I noticed this on Leslie’s good reads page and put it on my to-read list more to remember it as a potential resource. But I wound up with some time to kill in NYC and the Mid-Manhattan library has it for reference use only, so I went to visit. The book went with the 2002 exhibit that came out of a gift of 1,100 illustrated books from the Judith Rothschild Foundation. Turns out there is a fairly decent flash-driven site for the exhibition as well; it puts a selection of the books on a timeline marking out the boundaries of Russian’s revolutionary period, “…after which, Stalin’s great terror effectively ended the last pure public expression of the avant-garde.” It’s too bad that they couldn’t include more on the site, since it’s unlikely to see many of these books exhibited very often in the museum itself. But I suppose there is always this book.

Anyhow, there’s a vast array of books from handmade artist books to more industrially produced books. It is a little hard to look at a book of books and not be able to open them and look inside, but even in the photos it’s apparent how worn and fragile many of them are.

Russian avant-garde encompasses several distinct (yet often overlapping) movements, of which constructivism is perhaps my favorite. So I found myself drawn books from Alexander Rodchenko and El Lissitzky. The photomontages in particular reminded me of several by Martha Rosler in the WACK! exhibit of feminist art from 1965–1980 at PS1. We couldn’t help but comment how Photoshop has changed that arena forever. For some reason I love old photomontages, perhaps knowing how much harder it was to make them look really nice without the fancy software we have today.

Overall this is a nice book to spend some time with. Of course if you want to visit with the one at the Mid-Manhattan branch of the NYPL, you might want to get there before things disappear to who knows where when it merges into the research library (the one with the lions) sometime in the as-yet-undisclosed future.

Elissa was returning this at the library and told me I should read it, so I checked it out. This collection could be subtitled something like “variations on grief,” as all of them involve a core theme of loss, whether imminent or realized. Most of the deaths involve sickness, especially cancer, mostly parents. Somehow they all capture something a little different.

Some parts hit on somehow-still-tender spots for me, as when Mateo says in “The Beads,” “Maybe it’s too hard … Maybe I just can’t take it.” There are enough quirky, fantastic moments that keep the stories from becoming maudlin. Romm also has an awareness about focusing on death as a writer, acknowledged through the story “No Small Feat,” where a struggling writer discovers her boyfriend has published a story based around her own mother’s death.

One editor suggested I wait until I was in the next phase of my life before sending another story. It got so obnoxious that I stopped sending the stories out. No one wants to hear about mortality, I figured … I don’t have a patent on death. I wouldn’t want one. Really, he can have the subject — the whole big feat of it. I’d love to write stories about surfing teenagers, international spies, funny grandmothers, dogs that fly. But death is my map, the thing I’ve been living next to for years.

Overall, these stories have just the right balance of hard and magical realism, highlighting the way different ways that people resist letting go, like the character photographed gripping her mother’s nightgown and thinking, Don’t die.

I’d only ever read Calvino’s amazing Invisible Cities, but I wandered into the fiction c aisle the day I got my New York Public Library card and grabbed this collection. I guess I’ve always been worried of treading beyond Invisible Cities since it struck me so deeply. It’s kind of a collection of stories, as a young Marco Polo entertains Kublai Khan with descriptions of various cities in his empire, but it also kind of defies categorization. How could anything else compare?

So I was gratified to be, perhaps less struck, but still enchanted with Calvino’s eye and voice (that appear so easily translatable to English) in this collection. Divided into four sections, it arcs from kind of pre-WWII innocence in Italy via the Riviera Stories to Wartime Stories to Postwar Stories to a group of stories from the 1950s — all titled as “adventures” — under the umbrella of Stories of Love and Loneliness. I was impressed how, despite the variety in time and atmosphere and publication dates, this collection makes so much sense together. Many of them come off as fables without a clear moral. Throughout the stories are passages of such perfect, perceptive descriptions and character insights. Perhaps there is less of a feeling that the book captures timeless, universal truths, but there are still many excellent stories, especially those involving Italy during and directly after the war.

From “The Adventure of a Poet”:

“What do you hear?” she asked.
“Silence,” he said. “Islands have a silence you can hear.”
In fact, every silence consists of the network of minuscule sounds that enfolds it: the silence of the island was distinct from that of the calm sea surrounding it because it was pervaded by a vegetable rustling, the calls of birds, or a sudden whirr of wings.

“Theft in a Pastry Shop” reminded me a little of Murakami’s story along a similar theme. I can’t remember the title, but I think it’s in the Elephant Vanishes collection.

Maybe now I’ll be more inclined to check out more Calvino, especially since many of his stories are short enough to finish in a subway ride.

I kept hearing people talk about this book saying that Krauss wrote the same book as Jonathan Safran Foer (her husband), but she wrote it better. It’s somewhat true, being a multilinear story steeped in the Holocaust and its lost histories and secrets, driven by clever, young people who go through great lengths to reveal them. But in Krauss’s book, there is also the quirky, old man Leopold Gursky who escaped Nazi-occupied Poland for a lonely life in New York City, where he fears he is disappearing. He is certainly the heart of this book.

I try to make a point of being seen. Sometimes when I’m out, I’ll buy a juice even though I’m not thirsty. If the store is crowded I’ll even go so far as dropping my change all over the floor, the nickels and dimes skidding in every direction … All I want is not to die on a day when I went unseen.

There are so many threads spinning the story together that at first it feels disconcerting starting each one and getting used to all the players involved, especially since the trick of it is not knowing how they are all connected initially. In the end, it’s impressive how Krauss manages to show key aspects of the story without ever describing them in words.

The film version will be directed by Alfonso Cuarón (Children of Men, Y tu mamá también).