With apologies to Cynthia Ozick, I have a confession to make.

A few weekends ago, I picked up a copy of Foreign Bodies–Ozick’s 2010 retelling of The Ambassadors by Henry James–at Milwaukee’s Downtown Books. The blurb on the back looked great: at the behest of her overbearing brother, a divorced schoolteacher travels to Paris to recover a nephew who won’t come home. I chose it over a few other titles of hers that were also available. Having recently finished The Hunger Angel (see below), I was looking to reward myself.

I was at least twenty-five pages into the book before I thought to add it to Goodreads, where I like to keep track of how many pages I’ve read. But what did I find but a rating–five stars! –that I’d already posted in 2019. Not only had I read it, but I’d written myself a paragraph or two of notes so I could remember what I’d liked. (That enormous piano in Bea Nightingale’s New York apartment did seem a little familiar.) Anyway, I enjoyed the book again, though I would have to say that Ozick peppers her writing with some very pungent smells. Still, the writing is unfailingly witty. Bea’s wayward nephew Julian Nachtigall (Bea’s brother Marvin has kept the original family name) fancies himself a literary expatriate in Paris. He flirts with American girls by asking them wryly, Gertrude or Alice? in apparent reference to Gertrude Stein and her lover. Bea, however, claims to be asking herself Hamlet’s own question: to Bea, or not to Bea? She responds drily to her ungrateful brother’s scornful letters, abetting Julian and his Romanian refugee wife with an accumulation of lies. And even before she manages to cast off her ex-husband Leo’s enormous piano, Julian’s younger sister Iris declares her independent aunt Bea “terrifically brave.” Still, when Bea finally holds Leo’s symphony in her hands, she can’t help seeing its key signature, “Bea Minor,” as a bit of a slur.

…

Nobel Prize-winning author Herta Muller was born in Romania in 1953 to German-speaking parents. After the war, Romania deported many ethnic Germans to Soviet forced labor camps. Such is the fate of Leo Auberg, the narrator of The Hunger Angel (translated by Philip Boehm). Muller conducted extensive interviews with poet and camp survivor Oskar Pastior with the intention of co-writing a novel about the camps, where her own mother spent five years. But Pastior died, and Muller was left to complete the project on her own (see the Afterword).

When seventeen-year-old Leo is deported, he is eager to leave home. There is a collar of silence around his homosexuality that he associates with the lamb around the shoulders of the statue of a saint near the cathedral. Leo’s relatives equip him with an assortment of castoffs–after all, what does it matter what he brings to the camp? –which he packs into the case that is removed from the family’s gramophone. But his grandmother assures him, “I know you’ll come back.”

Before long, “the hunger angel climbs to the roof of [Leo’s] mouth and hangs his scales” (p. 77). What follows is a brutal evocation of starvation conditions, but the book is so beautifully written that it’s hard to tear oneself away. After work, the inmates are allowed to go begging for food before they return to the camp, and Leo brings a piece of coal as an offering. A Russian woman whose son has been deported to Siberia gives him a liter of potato soup and, when his nose starts running, a white batiste handkerchief. Leo can neither use this handkerchief nor trade it for food because he comes to believe that “the handkerchief was my fate. And once you let your fate pass out of your hands, you’re lost. I was convinced that my grandmother’s parting sentence I KNOW YOU’LL COME BACK had turned into a handkerchief” (p. 74). Muller explores the distortions of identity, compassion, and humanity that take place in the camp, along with the difficulties of adjusting to freedom afterward. I heartily recommend this book, but only if you are made of very strong stuff.

In 2022, I gave myself credit for finishing 62 books. I used a few indulgences to arrive at this number: I counted reading an issue of Ploughshares cover to cover, along with the unpublished manuscript I read for my beta reader (more on that delightful exchange later). I also counted shorter things that are complete in themselves, such as the book of Job. But if this seems like fudging, consider my first entry for 2023: The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni, in a much-anticipated new translation by Michael E Moore.

The book weighs in at 648 pages, so right out of the gate, I’ll be off my usual pace of five books per month. This might be hard to make up, especially since all three kids were just here over Christmas break (a most welcome distraction from reading). Manzoni’s characters are funny and flawed, and the story is edifying; I would compare it to Les Misérables, with perhaps a touch of Don Quixote. I’ve just finished a fifty-page discussion of the superstitions and brutalities that were rampant during the plague of the late 1620s, and that section was preceded by at least forty pages about the fight over Milan during the Thirty Years’ War. But I’m in the home stretch, and I’m anxious to see how the story turns out. After all, our pitiable ingenue, Lucia, has already converted a notorious criminal known as the Nameless One.

And due to the vicissitudes of library queues, this morning I started the audio version of David Copperfield. I read this book for the first and only time as a freshman in high school (see the photo on my home page), and I was inspired to revisit it by the release of Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, which is on my to-read list for 2023. And while I’m admiring and often enjoying Manzoni’s iconic work, I absolute love Charles Dickens. The pacing is quicker (though perhaps I have that impression because I turned up the reading speed on my app) and the asides are hilarious. I feel as though a great treat has been prepared for me.

Some highlights of my 2022 list include As Earth Without Water by Katy Carl, Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson, Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au, and Works of Mercy by Sally Thomas (you can read my review at https://www.tinymolecules.com/joan-bauer). I read Elizabeth Hardwick and Annie Ernaux, along with Miriam Toews, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Anna Seghers, and Olga Tokarczuk. And with any luck, I can still hit my number this year. Because as it turns out, I began 2022 with a wonderful, very long book: Maggie Shipstead’s Great Circle. Happy reading!

The coffee maker has grown sluggish in middle age. I turn it on first thing in the morning; it responds willingly at first, perking away, but then, with a sigh, it slows down, and the light will go off, a few ounces brewed and the rest of the water languishing in the receptacle. I don’t always notice at first. In fact, if it has succeeded in brewing most of the pot, I might not notice the lapse until the next day, when I’ve filled the receptacle to the brim once again while yesterday’s neglected water lingers somewhere in the works and sends the new coffee dripping down in a thin stream over the woodwork, rolling sideways behind the stovetop to drip down on that side, too. Even then, I might not notice until I open the white-painted cabinet door under the stove to take out a pan and see long yellow streaks on the inside. Poor housekeeping, that. By the time I see it, yesterday’s coffee is etched indelibly into the paint. All my laggardly scrubbing leaves a lingering trail behind.

While I’m packing the lunches or unloading the dishwasher, I try to glance at the coffee pot, to encourage it. With each press of the button, it leaps back into life, begins to brew, and then stops, wandering off like a daydreaming child that the coach has been forced to deploy in midfield while the more focused children eagerly follow the ball.

This often happens when sleep has eluded me the night before. If I wake up too early, I might start the rosary for the next day; but I soon fall asleep, only to wake up again and pray some Hail Marys without any idea what bead I was on or what mystery I was praying. Such inattentiveness might be expected in moments like that–although when I’m really awake, those late-night rosaries are the best ones I pray. I might notice, for instance, how the sweetness of Mary’s greeting breaks into the silence imposed in Elizabeth’s house by the muting of Zechariah. No wonder the babe is attentive and leaping for joy! But if God has to wake me up to get my attention, how inattentive must I be during the day? I am like that coffee pot, leaping at once when I’m called on to brew; I start out well, offering whatever is first on my mind, trying to keep track of all the prayers people have asked me to say. But I soon wander off, growing sluggish, abandoning the task of prayer almost before I’ve begun. Even the short consecration I memorized last spring and try to say every day can be too much to accomplish in one go.

How does one clean a coffee pot? The internet says to brew several cycles with equal parts water and vinegar. I put it off, hoping to do it when no one is home; after all, no one wants to infuse the air of their kitchen with warm vinegar. And perhaps it’s too late for my old machine. For inside its walls are black scales, the dregs of coffee long past; in my mind, I see Jean Valjean carrying Marius through the sewers of Paris, afraid to look up. If the coffee can do this to the pot, what must it do to our insides?

And yet the cup of coffee beside me right now tastes perfectly fine. On Fridays, I like to drink from the mug with the crack in the glaze; if you fill it too full it will leak, but if you fill it only halfway, you can still use it. It reminds me that I, too, am a flawed vessel.

Because even a sluggish pot still makes coffee; and even a weak prayer life is a turning toward God. After all, if a man has a hundred coffee pots and one of them wanders away, spilling its gold down the cabinet doors, won’t He leave the ninety-nine that are working (or praying) and tenderly start the brew cycle again and again?

My most recent dive into In Search of Lost Time began in 2020, when my daughter was reading Swann’s Way for a college class. I picked up her book and started enthusing about the moment when the narrator, world-weary and sad, traces his first taste of the madeleine dipped in lime blossom tea to his Aunt Leonie’s bedroom in childhood. Suddenly, the whole of Combray, where he and his family spent their Easter holidays, rises up like a stage set around him. And while the line quoted at the top of my site—reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life—is actually from one of Proust’s two essays on reading, the world of the Search seems to hover around in that earlier piece: it’s in the bedclothes, the pictures, even the view from the window. In that essay, Proust himself seems to stand on the threshold of claiming his mature voice. But in a larger sense, I think the word “threshold” refers to that moment of recognition that leads us to plunge fully into the work. For me and for so many others, that moment comes when the madeleine calls forth Proust’s theory of involuntary memory. That’s when I said to myself, “I’ve always felt that, but I didn’t know how to express it.” Such moments, for Proust, become a jumping-off place for the reader’s own self-exploration. As for what he actually meant by the spiritual life, perhaps it occurs when something you’re reading prompts in you the kind of deep thought that makes you stare into space, the book and the time and all your devices forgotten.

I finished the book for the third time in our hotel room on a visit to our daughter during the Covid-deformed spring of 2021. She was busy that night, so my husband and son and I had a drink at the bar, where I reminded them that the novel ends with the unsteady old Duc de Guermantes, now in thrall to the former Odette de Crecy, tottering on giant’s legs reaching downward through so many lifetimes. That moment now is encoded for me in the book, which I fully intend to revisit. After all, if I am ever to cross that spiritual threshold, it will be on such tottering legs.

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