3 Book Recommendations #1

"I don't like iciness"

Tove Jansson (right) reveling in the Finnish summer (while wearing excellent pants, as always).

I’ve had such a phenomenal response to my Recommendations series. Thank you to everyone who submitted—these take a bit to pull together (I take this job quite seriously thank you very much) so I’ll be putting them out on a schedule of about every other week. If you haven’t submitted yet, go ahead and get in touch (reply to this email or leave a comment below) and I’ll add you to the list.

For our debut of the series, Keri K. sent in the following…

Books Keri could not live without:

• To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

• The Visiting Privilege by Joy Williams

• The Summer Book by Tove Jansson

What Keri is looking for in her next book:

• “A book that takes chances or is surprising formally, but not at risk of character (I don't like iciness) — ex. I loved On the Calculation of Volume [by Solvej Balle], books by Katie Kitamura, Susan Choi”

• Beautiful sentences

• “While I love writing that is short and sharp, I also love the wonderful feeling of being deeply involved in a setting, in the world of the characters. (Love an English house situation, for example).”

There is a certain quality of light to the Woolf and the Jansson—they are both, of course, “vacation” novels with deep, warm humanity and a current of nostalgia zipping through them. The Williams—with her staccato sentences and nail-biting nihilism (“We have made an unutterable waste of this world, and our passage through it is bitter and unheroic,” she once wrote in a New York Times review)—is a bit of a gritty wrench in things. But all three writers show a kind of connectivity with the emotions that underpin daily life in a way that is impossible to fake. So here are my recommendations…

Recommendation 1

Versailles by Kathryn Davis (224 pp.)

Marie Antoinette and her iced cake of a life (until, of course, that unfortunate beheading) is a ripe subject for historical novelists. But Kathryn Davis comes at the subject of the French aristocracy—and Revolution—sideways. Like the Sophia Coppola film before it, Versailles begins with Antoinette as a teenage bride, made to strip down completely at the French border in order to leave everything Austrian behind her before she weds the future King Louis XVI. But Versailles is just as concerned with the famed palace’s grand staircases, topiaries, and woodlands as it is with the towering wigs and desserts that marked their reign. Told in dialogues, poems, dramas, flights of fancy, and straightforward prose, Davis writes the palace as a kind of prison Marie Antoinette built around herself, a fortress that first enabled her use to her ignoble power for inglorious ends, then only temporarily fortified her against the angry Parisian mobs that would eventually guide her to the guillotine. Told with an architect’s skill, Versailles sees the shoots of asparagus that sprout from the earth and the glistening spring water that spurts from Louis’ (ahem) freshly installed pipes as just as worthy of history’s backward glance as a chittering young girl with a taste for diamond necklaces.

Recommendation 2

The Voyage of the Narwhal by Andrea Barrett (432 pp.)

In the case of Andrea Barrett, a cover actually sold me the book: I picked up her short story collection Ship Fever (winner of the 1996 National Book Award for Fiction) in 2022, just after all her books were redesigned, and the cool, turquoise, painted ocean on the cover seemed to promise a certain calm and freshness in the prose. It did not disappoint. (I then went on to read her newest collection Natural History, her novel The Air We Breathe, and The Voyage of the Narwhal in rapid succession.) Barrett’s characters are usually up-close observers of scientific progress and scientific mayhem—Darwin’s acolytes, contemporary botanists, Carl Linnaeus himself. They peer around the edges of the known world, often putting their bodies at risk to conquer small intellectual territories.

Barrett’s prose is the epitome of warmth, always generous toward its subjects, and in The Voyage of the Narwhal she has equal consideration for Erasmus Darwin Wells—an Arctic explorer aboard a fictional disastrous 1855 expedition—and the two women he leaves behind in Philadelphia, his sister Lavinia and her paid companion Alexandra. Just as the country house novel defined English literature around the turn of the nineteenth century, the exploration novel takes on a distinctly American feel in a confined space. The Voyage of the Narwhal is an epic written in miniatures, a swashbuckling history told with beautiful attention on the level of the sentence.

Recommendation 3

Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss (144 pp.)

The ghost wall of Moss’ title could be several things. It might be Hadrian’s Wall, the ancient Roman border near which the holiday-makers she writes about camp as they attempt to live (by choice) like people from the Iron Age; or perhaps it’s the demarcation line between the living and the dead, the habits and skills of ancestors versus the uselessness of contemporary humans; it could also be the unseen barrier between the women of her tale, who study helpful ancient arts like jointing a rabbit and delivering a baby, and the men, who simply want “to kill things and talk about fighting.” The ghost wall is also, of course, a literal thing, a last-ditch effort made of animal skulls and other materials, piled up to keep out invaders. No matter which interpretation you choose, there is the symbol of a dividing line, a clear before and after, or them and us.

Like her metaphors, Moss’ writing (vastly undervalued by the literary marketplace, I think) is rich and nuanced. This compact book is somehow a page-turner and a rumination, a rallying cry and a paean. On the page it’s alive with the whims of its central character, teenage Silvie, who is capable (she can identify plants like a walking Audubon guide) but sometimes disinterested in the ancient world. Like the Ramsay children of To the Lighthouse and six-year-old Sophia in The Summer Book, Silvie is a small creature in the scheme of the universe, singled out as remarkable by the scratch of a writer’s fine pen. Ghost Wall sings with the calls of birds and creeping of plants, a not-quite-Thoreauvian manifesto on the rigors of life in the natural world.