Independent Bookseller Edition
Half a Lifelong Romance by Eileen Chang, translated by Karen S. Kingsbury (Anchor Books, 2016)
As the summer of our thirtieth wedding anniversary comes to an end, I can frame my experience with visits to three independent bookstores in three different states—one old favorite, and two that are new to us.
Whenever we go to see Shakespeare at the American Players Theatre in Spring Green, Wisconsin, we always stop at Arcadia Books. This lovely bookstore features thoughtfully curated contemporary fiction, along with beautiful cookbooks and gifts, children’s literature, and a cafe called the Paper Crane. As I browse the tables, I like to test myself on how many of the staff recommendations I’ve read. But this year, a dear friend drew my attention to the rolling remainder bins tucked under the front window display. They look like those little carts filled with wooden blocks in the Pottery Barn Kids catalog–as if any child in America could neatly corral their modern-day toys in such tiny receptacles. Okay, maybe yours could. But not mine.
These remainder bins are really a toy store for grownups. I found early titles by Nicole Krauss and William Trevor, among others. And when a title by Eileen Chang caught my eye, I turned to my resident expert—my husband–who assured me what a fine writer she was.
Half a Lifelong Romance is set in Shanghai, partly against the backdrop of the Japanese invasion of 1937. The story was originally published under a pseudonym in China in the nineteen-fifties, in serial form and with a party-approved ending. But long after Chang fled China to live and write in the United States, she significantly revised and republished the book under her own name (see Kingsbury’s illuminating introduction). And while Chang often released her own English versions of much of her work, she did not do so with Half a Lifelong Romance.
Gu Manzhen and Shen Shijun are colleagues who soon become star-crossed lovers. When the story begins, Manzhen’s father has died, and her older sister Manlu has broken off an engagement in order to support the family as a taxi dancer, an occupation that quickly deteriorates into prostitution. When Manlu becomes the second wife of one of her clients, Manzhen is determined to take up her sister’s former financial burden through honest means. She postpones marrying Shijun, an engineer, until one of her younger brothers is old enough to support the family in her place.
This opens a gap that will divide the two lovers. Manlu’s husband Hongtsai begins to covet Manzhen, and Manlu decides to exploit her own sister by faking an illness to lure her into the house for the night. Hongtsai comes to Manzhen’s room, and there is a struggle; in the end, he “[carries] her unconscious body to the bed and [strips] off her clothes: [she looks] like a luscious corpse. This [is] his chance to romp to his heart’s content.” Once the rape is accomplished, the couple imprisons Manzhen and demands that she become Hongtsai’s third wife, driving her to the verge of madness. Manzhen escapes thanks only to the kindness of an impoverished woman giving birth in the hospital bed beside her.
But the chain of misunderstanding and missed opportunities between Manzhen and Shijun has begun. Over the years, both young people are subject to the misguided machinations of their respective families, with tragic results. Fourteen years must pass before the two lovers finally meet again in a scene reminiscent of An Affair to Remember–with shades of Portrait of a Lady to boot. Shijun reflects that “Love is not passion, perhaps. Not yearning either, but the experience of time, the part of life that accumulates over the months and years.”
Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor (NYRB Classic, 2021)
We made a trip to Chicago the day before a NASCAR race was scheduled on the Magnificent Mile–there was fencing in front of the Art Institute, and bleachers on some of the sidewalks. After touring a Van Gogh exhibit, we sought out Exile in Bookville, which is tucked away on the second floor of the historic Fine Arts Building on Michigan Avenue. Here, you can pick out some vinyl and ask them to play it while you browse. I seem to recall hearing Joan Armatrading that day.
This lovely bookstore is full of contemporary titles and apparently hosts lots of author events. But we were drawn to a good collection from the New York Review of Books, where I picked up Elizabeth Taylor’s 1971 novel about growing old in a place where one has few connections. “It was hard work being old,” one of Taylor’s characters admits. “It was like being a baby, in reverse. Every day for an infant means some new little thing learned; every day for the old means some little thing lost.”
When Laura Palfrey first uses her cane to mount the rainswept steps of London’s Claremont Hotel, we are told that “[she] would have made a distinguished-looking man.” Before she was widowed, Mrs. Palfrey had lived for years with her husband in Burma. “After their hard, often uncomfortable, sometimes dangerous married life,” the Palfreys retired to comfort in Rottingdean. Now, as Mrs. Palfrey peeks discreetly through the windows of London’s basement apartments, she recalls watching her husband’s strong hands as he built what he called “a good toast fire” in the grate. “If I had known at the time how happy I was, she decided now, it would only have spoiled it. … In the end, the perfect marriage [we] had created was like a work of art.”
And yet Mrs. Palfrey creates an alternative history for the other pensioners with whom she shares her evenings. When an impoverished young writer named Ludo assists her after a fall, she invites him to dine at the Claremont in the guise of her grandson Desmond, who has been slow to appear. Ludo agrees, overcoming his vague distaste in the service of art; when he gets home that evening, he will shamelessly transcribe all the details of the visit. Mrs. Palfrey tells Ludo that she and her companions aren’t allowed to die at the Claremont, and Ludo adopts her phrase as the title of his novel.
As Mrs. Palfrey notes, “[the] disaster of being old [is] in not feeling safe to venture anywhere, of seeing freedom put out of reach.” One by one, the women of the Claremont succumb to their frailties and move on—beginning with Mrs. Arbuthnot, whose worsening incontinence forces her into a state of rigid neglect in a nursing home. Meanwhile, Mrs. Palfrey receives an offer of marriage from the hotel’s only male inhabitant, a man who writes letters to the editor and tells off-color jokes to the male staff. Naturally, she declines, reflecting that her husband Arthur would want her to soldier on as she was.
But Mrs. Palfrey cannot resist writing to her daughter about the proposal. And when she suffers an accident, her imprudent letter brings her grandson to visit at last–but because Ludo has been impersonating him all this time, the people of the Claremont take the real Desmond for an impostor. In the end, Desmond withdraws, assuming that Mrs. Palfrey’s injuries will forestall the marriage that might have deprived him of his inheritance. At her death, he neglects even to place an obituary–thus unknowingly leaving her story to Ludo, his double. Perhaps it is those with whom we are thrown together by chance who, in their proximity, are best able to love us–even when, like Ludo, they break our confidence.
The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben, translated by Jane Billinghurst (Greystone Books, 2016)
Near the end of the summer, my husband and I returned to the scene of the crime—Omaha, Nebraska, where we were married in 1993 at St. John’s Church on the campus of Creighton University. My husband loves to tease me that when we come to Omaha, my sisters and I spend two hours having lunch before we decide what we’re going to do for the day. As if that weren’t the point! And besides, when our children were younger, it often took them a while to settle on bowling versus the trampoline park. Now, we look for coffee shops and independent bookstores.
Dundee Book Company began as a pop-up cart with offerings tailored to the venues it visited. Now located in a 1910-era home in Omaha’s Dundee neighborhood, it features contemporary literary fiction, poetry, translations, and “under-the-radar classics,” according to owner Ted Wheeler in Shelf Awareness. When seven of us visited in a body that afternoon, we easily fanned out through the entirety of the store’s offerings in the home’s living room. We made up for that by buying several books.
The Hidden Life of Trees resonates with Overstory by Richard Powers and with Paul Pastor’s lovely essay on fungi in Ekstasis. For years, author Peter Wohlleben worked for the lumber industry in the beech forests of Central Europe, but his perspective changed when he began offering tours. “Visitors were enchanted by crooked, gnarled trees I would previously have dismissed because of their low commercial value. … I began to notice bizarre root shapes, peculiar growth patterns, and mossy cushions of bark.” As a writer who loves to anthropomorphize trees, I quickly responded to this–but I found it much harder to accept Wohlleben’s suggestion that trees could be sentient, though he anticipates my reluctance and seeks to unpack it. Human beings have more difficulty understanding plants than animals, he says, “because of the history of evolution, which split us off from vegetation very early on.” More importantly, trees are “so incredibly slow. … Their complete life-span is at least five times as long as ours. Active movements such as unfurling leaves or growing new shoots take weeks or even months. And so it seems to us that trees are static beings, only slightly more active than rocks.”
Wohlleben makes a convincing case that trees can feel pain, communicate via underground networks and chemical signals, and perhaps even learn and remember. Trees nourish the sick ones among them, and they raise their young, just as animals do. They are equipped in many spectacular ways to flourish in communal life, but “[thanks] to selective breeding, our cultivated plants have, for the most part, lost their ability to communicate above or below ground,” and many of them are “[isolated] by their silence.” Cultivation, it seems, must begin with careful curation of what God has designed. And as the summer of our thirtieth wedding anniversary draws to a close, I will be watching the trees reabsorb chlorophyll and seal off their leaves so that a good wind will bring them down. A good sleep to you, trees. And to my husband: here’s to many more happy years!
Joan Elizabeth Bauer 