Next reader of 84, CHARING CROSS ROAD

As I mentioned in my reflections after reading this book, it's going to be hard to send this on to another reader because I know I'll want to read it again. Fortunately, though, it isn't going far! The next reader of 84, Charing Cross Road is ...

my good friend Mark Robson, who doesn't live far away! So if I want the book back, I can just drive over there and demand he hand it over.

Ahhh, just kidding. That's not how this works. I'm not going to ask for the book back, Mark. After you've read it — and enjoyed it, I hope — send it on its way to the next reader.

Next up is a little mystery that won Celia Fremlin an Edgar for Best Novel — The Hours Before Dawn.

"Stern" by Bruce Jay Friedman

Humor's a funny thing. It's fickle, too. How it works on you can rely on so many identifiable factors and far more unidentifiable ones.

When I found STERN by Bruce Jay Friedman on a shelf in John K. King Used Books in Detroit, I was thrilled to come across a book that Time magazine described as "hugely comic" and the New York Times said was a "pure delight." I was ready to read something funny. I also loved the cover, which features a simple line drawing of a slope-shouldered man shuffling along under duress; the cartoonish style was appealing.

Stern opens with a prologue (though it's not so much a prologue as it is a chapter one) and it didn't immediately grab me. It seemed a bit ponderous ... and, ironically, not funny. Stern and his wife with their young son have just moved to the suburbs where the Jewish family is surrounded by threatening gentiles. When Stern's wife has a run-in with a neighbor who shoves her to the ground, calls her a "kike," and sees up her dress, Stern is traumatized. He is incapable of confronting the man who assaulted and insulted his wife and Stern's breakdown begins.

The remainder of the book details the decline of Stern's first physical and then mental health as he allows anxiety surrounding his bigoted neighbor, who he comes to think of as the "kike man," to consume him.

Stern's Jewish identity is central to his view on life and to the book's humor. It seemed to me that the book had two main running jokes: one, Stern's belief that being Jewish is terrible, and two, his routine rejection of taking an action for fear of getting his ass kicked; time and again, Stern thinks to say something or do something but refrains because he goes on to imagine how the person is likely to have a violent reaction and beat the living daylights out of him. It was funny the first couple of times, but then it became frustrating. I'm sure I also under-appreciated the humor rising out of Stern's self-loathing. That, too, I eventually found tedious.



There's also quite a bit of humor that rides on the back of racial and ethnic stereotypes that even though I understood it to be satirical I found it difficult to dredge up the comedy. Turns out I have a hard time finding funny any sentence that begins with "The Negro ..." I'm simply cringing too much to chuckle. Written in 1962, Stern, which was Friedman's first book, is a work of its time, as are most books, but I found it didn't perhaps age well.

There are occasions, however, when Friedman steps away from "Stern as a Jew" and translates his anxieties  and fears in broader terms outside of ethnicity. It's at those times that I most identified with Stern, sharing the worry that comes with the responsibility of protecting your family in a violent, unpredictable world. The world can be a frightening place. If you think about it too much, it could very well, as Stern learns, give you an ulcer ... or worse.

Bruce Jay Friedman

I had never heard of Friedman, but he had real success as a writer and was apparently good friends with Mario Puzo, the author of The Godfather. Friedman wrote seven other novels in addition to Stern  and several nonfiction pieces, including The Lonely Guy's Book of Life (1984), which was adapted into the Steven Martin film "The Lonely Guy." Friedman also wrote several screenplays, including "Doctor Detroit" and "Stir Crazy," and he earned an Oscar nomination for his work on "Splash." His memoir Lucky Bruce was published in 2011.

I found an interesting interview of him here.

So this book isn't for everyone, but then again, which book is? Hell, I even know some people who don't like Dr. Seuss. If you're interested in giving Friedman a whirl, drop me an email. His sense of humor may be right up your laugh track.

'84, Charing Cross Road' by Helene Hanff (1970)

One of the things I love about the experience of reading is the pleasure of the unexpected find. It's not a book you heard about on NPR or read a review of on Goodreads or Amazon or even had a friend recommend at dinner. No, the unexpected find is a book you bring no foreknowledge or preconceptions to. A book that in some mystical, intuitive way hooks you there in the bookstore and convinces you to take a chance on it.

It's actually a little bit like going on a blind date. Some of the same excitement and anticipation, a little uncertainty and unease, and usually a similar sense of disappointment about half through when you realize, meh, not so great.

BUT, every once in a while (even perhaps a great while), you fall in love.

And that is precisely what happened to me this time when I picked up 84, CHARING CROSS ROAD at a used bookstore in Chicago and met Helene Hanff.

The lone quote on the cover is from the Houston Chronicle and reads: "The most delightful book of letters ever published."

The astounding truth is that the Houston Chronicle may be dead-on.

I've been a fan of letter collections ever since first reading John Steinbeck's A Life in Letters, but this little volume of letters between a New York writer and a London bookstore has a charm that is unmatched.

From the very beginning, when Hanff writes to the used bookstore Marks & Co., at 84, Charing Cross Road in London to ask if they have some old books she is looking to buy, I was captivated. I think in part it was the genteel style of the letters that drew me in.




Hanff writes the first letter in October, 1949, and for the next 100 pages or so we read an exchange of letters that spans some 20 years. Through these letters, a fond friendship forms across the ocean between Hanff, a struggling freelance writer who loves "antiquarian" books, and the bookstore's senior buyer Frank P. Doel, the store's staff, and even Doel's wife and children.

In the years following World War II, there was still rationing in England, which I don't think I was aware of. Hanff endears herself to the bookstore staff and Doel's family by sending them care packages of eggs and meat and other hard-to-come-by items for Christmas and Easter.

I don't know when I fell in love with Hanff, who is witty and amiable and sincerely caring. It may have been while reading the letter where she was bemoaning the fact that Doel had not shipped her any books recently and she wrote, "You leave me sitting here writing long margin notes in library books that don't belong to me, some day they'll find out I did it and take my library card away."

The love affair may have started then, but I was thoroughly head over heels when she later wrote, "i go through life watching the english language being raped before my face. like miniver cheevy, i was born too late. and like miniver cheevy i cough and call it fate and go on drinking."

"Helene, I love you!" I cried out loud, not knowing or caring who Miniver Cheevy was, but understanding the sentiment completely nonetheless.



The other strong appeal of 84, Charing Cross Road is its harkening to a slower time when letters took days, if not weeks to arrive. It made me feel me warm and nostalgic for the passing of a wonderful form of communication. It made me want to write a letter to my son who is away at college.

I had not heard of 84, Charing Cross Road at all and was surprised to learn that it had been adapted into a 1987 film starring Anne Bancroft as Hanff and Anthony Hopkins as Doel.

Hanff (who I think bears a strong resemblance to the actress Linda Hunt)  was a fascinating person. An aspiring playwright, she ended up writing for early television, first for the "The Adventures of Ellery Queen" and then later for Hallmark Hall of Fame. She also wrote histories for children. In 1961, she wrote a memoir titled Underfoot in Show Business. She died in 1997.

Helene Hanff

Linda Hunt

It's going to be a little difficult to let this volume go. I know I'll want to read it again. But it deserves to be read by another reader who might also fall in love with Hanff, so if you're interested, let me know.

Next Reader of YONNONDIO

I drew the name yesterday, but I was too exhausted from the weekend to post the announcement. I know that left many sitting on the edge of their seats waiting to hear who it could be ... well, edge-sit no more because I'm happy to declare that the next reader of "Yonnondio" by Tillie Olsen is ...

Ann Stofflet!

Whoo-hoo! Yay, Ann. I'm happy for you because I think you're going to dig the book. Email me your address and I'll pop it in the mail tomorrow. Also, remember, reading the book carries with an obligation to pass it on to its next reader.

Next up is the most delightful book I have come across in years. It's perfect for a quiet Sunday afternoon of reading. It's a collection of letters between a New York writer and a London bookstore. It's fantastic. I'll post my thoughts on it soon.

'Yonnindio from the Thirties' by Tillie Olsen (1974)

Fonts can be like hairstyles sometimes; they can be the hallmark of a decade. It was the font on the cover of YONNONDIO FROM THE THIRTIES by Tillie Olsen that attracted me to the thin book on the shelf of a used bookstore in Chicago called The Armadillo's Pillow.

"This was published in the 70s," I thought at a glance. I don't know what the font is called but something about its curlicues and the swollen letters signaled it was from the era of "Smokey and the Bandit." So I flipped to the copyright page and, sure enough, it was published in 1974.

Immediately I was endeared to the book for proving my instincts accurate. I suspect if it had been published in the 60s or 80s, I'd've put it back on the shelf, disgusted with its deception.

The other intriguing element to this book that struck me is a bit of a contradiction I noticed between a quote on the front and one on the back. Across the top of the front, above the title, is a quote that declares: "Everything she has written has become almost immediately a classic!" But then on the back, in an excerpt from the "New Republic," we learn, "Of the major living American writers, Tillie Olsen is the least prolific," by which they mean really not prolific considering she had published only one other work of fiction, a collection of short stories titled Tell Me a Riddle. I don't know if you can write "everything she has written" when "everything" amounts to two books.

What's more, if Yonnondio is a classic, I'm arrogant enough to think I would have at least heard of it. And who the heck is Tillie Olsen?

So I bought it for a buck, which proved well worth it because I was in store of a couple of surprises.

The first surprise was learning that Olsen actually wrote the book in the 1930s. It just wasn't published until 1974. The second, and most startling surprise, I didn't learn until the end: Olsen wrote the thing when she was 19, a stunning fact I never saw coming.

Yonnondio, a word taken from a Walt Whitman poem by the same title, means "lament for the lost," and a lament the novel surely is and lost in a stark world permeated with poverty and despair Olsen's characters assuredly are. From the outset, Olsen paints a desperate picture of 6-year-old Maize Holbrook's life in a mining town in Wyoming where death deep underground is a daily threat. Her father Jim is an abusive alcoholic and her mother is a strong but exhausted and fearful caretaker.



The lyricism of Olsen's writing contrasts sharply with the violent, harsh and coal-coated life of the mining town. Her beautiful language depicts horrific conditions, shown to us through Maize's innocent eyes:

"I would be a-cryen," she whispered to herself, "but all the tears is stuck inside me. All the world is a-cryen, and I don't know for why. And the ghost may get daddy. Now he's goin' away, but he'll come back with somethin sweet but sicklike hangin on his breath, and hit momma and start the baby a-bawlen. If it was all a dream, if I could only just wake up and daddy'd be smilin, and momma laughin, and us playing. All the world a-cryen and I don't know why ..."

The Holbrooks eventually pick up and move to a farm in North Dakota where life is clean and open and they experience an idyllic respite, but it is only for a season. They are tenant farmers and at the end of the harvest, despite long days of backbreaking work, Jim doesn't earn dime; instead, he ends up owing the banks. They haven't escaped poverty at all.

They leave the farm for the city where Jim gets a job in a slaughterhouse and the family lives in a ghetto. The living conditions are even worse than the mining town; the persistent cloud of coal dust has been replaced with an overpowering stench that almost makes even sleep impossible. Sickness and fever plague the family. The scenes set in the sweaty and bloody slaughterhouse evoke Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. But Jim Holbrook needs the job and what else is he going to do? He does not live in a reality that offers a wide range of options or opportunity.

As Olsen writes, "'Life,' heavily from Ellen Burgun. 'Life's no bottle of perfume. I'm tired enough to die.'"



In addition to exploring the inescapable whirlpool of poverty and the exploitation of the working class, Olsen presents a powerful portrait of motherhood, embodied by Maize's mother Anna, who emerges as the sole hero in the book. Her will is indomitable, her spirit unbreakable ... nearly. "O Jim," she says, "the children. Seems we can't do nothing for them in this damn world."

Tillie Olsen, 1940s

Olsen's oppressive and depressive depiction of the 1920s is a brutal counterpoint to the more popular novel most often associated with the decade: F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. You can't help feeling Olsen's unblinking account is the truer reality, and as it turns out, much of the novel is based on her childhood experiences.

Yonnondio was Olsen's first attempt at a novel. Born in Nebraska,
she lived most of her life in San Francisco, where she was a union organizer and political activist. She is often associated with the first generation of American feminists. I didn't know it going in, but it becomes clear fairly quickly that Olsen has a definite and passionate political position on the state of poverty and the disenfranchisement
of the working class. She was, in fact, at one time a member of the Communist Party. The title story in her short story collection Tell Me a Riddle won the O. Henry Award for Best American Short Story of 1961. Olsen died in 2007.

By the way, there is a third surprise that comes at the end of Yonnondio, but I will leave that for the next reader to discover on their own.

** If you'd like to be the next reader of YONNONDIO FROM THE THIRTIES, send me an email in the message box above. I'll randomly select a reader to send the book to on Sept. 14. Remember, if you want to read the book, that's great, but you have to be willing to send it on to another reader when you've finished. And if you feel the urge to share with me your experience with the book in a comment on this blog, that'd be terrific.

Next Reader of THE MARTYRED

I held the first drawing for Novel Revival this afternoon. It was very exciting and I even created a little drumroll as I drew the name just to add to the drama. And the next reader of THE MARTYRED by Richard E. Kim is ....

JERRY HINNEN!

Yes, Jerry, I will be putting the copy of THE MARTYRED in the mail to you tomorrow. Congratulations! I think you'll enjoy the book ... and remember: You have to pass it on to another reader once you've finished it. That's the deal.

I'd love to hear what your thoughts on the book once you've read it.

Next up is a fascinating little book by Tillie Olsen called "YONNONDIO: FROM THE THIRTIES, which was written in the 1930s but wasn't published until 1974. Not only I had never heard of this author, I wasn't sure how the hell to pronounce the title.

As soon as I've finished it, I'll be ready to start looking for its next reader.

'The Martyred' by Richard E. Kim (1964)

It was the grandiose book jacket quotes that prompted me to open the pages of Richard E. Kim's first novel THE MARTYRED, which I came across on the third-floor shelves of John K. King Books in Detroit.

" ... one of the ablest young novelists to appear in any nation, in decades," wrote Maurice Dolbier of the New York Herald Tribune.  I don't know who this Dolbier guy was, but that is some high praise for an author I'd never heard of.

"Mr. Kim's book stands out in the great tradition of Job, Dostoevsky and Albert Camus ..." according to the New York Times. Wow. Dostoevsky? The New York Times compared this book to Dostoevsky? Really? That intrigued me.

Richard E. Kim

And then there was the more reserved and humble blurb that read, "A major achievement in my opinion." But it was by Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winning novelist Pearl S. Buck, which maybe they felt was an important get because Kim is Korean and Buck wrote about China ... which doesn't really hold up, but still — it's Pearl S. Buck and if in her opinion the book is a major achievement, it deserves consideration.

I was compelled to thumb to the first page. Kim's opening line hooked me: "The war came early one morning in June of 1950, and by the time the North Koreans occupied our capital city, Seoul, we had already left our university, where we were instructors in the History of Human Civilization." The sentence echoed Hemingway's opening line in the short story "In Another Country" where he writes, "In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it anymore."

Hear me read little bit of the beginning of the novel:

I also liked the irony Kim immediately establishes with two academic men who teach history in the abstract poised to become actors in history in the making.

Described on the back as a "modern Christian epic," THE MARTYRED is the story of an intelligence officer's investigation into the execution of 12 Christian ministers by the Communists during their occupation of Pyongyang. Captain Lee quickly learns that 14 ministers were originally arrested and the two who survived are under some suspicion for having either conspired with the Communists or having denounced their faith. In what Lee describes as a "strange coincidence," one of the ministers executed was his best friend Park's father, a devout pastor characterized by his son as a "man of fanatical faith."

Lee's investigation into the happenings surrounding the executed ministers carries far more import than merely discovering the truth. Lee's superior, Col. Chang, is anxious to elevate the ministers to the status of martyrs in order to use their martyrdom for purposes of propaganda and has no interest in learning what actually happened. The surviving ministers are determined to protect their parishioners' faith from any cracks of doubt and are willing to leave the truth clouded. It is Lee alone who continues to believe in truth's efficacy.

In the end, Kim presents the difficult question of who the real martyrs in his tale may be and reveals the power of faith despite whatever seeds of self-deception out of which that faith may have grown.

I found THE MARTYRED to be an engaging and provoking book and agree with Buck that it is a major achievement, particularly for a first novel. The style is sparse and clean and clear. The glimpses into war-torn Korea are fascinating. The ethical dilemmas are compelling. This was a terrific find. It was translated into 14 languages and in Korea was made into a play, an opera and a film.

Kim, who served in the Korean War and emigrated to the United States in 1955, went on to write two more novels — THE INNOCENTS (1968) and LOST NAMES (1970) — but appears to have turned away from writing novels to become more of an essayist, translator and professor of literature. He died in 2009 at the age of 77 in Shutesbury, Massachusetts.

** If you'd like to read THE MARTYRED, send me an email in the message box above. I'll randomly select a reader to send the book to on Sept. 1. Remember, if you want to read the book, that's great, but you have to be willing to send it on to another reader when you've finished. And if you feel the urge to share with me your experience with the book in a comment on this blog, that'd be terrific.