NYRD
Lately I have developed a strange new habit. I go into the larger bookstores, prowl among the shelves, and gather up all the books published by NYRB Classics. They’re easy to spot in a crowd: they’re all eight inches high and beautifully designed, with monochromatic spines stamped with the author’s name, the book’s title, and at the bottom, the NYRB logo. Then I find a shelf that is not too cluttered, clear a space, and arrange the NYRB Classics in a single row. It pleases me to look at them this way. In fact I have suggested to various bookstores that they be displayed in this manner, but no one has listened to me. Well, if they won’t do it, then I will.
So far no one has stopped me from carrying out my rearrangement projects. I get a few odd looks, but then I always get odd looks. If salespersons dare ask me what I’m doing, I can always throw them off by saying, “I don’t understand how you can not have Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege, 1942-43 in stock when it’s only the definitive account of the siege.” Delivered in the right tones, it causes the bravest staff to back away, slowly.
Seriously, lining up all the NYRB Classics on a shelf can only help sales. An interior decorator may come along, appreciate the display for its aesthetic value, and buy up the whole bunch for some wealthy, clueless client whose children might actually open the books out of curiosity.
My obsession with NYRB Classics began with the Russians. For sheer intensity, emotional chaos, and crazy courage, I look to Russian authors. They make my life feel calm and organized. Would the writers who came after Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Babel be intimidated at what they had to follow? Hell, no. The problem is that most of these authors were suppressed under Communism and have never been translated or published outside of the old Soviet Union. For instance, the state decided that Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman was too dangerous to be published, so the KGB seized not only the manuscript, but the typewriter ribbons it had been prepared with. The typewriter ribbons!
Fortunately some of the books are now available as NYRB Classics. An imprint of New York Review Books, NYRB Classics publishes reissues of good books by authors who have unjustly fallen out of fashion, and translations of masterworks little-known in the west. Their Russian selection is particularly strong. Grossman’s Life and Fate is a modern version of War and Peace, if Tolstoy’s epic had been written by Chekhov. Soul is a collection of stories by Andrey Platonov, whose work was censored in his lifetime; Stalin himself declared the author “scum.” It’s amazing that these works survived at all. Platonov’s story “The Return” is a deceptively simple piece that kicks harder than a bottle of vodka on an empty stomach.
The younger Russian authors are also represented. I am currently reading Vladimir Sorokin’s The Queue, a novel written entirely as a series of dialogues among thousands of people standing in line in a Moscow suburb in the 1980s. They don’t know what they’re queueing up for — it could be jackets or jeans, made in Turkey or Sweden, all they have to go on are rumors — but they queue up anyway, because that’s what one did in the Soviet years of stagnation: queue up. The speakers are not identified, so we don’t know who’s saying what to whom; they jostle, flirt, argue over their place in line, fall asleep, find little ways to make the wait more bearable, gossip, go off to eat and drink, come back and wait some more. Amidst this deluge of information the reader should’ve developed a giant headache but, amazingly, you start recognizing the characters. They resist being dehumanized by the system represented by the queue. In a society where there are supposedly no individuals, they can’t help but be individuals.
My Russian jag led me to some relatively obscure but fascinating memoirs by a Nazi soldier, a disenchanted Italian fascist, and an eccentric Austro-Hungarian aristocrat, all from NYRB Classics. The Stalin Front by Gert Ledig is a gripping account of the war on the
Eastern Front. Kaputt is Curzio Malaparte’s hallucinatory, bizarrely lyrical report of that same war.
Memoirs of an Anti-Semite by Gregor Von Rezzori is one of the most charming and disconcerting books I’ve ever read: in five episodes the author, who by the way is not a Nazi, recounts his history of fascination with and revulsion towards Jewishness. His casual, careless, ultimately obtuse attitude made him a passive collaborator in the horrors of the century.
I took a break from historical turbulence to read NYRB’s reissue of The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley. It is only slightly less turbulent than the war memoirs. Hartley’s novel is about a schoolboy who is invited to spend the summer at the country estate of a wealthy classmate. He innocently agrees to deliver notes between his classmate’s older sister and her unsuitable lover, a tenant farmer. Betrayals, revelations, terrible things follow. If the plot sounds oddly familiar, it’s because The Go-Between is a template for Atonement by Ian McEwan. (It was filmed by Joseph Losey in the early ‘70s with Julie Christie and Alan Bates.)
When I get out of The Queue, I’m going to read The Post-Office Girl by Stefan Zweig. Or Belchamber by Howard Sturgis, a contemporary of Edith Wharton and Henry James. Or more Russians. Between boredom and chaos, always pick chaos.
NYRB Classics turn up unannounced at local bookstores. The Queue is available at National Bookstore Shangri-La, Rockwell, Glorietta, Mall of Asia, Bestsellers Podium and Bestsellers Robinson’s Galleria.
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