French Flaps

By Andy on Jun 03, 2009 | Add a Comment

We were joking that this is my season of the French flap, and I have to admit an affinity for the look of the import editions that wear them. But the ones I selected are pretty gritty under their elegant dress.

Perhaps I should introduce myself. I spent many years at a maritime museum, editing its magazine, writing, editing, and producing books, and indulging a passion for history and the sea. While wonderfully satisfying, the experience showed me that enthusiasm for a subject is no substitute for clear, well-developed expression.

Now, independent writing and editing keep me occupied when I’m not at Bank Square Books. There, three days a week, you can find me helping customers, receiving and shelving new books, or changing the window displays. And sometimes you won’t see me because I’m in back, working on our Web site and online communications.
 
My contributions to our staff picks often include some nonfiction, short stories, or essays as a balance to the well-considered fiction selected by my colleagues. This time there’s even a bit of a watery theme connecting some of the books.

The nonfiction musing on the sea and our human relationship with it, James Hamilton-Paterson’s Seven Tenths: The Sea and Its Thresholds, is edgy and dense in places, and its breadth encompasses the aesthetics of poetry, the brutality of piracy, and the chemistry of a human body decomposing in the sea. It may be a challenging read for those whose primary view of the sea is as a place of recreation, but it is so well written that bits of it have stayed with me during the ten years since I first read it.

So has the taut prose of Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat,” a short story based on his own experience off Florida in 1898, which is included in An Experiment in Misery: Stories. As in The Red Badge of Courage—and almost a precursor to the best of Hemingway—his strong, spare writing puts you right there, as if you too are pulling an oar in that doomed boat. And the other stories remind us how much Crane accomplished in a short, tragic life.   

The late Jean-Claude Izzo’s The Lost Sailors (translated from the French by Howard Curtis), is curt and brutal, but compelling. Aboard a Mediterranean freighter stalled by bankruptcy in Marseilles, Captain Abdul Aziz tries to keep his crew together, young Mate Diamantis searches for beautiful Amina, and the other crew members, from different corners of the Mediterranean, chafe at their inaction and stumble through the gritty, violent waterfront jungle of Marseilles, so far from their accustomed existence at sea. It comes to a sad end that reflects Izzo’s own worries about the fate of the Mediterranean itself.

A few years ago, I went to Madrid to collect my daughter at the end of her semester abroad, and we hopped over to Rome for a couple of days. It was almost a classic affair: an immediate detesting of the city for her unruly behavior and unkempt appearance, followed by intense emotional connection after gazing out across the city at twilight from the Spanish Steps, encountering the looming Pantheon around a dark corner, and being overwhelmed by 2,500 years of art and architecture. All the senses were engaged, so the memories are vivid. Later, I enjoyed novelist Anthony Doerr’s reflections on his immersion there, Four Seasons in Rome. Now, here’s a short piece of fiction about modern Roman life that’s a bit reminiscent of Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog: Amara Lakhous’s Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio (translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein). Lahhous—born in Algiers--suggests both the breadth and the narrowness of cultures in Rome today. When a resident of an apartment building is murdered, eleven other tenants offer their interpretations of the crime, each perceived through the eyes of a different culture. The diversity of voices adds great dimension to what I saw in person.

Playwright Eduardo Machado’s Taste’s Like Cuba: An Exile’s Hunger for Home is a tasty mix of memories and recipes. His memories take him back to the pre-Revolutionary Cuba of the 1950s, an idyllic time despite the poverty and corruption, and clearly a time of strong bonding over simple food. After a hasty departure with his family and a difficult acculturation into the U.S., he grew into a highly regarded actor and playwright, but he never lost his longing for Cuba, which he punctuates with remembered and adapted recipes. When he actually returns to Cuba after nearly 50 years, he finds it as changed as he is, but he knows that he will always be Cuban, always defined by his Arroz con Pollo.

Finally (even though it doesn’t have French flaps), to encourage good writing as well as good reading, I’m recommending Bill Bryson’s contribution to literateness, Bryson’s Dictionary for Writers and Editors. Can’t remember the difference between flotsam and jetsam, jibe and gibe, or lay and lie? Need to check the spelling of impresario or barracuda? Wondering when to use effect and when to use affect, how to indicate possessives, or what punctuation to use? Bryson has brief, clear explanations, offered with a hint of his wry humor in dictionary form. You’ll be tempted just to browse for a few minutes, and you’ll be rewarded if you do.