Published: 17 December 2021
Last updated: 5 March 2024
A bad year ends with an abundance of good books. Aviva Lowy finds some holiday cheer on the shelves of your real or virtual bookstore
Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket - Hilma Wolitzer (Bloomsbury)
Is the gift of writing hereditary? I hoped so when I opened this book by the 91-year-old mother of one of my favourite American novelists, Meg Wolitzer. And I wasn’t disappointed.
Of course, this isn’t the first publication from Wolitzer senior, who has built her own impressive and awarded reputation over 50 years for short stories, novels and fiction for young readers. It’s just that I wasn’t aware of her.
So what a delight to be introduced to this poet of the quotidian. As Wolitzer writes of Howard and Paulie, the enduring New York couple who feature in most of the short stories in this collection, their daily life seemed like it would go on forever in “that exquisitely boring and beautiful way”.
Except, it doesn’t. While most of these stories have appeared over the years, in some form, in magazines such as Esquire and New American Review, the final piece, The Great Escape, is new. Chronicling the death of Howard from Covid-19, it mirrors the real-life experience of Wolitzer, who lost her husband Morty to the virus.
This is beautiful writing and a joy to read. It’s also very funny. Take her line about Howard, banned when Paulie hosts book club, who “skulked off to the bedroom like a grounded teenager”. Or a depressed Howard, shuffling in for breakfast, “still convalescing from his childhood”.
Year Book - Seth Rogen (Hachette)
“People ask me what the hardest part about being Jewish is. The persecution? The repeated attempts at systematic annihilation? Nope. The hardest part about being Jewish is . . . the grandparents.”
This is the joke a young Seth Rogen opened with when he made his stand-up comedy debut at the age of 13. He killed it, automatically scoring another gig and sealing his career in comedy.
When he landed a role in Judd Apatow’s TV series, Freaks and Geeks, at the age of 16, he dropped out of high school and moved with his family from Vancouver to LA, where he became the family’s main breadwinner. He’s now a lauded actor, writer, producer and director - and not yet 40, having made the most of that early start.
This book begins with his teenage years, when Rogen developed a taste for marijuana and his reputation as a stoner. As he writes here, "people criticise weed for changing your view of reality. But sunglasses literally change your view of reality, and nobody gives them a hard time for it. Weed is my sunglasses. . . I’m not quite cut out for this world but weed makes it okay".
If you are good with the drugs, sex, and toilet humour, Year Book from the likeable Rogen is laugh-out-loud funny for anyone of bar/bat mitzvah age and above.
Real Estate - Deborah Levy (Hamish Hamilton)
Don’t be fooled by the apparent mundanity of the title. Real Estate, the third and final book in the “living autobiography” by British playwright, novelist and poet, Deborah Levy, is a reflection on how the author chooses to exist in the world and not a guide to bricks and mortar properties.
Though Levy does hanker for a dream home; the “unreal estate” house which she claims to have been carrying inside her all her life. She renovates and relocates the house of her mind, adding honeysuckle or mimosa, a river or a sea, a rowing boat and an egg-shaped fireplace.
Unusual for a memoir, there are only selected, random vignettes from what we presume is Levy’s actual life. But as she writes, responding to a woman who has asked how closely an earlier book in the trilogy reflected her life, “I told her the weight of living has been heavier in my life than it is in my books”.
Though Levy concedes she will never acquire her unreal property portfolio, she concludes that the books she has written are her “real” estate.
“Of all the arts, the art of living is probably the most important,” Levy says. We readers are lucky that she shares hers with us.
The Lost Cafe Schindler - Meriel Schindler (Hodder & Stoughton)
“My grandfather’s café was a glittering success: it was a place where people could forget the economic and emotional privations of post-war Austria and enjoy good coffee, live music, dancing, and some of the best cakes in Austria ... until the Nazis arrived.”
When Meriel Schindler’s father died in 2017, she discovered a trove of documents and family albums dating back to the two World Wars and relating the fate of her Jewish relatives.
Intending only to write a small family history for her children, and to better understand the difficult relationship she’d had with her father, British lawyer Schindler soon found herself with a “full-blown obsession” about the fate of the Jews of Western Austria.
“During my research, I was most struck by how antisemitism could take root in a city where there were so few Jews: Innsbruck had fewer than 500 Jews in 1938. They were middle-class, highly assimilated businesspeople; in my grandfather’s case, all he ever wanted was to serve the best apple strudel in town.”
Centred around the eponymous cafe which was the social hub of Innsbruck, Schindler’s book recreates the journey of her family, which included Alma Schindler (the wife of Gustav Mahler), the Kafkas, and the Jewish doctor who treated Hitler’s mother when she was dying of breast cancer.
How to Live. What to Do - Josh Cohen (Random House)
What can Lewis Carroll’s Alice teach us about the ordinary madness of childhood? Or Goethe’s Young Werther tell us about the experience of first love? Or Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway show us about coping with midlife disappointment?
Quite a lot, according to Josh Cohen, whose book is subtitled In Search of Ourselves in Life and Literature, and brings together the author’s two specialisations; he is a practising psychoanalyst and a professor of literature at the University of London.
Cohen claims his epiphany that a book could give “shape to the whole landscape of my inner life” came when he was a six-year-old, and his parents, returning from a trip to the US, gave him a collection of Peanuts cartoons. He was particularly taken by one of Lucy in her booth offering psychiatric help for five cents.
“The Peanuts strip offered a remedy of sorts and created a space in which my own confusion and anxiety could be heard. Peanuts, you could almost say, was my first psychoanalyst.”
As Cohen says, “the core of the book is the concern with imaginative life and the ways in which fiction helps feed our imagination and our capacity to understand ourselves”.
Bourdain in Stories - Laurie Woolever (Bloomsbury)
Jewish celebrity chef, Anthony Bourdain, who suicided in 2018 at the age of 61, has been described as both a “rock star” and “bad boy” of the culinary world. Outspoken about such topics as sexual harassment and the poor treatment of Spanish-speaking immigrants in the restaurant industry, as well as the conditions of Palestinians, Bourdain appeared to have an insatiable appetite for life, eating everything (sheep’s testicles, ant eggs and an entire cobra), everywhere around the globe.
This book by his long-time co-author and collaborator, Laurie Woolever, who describes herself as Bourdain’s “lieutenant” for nearly a decade, is a collection of reminiscences by family and friends, arranged in sequence over the chronology of his life from his school years on. It is based on her interviews with more than 90 people in the year following Bourdain’s death.
The text is set out like a play, with direct quotes from the cast of characters standing alone on the page, and a dramatis personae up front to reference who they are and the role they took. Reading it is a bit like finding yourself at Bourdain’s wake as the gathered recount anecdotes about him.
Woolever’s introduction speaks of “helping the people he loved tell the following version of his story”.
