A Different Stripe

"A Scarlett O'Hara, Blanche DuBois, Snow White and Miss Havisham all rolled into one." That's how the Times Literary Supplement described the heroine of Wish Her Safe at Home by British author Stephen Benatar.

We're delighted to have Mr. Benatar's novel in the series and we are excited to welcome him to our side of the pond! I hope you'll join us at these upcoming events:

Monday, February 22, 7 pm
McNally Jackson Books
52 Prince Street 
New York, NY
212-274-1160

Tuesday, February 23, 7 pm
The Community Bookstore
143 Seventh Avenue
Brooklyn, NY
718-783-3075

Wednesday, February 24, 7 pm
Harvard Book Store
Harvard Square
Cambridge, MA
617-661-1515

"One could love her for the only sufficient reason that one chose to."

Rachel Felix (said to be an inspiration for the character of Minna) as Phèdre.
Image from the NYPL Digital Collection.

The other day, a kindly reader wrote in to make sure we were doing ok, mentally:

Dear Friends at NYRB,
 
Thank you for your update on novels about madness, isolation, troubled minds, dark companions, the dead of winter, and brutal Soviet camps.

You folks need to cheer up.

Well, reader, we hear you. And just to show you that we've got other modes besides doom and gloom, we're going to hit you with some lovey-dovey stuff, in honor of Valentine's day (and Valentine Ackland). This excerpt, from Sylvia Townsend Warner's thrilling Summer Will Show, has to be one of the more romantic and even life-affirming things we've published. And STW manages to get a little critique of capital in there as well. Enjoy!

Her happiness, blossoming in her so late and so defiantly, seemed of an immortal kind. One day, looking over a second-hand bookstall with Minna, she opened a snuffy volume that had English poems in it. Her eye fell on the verse:

My love is of a birth as rare
As ’tis of object strange and high,
It was begotten by despair
Upon impossibility.

“Look,” she said, pointing on the withered page.

Minna began to glance about for the vendor.

“No. Let me look at the other poems. It is silly to buy a book just for the sake of a verse which one can learn by heart.” It seemed to her that the other poems were wilfully annoying, and she would have put down the book, but Minna clung to it, absorbed, her lips fumbling at the English syllables.

“Un objet bizarre et élevé. Sophia, I must buy this book. I feel an obligation towards it. Besides, it will improve my English.”

To please her Sophia spent some time beating down the bookstall man.

Whatever it did for Minna’s English, Sophia did not open the book again; but that one verse, rapidly memorised, stayed in her head, and seemed in some way to sum up the quality of her improbable happiness, just as Minna’s absurd bizarre et élevé hit off the odd mixture of nobility and extravagance which was the core of the Minna she loved.

Minna was not beautiful, nor young. Her principles were so inconsistent that to all intents and purposes she had no principles at all. Her character was a character of extremes: magnanimous and unscrupulous, fickle, ardent, and interfering. Her speaking voice was exquisite and her talent of words exquisitely cultivated, but she frequently talked great nonsense. Similarly, her wits were sharp and her artfulness consummate, and for all that she was maddeningly gullible. She offered nothing that Sophia had been brought up to consider as love-worthy or estimable, for what good qualities she had must be accepted with their opposites, in an inconsequential pell-mell of wheat and tares.

Sophia had been brought up in a world policed by oughts. One ought to venerate age, one ought to admire the beautiful. One ought to love ugly Mary Thompson because she was so clean, God because he was so good, prating Mr. Scarby because he was so honest and paid all his son’s debts, scolding cousin Arabella because she was so capable, Mamma because she was so kind, Frederick because he was her husband. One ought to devote oneself to one’s children because, if well brought up, they would be a comfort in one’s old age. Behind every love or respect stood a monitorial reason, and one’s emotions were the expression of a bargaining between demand and supply, a sort of political economy. At a stroke, Minna had freed her from all this. Unbeautiful and middle-aged, unprincipled and not intellectual, vain, unreposeful, and with a complexion that could look greasy, she offered her one flower, liberty. One could love her freely, unadmonished and unblackmailed by any merits of body or mind. She made no more demands upon one’s moral approval than a cat, she was not even a good mouser. One could love her for the only sufficient reason that one chose to.

What does the future hold for translated books?

Four publishing pros--including our own editor, Edwin Frank, will share their vision for the future of works in translation.

February 3rd at 7pm
Melville House Bookstore
145 Plymouth Street (at Pearl Street)
Dumbo, Brooklyn

$5 at the door. Wine, beer, snacks available.

With Melville House co-publisher Dennis Loy Johnson; Barbara Epler of New Directions; Dan Simon of Seven Stories, and Edwin Frank of NYRB Classics.