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After reading and enjoying Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter, I tried another one of his (Citizen Vince) and liked it just as much though it was very different. Then I tried a volume of his short stories, We Live in Water, and they were amazing. He is such a talented writer! I am now 50 pages in to The Financial Lives of Poets - funny, heartbreaking, wry and clever. I haven't deep dived a writer like this since I read five Hermann Wouk books in a row a few years ago.
Your post reminded me to check out Jess Walter again. I’m 100 pages into The Financial Lives of Poets. Exquisite writing.
"Everything about him began to annoy me. The way he whistled in the bathroom, and moved his lips as he read the paper, the way he had to ruin every nice moment by pointing its niceness out. When I was not aggravated with him I was angry at myself, angry and full of guilt for causing so much grief to this man for whom happiness, or at the very least gladness, came easily, who had a talent for putting strangers at ease and drawing them over to his side so that people naturally went out of their way to do him favors, but whose Achilles' heel was his poor judgment, proof being that he had willfully roped himself to me, a person who was always falling through the ice, who had the opposite effect on others, immediately making them raise their hackles, as if they sensed that their shins might be kicked."
"Aside from a large carpet remnant lugged home on the bus from the northern end of Banbury Road, an electric kettle, and a flea market set of Victorian cups and saucers, there wasn't much in it. I've always like the feeling of traveling light; there is something in me that wants to feel I could leave wherever I am, at any time, without effort. The idea of being weighed down made me uneasy, as if I lived on the surface of a frozen lake and each new trapping of a domestic life--a pot, a chair, a lamp--threatened to be the thing that sent me through the ice. The only exception was the books, which I acquired freely, because I never really felt they belonged to me. Because of this, I never felt compelled to finish those I didn't like, or even a pressure to like them at all. But a certain lack of responsibility also left me free to be affected. When at last I came across the right book the feeling was violent: it blew open a hole in me that made life more dangerous because I couldn't control what came through it."
"One day he asked his wife if she wanted to go for a walk, and slowly, taking a meandering route, they arrived at the house on Ha'Oren Street as if by accident, and he took the key out of his pocket and opened the gate, and she, bewildered, hung back, the way one always hangs back, a little frightened, when a dream suddenly transforms into reality."
"And yet for a long time I continued to believe it was possible to dedicate myself to my work and share a life, I didn't think that one need cancel out the other, though perhaps I already knew in my heart that if it were necessary I would not side against my work, could not any more than I could side against myself. No, if my back were pushed to the wall and I had to choose I would not have picked him, would not have picked us, and If S sensed that from the start soon enough he came to know it, and worse yet, for my back was never pushed to the wall, Your Honor, it was less dramatic and more cruel, how little by little I grew lazy with the effort required to hold and to keep us, the effort to share a life. Because it hardly ends with falling in love. Just the opposite. I don't need to tell you, Your Honor, I sense that you understand true loneliness. How you fall in love and it's there that the work begins: day after day, year after year, you must dig yourself up, exhume the contents of your mind and soul for the other to sift through so that you might be known to him, and you, too, must spend days and years wading through all that he excavates for you alone, the archaeology of his being, how exhausting it became, the digging up and the wading through, while my own work, my true work, lay waiting for me."
I recognized the name Nicole Krauss--- I read The History of Love by her several years ago. I thought it was brilliant, and kept thinking it would be a great book for a book club because I sure needed a lot of explaining (that I never did get). She was married to Jonathan Safran Foer ( Everything is Illuminated).
I was so dazzled by her but almost a little intimidated.
Definitely a great writer.
I just finished The King's Cavalier by Samuel Shellabarger. An early 1950s historical novel set in 15th century France. Shellabarger did two bestseller historical novels, Captain from Castille and Prince of Foxes in the late-1940s/early-1950s that are well known. I'd read those several times. He wrote two more obscure ones and then died of a heart attack. I read Lord Vanity which was lousy and this one which was better but not to the level of his two best known books.
I'm circling back to a 1959 Alistair MacLean book called Night Without End I think I last read in the 1970s. I'm 1/4 of the way through it.
I'm liking it. Some repeats - like the Red Cloud / Crazy Horse / Fetterman battle at Fort Phil Kearny. Before that he focused on the background on the cattle drives / trails / cowboys. Fascinating info. Still the usual great research and background. I find it amazing that these families from the east headed west and risked their lives for land. I'm about a fourth of the way through with some great chapters coming up. Great photos throughout.
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Thanks for the feedback.
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