Best Côte d'Azur rental for 15 people. Natural rock pool in Gaeta. A tuna factory in Sicily. Hiking in Montana.
Smutty novel wins the Nobel prize ??
Book recommendations and anti-recommendations:
If you’re the type of person who can buy a short story collection and only read the title story—I am this person—get Antonio Tabucchi’s Little Misunderstandings of No Importance before the New Year. If you aren’t that person, Grace Paley’s Enormous Changes at the Last Minute will have the same effect, except everyone else will have read it, too.
Little Misunderstandings of No Importance. If you’re interested in the English class war, a lot of lost “Public School boy” novels are kicking around online, most notably Tom Brown’s Schooldays: By An Old Boy and Jeremy at Crale. And there’s always Stalky and Co (“an unpleasant book about unpleasant boys at an unpleasant school”).
If you haven’t read Iris Murdoch, you must start with The Sea, The Sea. It’s a sloppy autobiography written in real time by an aging, narcissistic stage director who has escaped to a seaside house to write said book — only to be constantly visited by his exes, and barraged by letters from his so-called best friends (“I couldn’t bear it if you had really changed your life…Civilization is terrible, but don’t imagine that you can ever escape it, Charles. I wasn’t to know what you are doing. And don’t imagine that you can ever hide from me, I am your shadow.”) It’s incredible. I always thought she was so serious, though I don’t know why now. Sample page:
If your son/daughter is a Manhattan teen in STEM, be sure to get them a copy of the novel LaserWriter II about a 19-year-old girl working at a Mac repair store in the city. This one flew under the radar for some reason.
I bought The Vegetarian by Han Kang at the airport, where it was propped next to the checkout of the bookstore, I assume because Kang won the Nobel Prize in literature this year. This is also the reason I bought it. (The Vegetarian also won the Man Booker.) I hardly engage with literary prizes on any level, liable as they are to piss me off. (I did enjoy this piece in the New Yorker on Fitzcarraldo’s uncanny number of Nobel wins.) I read The Vegetarian at Heathrow and finished it on my flight to Dublin (183 pages). It has an art subplot in the vein of My Year of Rest and Relaxation (male artist persuades mentally ill woman to be the star of his performance art). It was also smutty to the point of seeming like a romance novel (the mentally ill woman is the artist’s sister-in-law). The premise itself is silly: a woman decides to be a vegetarian, and her entire family flips out. I have no idea why it won any prizes. A very baffling reading experience!
Ravel is my all-time favorite book about a thin-skinned aesthete surrounded by frenemies. (Read if you love Thomas Bernhard. Who doesn’t love Thomas Bernhard!) If you read one book, make it this one.
Vacation ideas: Best Côte d'Azur rental for 15 people. Natural rock pool in Gaeta. A tuna factory in Sicily. Hike and drink in Montana.
If you can’t travel to a warm location, buy some exotic fruit or flowers (for some reason, I really want someone to ship me leis from Hawaii).
I’ve been eyeing a trip to Gaeta ever since I learned that Cy Twombly lived there while painting his Quattro Stagioni series. I learned this, like everyone else, on Tumblr. His house is well-documented. (You’ll recognize the loopy blue painting around the doors.) Twombly compared Gaeta to “East Hampton from 2,000 years ago.”
My fav airbnb in Gaeta.
