaper clippings, photographs...
...Pepys was a man about town who hobnobbed with royalty, nobility, intellectuals, artists, actors and actresses, military men, clergymen and bishops, as well as tarts, boatmen, hackney drivers, and tavern keepers...
...S ummer is the time when we promise once again to read Proust's Remembrance of Things Past...
...The fire and the plague are there, but what makes the diary Commonweal 2 3 June 18,1999 such compelling reading is its combination of private and public history...
...If in spite of everything you are still resolved to embark upon a summer's reading of Proustian scale, I recommend Robert Latham's The Shorter Pepys (University of California Press, $50,1,152 pp...
...As I read her newest book I will also have at my side my well-thumbed New and Selected Poems (Beacon Press, $16, 272 pp...
...I don't know if high school kids today read Samuel Pepys's Diary...
...Of course, what usually happens is we get halfway through Swann's Way and then throw Proust over for a ripping John Grisham or Stephen King...
...In 1995, the book exploded into prominence by winning both of France's highest literary awards, the Prix Medicis and the Prix Goncourt...
...This memoir of his Russian summers was written in his grandmother's French, but even in English translation it is clear that he has found his "language of amazement...
Vol. 126 • June 1999 • No. 12
