Roses are red
violets are blue
I cannot rhyme
doesn't matter
I've got book recommendations
just
for you
Happy Valentine's Day! What a great opportunity to start another new section of my blog where I want to share what I'm currently reading. Like Kurt Tucholsky's Auf dem Nachttisch, On the Nightstand will be about the books currently waiting beside my bed to be read at night before I fall asleep. Right now this place is occupied by two books which can be linked by their main topic: love. But they are no cheesy Rosamunde Pilcher style romance novels but rather books that look at love from a different angle. Romantic but yet realistic. Heart-warming and heart-breaking at the same time.
F.Scott Fitzgerald is one of my all time favorite American writers. Not only because of The Great Gatsby. I also love his short stories and liked his essay Echoes of the Jazz Age which he published in 1931 when the Jazz Age, the Roaring Twenties, were aleady over. After having read his retrospective of this time, I had always been curious how it was like when he met his wife Zelda, when they travelled Europe, and had the time of their lives. Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda is a collection of their love letters. They do not only reveal an extraordinary relationship, but have also been a source of their literary works. Especially Scott borrowed many of Zelda's sentences. Like her comment on the birth of their daughter Scottie:
"I hope it is beautful and a fool - a beautiful little fool."
Words he later gave to Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby. But only about 20 percent of the collection cover their happy times together - the bigger part of the book shows a difficult, nonetheless deep love between those two writers whose affection for each other did not stop them from being rivals. Letter by letter the situation worsens: Scott's alcoholism increases and Zelda's mental health deteriorates. Most of the letters are written by Zelda from some sort of mental institution. But however far away they were from each other physically or due to their psychological weaknesses, emotionally they were always close. It is fascinating how tender the tone of their writings were. Up until the end.
Jeffrey Eugenides is my favorite contemporary American author. After having devoured all his novels - The Virgin Suicides, The Marriage Plot, and Middlesex - I was craving more. This is how I found this book. And although it doesn't contain one single story by the man with the Greek lastname, it is a great book. Why? As the editor, he picked all the short stories which he published under the title My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead. The Pulitzer Prize winner only wrote the introduction to explain what made him publish such a collection and how it got its name (From a story by the Latin poet Catullus who was the first poet in the ancient world to write about a personal love affair):
"Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal births and feuding families, on matrimonial boredom and at least one cold heart. Love stories, nearly without exception give love a bad name [...] I offer this book, then, as a cure for lovesickness and antidote to adultery. Read the love stories in the safety of your single bed. Let everybody else suffer."
The subtitle reads: "Great Love Stories, from Chekhov to Munro". In addition to "The Lady With the Little Dog" by the Russian which I had only known as a great dramaturge and playwright and "The Bear Came Over the Mountain" by the lady who just won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the collection also contains stories by James Joyce, William Faulkner, Vladimir Nabokov, Robert Musil, Raymond Carver and twenty more.
The American book review magazine Kirkus Reviews stated:
"Eugenides offers a perfect Valetine's Day gift for lovers of literary fiction"
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