And what's been tossed up on the beach lately?

Here's how good Dianne Eberett Beeaff can be:

The narrator is a young woman who's been sleeping around as a way to protect herself from commitment and potential pain. She's agreed to go out with a man who is both right for and interested in her:

"As a rule, I avoid Seaport Village. Too much unmanageable romance. Too many overstimulating sea breezes, babbling brooks, and so forth. Tonight, a riot of last summer flowers and mellowed lamplight suffuse the place with a fairy-tale expectancy, and calf-eyed couples drift down the cobblestoned walkways, meandering past balloon stalls and soda fountains, carousels and book niches. All of this threatens my objectivity."

In one paragraph we learn a great deal about the character and her feelings, the place and the time (late summer, evening), and the author's done it without breaking a sweat.

The author's book is On Tràigh Lar Beach, a collection of stories. You can visit Tràigh (pronounced "try") Lar beach on the west coast of Isle of Harris in the Outer Hebrides. Beeaff writes that flotsam is carried on the Gulf Stream from the New World and dots the sand.

She says, "I have written professionally for many years beginning in the area of magazine journalism. I self-published two books: the memoir A Grand Madness, Ten Years on the Road with U2 and Homecoming. More recently, I had two other books traditionally published: Power's Garden and Spirit Stones. I was always inspired by some personal experience that lead me to explore a specific area, era, subject or personality."

She says that years ago she visited the Outer Hebrides. "We stayed just down the road from Tràigh Lar Beach, in the hamlet of Rodel. Walking on beach one afternoon, I noticed several items tangled in the seaweed and jotted them down in my journal. Years passed and, as I finished up the sequel to my memoir [A Grand Madness, U2 Twenty Years After], I began working on these stories."

It's an interesting book, unusually well-designed and attractive. It consists of 14 short stories—some very short—and a novella. As a framing device, an unnamed narrator is vacationing in the Outer Hebrides with her husband. She has just won a prize for her novella and had "a two-book contract flung across my shoulders like a length of chain mail." Casting about for a subject she visits the beach and inspiration is waiting in the sand.

Each story involves a different object, character, and (mostly) place. The objects include an empty ketchup holder, a packet of arthritis pills, the handle of a child's bucket, a disposable syringe, a wine bottle cork, a plastic laundry basket. (It struck me that this could make a writing class assignment: Write about a jar of pickled onions . . . a camera lens cap . . . an artificial lotus blossom.)

These stories are mostly short, six or eight printed pages, and they are as different from one another in form and voice as the objects that inspired them, and while I responded more positively to some than others they are all well-written. For example: 

"Adelaide, Eden's mid-forties owner, usually buzzed around the room in a short-skirted power suit at least one size too small, her long rust-colored hair free as flames. She radiated a sensuality as juice and seductive as her neon-red lip gloss, and when the mail-dominated dive club was in session, she struck me as honey to a swarm of bees."

At times, however, her ability to create metaphor can get away from her. "He had a face like polished driftwood." That's fine, but half a page on the same character's eyes "gleamed like buffed sandalwood," which is a bit much. Still, many of us wish we could do as well.

The second half of the book is novella, Fan Girls. An unnamed narrator introduces the reader to four young woman at a rock concert. Annie, Emily, Dana, and Chelsea are all Datha fans, one of whom is dangerously fanatic. Their individual stories are all very different but all linked to the band and their music in some way. Given Beeaff's experiences as a twenty-year U2 fan, which must have exposed her to other fans, their stories and obsessions, I have a sense she's writing from the inside and the reader benefits from it.

On Tràigh Lar Beach is an engaging collection by a writer who's been around the block more than once and seems to have recorded the most intriguing people and sights along the way.

What does it mean that money is an allegory?

This is an interesting time to read about money. It occurred to me as I began Frederick Kaufman's The Money Plot: A History of Currency's Power to Enchant, Control, and Manipulate that I have not used actual money—coins and bills—since early March. I've bought stuff—groceries, gas, books, shoes—but paid with a credit card or the click of a mouse. What happened to the money? Where's the money?

Kaufman is a New York-based writer, editor, and educator. He teaches at the City University of New York and its Graduate School of Journalism, where he serves as a professor of English. He is a contributing editor to Harper's magazine, and frequently writes about food and food culture. Earlier books include A Short History of the American Stomach (2008) and Bet the Farm: How Food Stopped Being Food (2012).

He acknowledges that the book's origin came out of a pitch meeting to his agent. Money is not a natural subject for an English professor with a background in food culture, and I had a sense at times that Kaufman was straining to make his research connect intelligibly with his thesis.

Worse, it was not clear to me what exactly the money plot is, which, I admit, may well be a reflection of my own ignorance. He does try to explain: "The symbols engraved upon the dollar [bill] . . . are allegorical. For not only is allegory germane to the earliest forms of money, but to the nature of modern finance. And the same can be said for its plot." An allegory's plot does not drive the story to a solution; in an allegory there is no goal, no solution. "The stubborn lack of resolution to the plot has defined the challenge posed by modern money."

What is money? It's whatever we agree it is. If we don't agree that shells, beads, Redbacks (Republic of Texas dollars), cigarettes (prison currency), and more and more and more have a value that can be exchanged for groceries, gas, books, shoes, it's not money. Money is an illusion, a metaphor.

When I was stationed in Korea and Japan after the war, the US troops were paid in script. Paper nickels, dimes, quarters, half dollars, dollars, etc. Good at the PX, good at the barber, good at the company club. Twice during my three years overseas, we were confined to quarters and had one day to exchange all our script for a new version. Yesterday's currency was so much colored paper.

Why does money, any money, exist? Well, for one thing, it makes it easier to translate something abstract like a service or labor into something tangible like food, beer, and shoes. It is also a way to insure the future and control reality. Money may not buy happiness, but without it, it's difficult to be happy, no matter what Porgy says in the song.

The Money Plot is filled with interesting factoids: The first "coins" were shaped ostrich shell . . . the copper in a hundred per-1982 pennies is worth around $2.20 (pennies were debased with zinc in 1982) . . . in 1982 Ronald Reagan signed a law removing interest-rate caps at savings banks and more than 1,500 savings and loan institutions failed in the next ten years. Thales, the Greek philosopher, invented options—a way to risk a small sum to obtain a large one—in 585 BC. 

Kaufman embeds the factoids in stories about money: The kula rings of Melanesian outriggers. The buying and selling of women. The origin of Bitcoins. The role of gold. Richard Nixon, John Connally and the decision to abandon the gold standard. 

In 1971 we had roughly $10 billion worth of gold in Fort Knox. Foreign banks held roughly $30 billion gold-backed dollars. The Bank of England asked for $3 billion of its dollars to be converted into gold. If other central banks followed, the US would not only be out of gold, we would be in default and no one knew the effects of that—except that it would be terrible. So we said we're not going to back dollars with gold any more—and the effects were not terrible. Today the dollar "floats."

"By describing the illusion of money the light of primitive belief, classical mythology, Christian ethos, and political propaganda," Kaufman concludes, "my hope is that going forward we might no longer be locked into believing cant of financiers, the deceit of free and competitive markets as the essence of economic life. Instead, we might begin to understand that those who control money are less scientist than shaman, seer, storyteller, and soothsayer—those who spun ancient tales about sticks and stones, convincing others of their fiction."

It may not answer the question I asked above—Where's the money?—but The Money Plot tells a fascinating story nevertheless.

Here's what you'll find if you take the Ueno Park exit

The book begins, "I used to think life was like a book: you turn the first page, and there's the next, and as you go on turning page after page, eventually you reach the last one. But life is nothing like a story in a book. There may be words, and the pages may be numbered [?], but there is no plot. There may be an ending, but there is no end."

So what then is Yu Miri's book Tokyo Ueno Station? It's glimpses of the life of a laborer, Kazu Mori, born in 1933, the same year as the Emperor. The book includes history—the firebombing of Tokyo, Saigo Takemori's role in the Meiji Restoration . . . Japanese funeral rituals—the death of the narrator's 21-year-old son . . . a picture of contemporary Japan most tourists don't see—the lives of the homeless . . . and an unusual narrator—"Things like [hydrangeas in bloom] always made me feel lonely when I was alive." 

And because the narrator is dead, it raises questions about an afterlife I'll touch on in a moment.

Yu Miri's background

Miri was born to Korean parents in Yokohama in1968. The Encyclopedia Britannica says, "Her father was a compulsive gambler who physically abused his wife and children; her mother was a bar hostess who frequently took the teenaged Yū along to parties, where Yū was occasionally molested. One of Yū’s sisters became an actress in pornographic films. Yū became so confused about languages—when to use Japanese or Korean—that she developed a stutter. Her parents separated when she was 5 years old; she repeatedly tried to commit suicide as a teenager and was eventually expelled from high school."

Nevertheless, she's been celebrated as a playwright and novelist, winning the prestigious Akutagawa Prize for her novel Kazoku shinema (Family Cinema) in 1997. She's received threats from Japanese right-wingers who see her as defaming the country and being an ethnic Korean and non-citizen does not help. Gold Rush, a violent story of children in a dysfunctional family, was her first novel to be translated into English.

Kazu Mori tells his story, much of it in dialect in the original, making Morgan Giles's smooth translation even more impressive. Kazu left his wife and children in Fukushima to find work in Tokyo building structures for the 1964 Olympics. Because there was still no work in the northeast even during the boom years, he stayed in Tokyo, returning home long enough to sire a son and a daughter. Eventually he moves back. His son dies. His daughter marries and moves away. His wife dies. His granddaughter moves in with him to care for him. However he thinks, "She shouldn't be tied down here with her granddad,' and slips away to live as a homeless person in Tokyo's Ueno Park.

Much of the novel's action takes place in Ueno, which has the zoo and a number of museums. It is a favorite spot to picnic during cherry blossom viewing. The cops clear the park of the cardboard and vinyl tarp shelters when the royal family has an official occasion to visit. At the end of the book Kazu dies, which is hardly a spoiler because he's told us on page 33 he's dead.

Tokyo Ueno Station is short; you can read it in a single sitting. It's an interesting presentation of what I'm willing to believe is a possible—representative? emblematic?—Japanese life. As such it does not have a conventional plot. But the claim of a dead narrator made me consider.

Questions about an afterlife

Kazu talks as if he were alive and recalling events from his life. But at one point he notices a bird, "and I wondered if perhaps the bird was Koichi," his dead son. Certainly a thorough-going Buddhist could well his son has been reincarnated as a bird. But, if so, why hasn't the narrator been reincarnated? (Okay, maybe he's in the bardo if you want to bring in an idea that does not exist in the book.)

But there's more. The family are Pure Land (Jōdo) Buddhists, and the book emphasizes they are not Shingon, Tendai, or Sōtō Buddhists. In this teaching, "if one repeated the name of Amida Buddha, countless other Buddhas would surround you and bring you happiness. These would be the dead, who had returned to the Pure Land, and who would now protect us." But there is no indication Kazu has returned to the Pure Land and he does not protect anyone. 

So what is being dead like? Like being being alive but without a body? Like being reincarnated as a bird or some other creature? Or like going to the Pure Land which is "inhabited by many gods, men, flowers, fruits, and adorned with wish-granting trees where rare birds come to rest"? 

I am, I know, asking far too much of Tokyo Ueno Station. None of these questions reduce the power of the book. Giles is currently translating another Yu Mori novel, The End of August, "an experimental, semi-autobiographical epic spanning Korea and Japan over several decades and generation." I look forward to reading it.

Thanks to the OED you can look it up

What is arguably "the greatest enterprise of its kind in the history of scholarship'? Establishing the periodic table of the elements? Deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs via the Rosetta stone? The proof of Fermat's Last Theorem?

Those are all big deals, but I would argue—I'm a word person—that the creation and continuing growth of The Oxford English Dictionary (herein after, the OED) is a much bigger deal.

The OED is after all an effort to identify, define, and illustrate every single word in the English language from the earliest Anglo-Saxon with its borrowings from Celtic, Welsh, Cornish, Scots Gaelic, and Irish, through the incorporation of Latin in the 400-year Roman occupation, with Norse arriving from Scandinavia, and Norman French after 1066, up to and including words invented and borrowed yesterday.

The first edition of the OEC published in 1928 contained 414,825 words,1,827,306 illustrative quotations, and 15,490 pages of singe-spaced printed text. Although the original scholars thought it might take seven, maybe ten years to create, it took 67 years.

Simon Winchester's popular history The Meaning of Everything is The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary. It was published in 2003, but it remains as lively and fresh as the day it rolled off the Oxford University Press's press.

Winchester, a British writer, journalist and broadcaster, was born in north London in 1944. His website says that though not Catholic he was educated first at a boarding convent in Bridport, Dorset and later at Hardye’s School, Dorchester, Dorset. He went up to Oxford in 1963, to read geology at St. Catherine’s College. There he became involved in the University Exploration Club, and was the member of a six-man sledding expedition onto an uncharted section of the East Greenland ice-cap in 1965. He worked as field geologist in Uganda, on an offshore oil rig in the North Sea, and switched to journalism in 1967 where he stayed.

He became a foreign correspondent of the Guardian and the Sunday Times and was based in Belfast, New Delhi, New York, London, and Hong Kong. In 1998  he published The Professor and the Madman, a book about the editor of the OED and a forgotten American player. "Although his publishers had little initial hope for the book – ordering an initial very modest print run of some 10,000 copies – it happened . . . to sell millions of copies, and remains in print today . . . . " He went on to write more than 30 books.

The Meaning of Everything is just what the subtitle says it is, the story of the OED, how it came about, the main characters involved in its creation (only the "main" figures because hundreds of people from around the world contributed illustrative quotations), and the challenges involved—financial, scholarly, logistical, political. No one at the beginning had any idea of what the project would entail or its ultimate cost. If they had, they would have smothered the OED in its cradle. By the time it became clear that the editors were creating an immense edifice, the OED had become a subject of national pride, a symbol of Victorian England's mastery of the world.

Along the way, Winchester gives a brief history of English and of dictionary-making (America's Webster was a competitor). He sketches the personalities of key figures. Frederick Furnivall "was sufficiently dedicated to the sport [of sculling], and with his inherited fortune insulating him from the need to pay too much attention to legal work, that he took time to design a special outrigger for his boat, to form sculling clubs, to inveigh against clubs that forbade working men from taking part, and, most vocally of all, to protest against the then general ban on allowing women on the water." 

The book includes contemporary photographs, an index, and the footnotes are worth the price of admission: "Murray [the OED's editor] very nearly included by mistake the noun alliterates, which a reader came across in an essay by the American poet James Lowell. Lowell wrote in answer to a puzzled Murray—who could find no other citation—saying it was clearly a misprint for illiterates. The verb alliterate—meaning to constitute alliteration—does of course exist." As I said, this is a book for word people.

The second edition of the OED was published in 1989, a year after the first electronic version became available in 1988. The online version has been available since 2000, and as of April 2014 was receiving over two million visits per month. Wikipedia says the third edition—necessary because the language continues to adopt and invent new words—will most likely appear only in electronic form; the Chief Executive of Oxford University Press has stated that it is unlikely it will ever be printed.

None of this diminishes Winchester's delightful book. It's a portmanteau of words—look it up. 

What are the uncertainties in Proust's masterwork?

Okay, I admit it. I never finished all seven books of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. I read the first two because a graduate writing program required me to do so mand sometime after graduation I read "In a Budding Grove" a second time to build up momentum to continue on to Book 3, "The Guermantes Way." Sadly, I ran out of momentum by page 105. I know because that's where my bookmark remains.

In Search of Lost Time (or Remembrance of Things Past) (or A la recherche du temps perdu) is one of those literary peaks like Joyce's Ulysses, Tolstoy's War and Peace and Anna Karenina, Lady Murasaki's The Tale of Genji, and Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow that anyone with literary pretensions ought to have climbed. I claim literary pretensions, but I'm afraid I've read only one of the six.

Because Proust has been waiting patiently on my bookshelf since the early 1980s, and because I believe it would be nice to have read his masterwork, I requested a review copy of Proustian Uncertanties: On Reading and Rereading In Search of Lost Time by Saul Friedländer.

Friedländer is an award-winning Israeli-American historian and currently a professor of history (emeritus) at UCLA. He was born in Prague to a family of German-speaking Jews, grew up in France, and lived in hiding during the German occupation of 1940–1944. He won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for his book The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945. 

He has truly and thoroughly read and reread In Search and recently "I noticed aspects that I had failed to see before, and as I soon realized after some inquiry, seemed to have generally escaped attention." It is these aspects to which he directs our attention in this short essay—156 pages.

In Search reads like a memoir, but the Narrator is not Proust, so Friedländer asks, "How does the Narrator define himself? We know, for example, that the author did not hide his homosexuality, but the Narrator did. Why the difference? We know that the Narrator tried to marginalize his part-Jewish background. Does it reflect the author's position [Proust's mother was Jewish so according to Jewish law, Proust was Jewish], and how does the Narrator handle what he tries but does not manage to dismiss?"

Although the Narrator "recaptures the intense relation between mother and child," Proust never gives his parents names nor does he describe them. Proust had a brother; the Narrator has no siblings. Proust was half Jewish; the Narrator and his parents appear to be pious Catholics. Moreover, "the Narrator's attitude towards Jews is contradictory throughout the Search."

Proust was 25 when the Dreyfus Affair began to make the news, 35 when Dreyfus was exonerated and reinstated as a major in the French Army. The Affair exposed a deep vein of anti-semitism in French society. The Narrator, like Proust, was pro-Dreyfus but apparently not because of Dreyfus's Jewishness, but "because of the injustice done to the officer, because of his suffering" on Devil's Island.

Proust's position toward homosexuality was clear in his life: "He told quite a few people about his unrequited and tragic love for Alfred Agostinelli" who died in a plane crash. The Narrator, however, has a rant against the homosexuality of Baron Charlus. Why? "Proust may have surmised that an openly homosexual novel," says Friedländer, "without any disclaimer, would have repelled many readers. Is that the answer? I do not know." Another Proustian uncertainty. 

Finally, Friedländer's asks if there is a comprehensive moral accounting in the novel. He writes, "there is no love in the Search without betrayal and jealousy; there is no friendship that lasts over time, no loyalty except that imposed by social imperatives. But isn't that mostly the case within any society? It wouldn't be worth dwelling on if the novel didn't insist on a somewhat unusual category of betrayals: that of parents by their children and particularly of doting fathers by their daughters. . . ."

For anyone who has wondered what the damned thing is about or whether to try it once again with an informed and insightful guide, Proustian Uncertainties is a good place to start.

A unique and powerful memoir

Childhood is a foreign country in which we've all lived but few of us can evoke the landscape and the events we lived through the way Jennifer Croft does in Homesick.

Homesick is an exquisite little book, filled with color photographs, mostly snapshots, that Croft and her mother have taken over the years. A headnote at the book's beginning quotes Henri Cartier-Bresson: "We photographers deal in things that are continually vanishing and when they have vanished, there is no contrivance on earth that can make them come back again." 

Which, when I think about it—an attempt to retain things continually vanishing—is what a memoir does.

Homesick is identified as "a memoir," but is written in the third person about Amy and her younger sister Zoe. The (unnumbered) first chapter is headed: "Their mom gets them ready for all the possible disasters that might ever occur." 

The text begins: "So she reads aloud the headlines from the Tulsa World at breakfast while Amy and Zoe eat their Cheerios. The girls stay quiet while their mother talks, but they don't really listen. All they know is that there is always a disaster happening somewhere."

I picked up the book because Croft won the 2018 Man Booker International Prize for her translation of Olga Tokarczuk's Flights and the little bit the flap copy told me about Croft I found fascinating. 

She grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she entered the University of Tulsa at age 15. After completing her BA at the University of Tulsa in 2001, she learned Polish at the University of Iowa, where she did her MFA in literary translation. She lived in Poland for two years on a Fulbright scholarship. She said in an interview, "Polish has always been more of an academic and professional connection for me, but I try to go back to Kraków or Warsaw at least once a year to maintain that connection." She learned Spanish in Buenos Aires. She also translates from Ukrainian, which, on the basis of Homesick, she learned from a tutor who homeschooled Croft and her sister (i.e., Amy and Zoe) in Tulsa.

I assume that Homesick, although told in the third person from Amy's point of view, is a memoir. As far as I can tell, the events occurred in Jennifer's life: Amy, like Jennifer, entered UofT at age 15; Amy, like Jennifer, won "the world's largest translation prize in London" on June 1, 2018. Which makes me believe that Jennifer as a child also went to Camp Waluhili (a real camp for Camp Fire Girls), that her sister did have a brain tumor, and that Jennifer flirted with alcohol dependency once she could drink.

Another notable factoid: Homesick's flap copy says that it was originally written in Spanish, putting the story at one more remove from Croft, who, somewhere, says she translated it herself.

All the above, of course, says very little about the book, which in short chapters—some only a paragraph or so—evokes the sisters' childhood in Oklahoma; their Russian tutor with whom both girls fall in love and who, inexplicably, kills himself (although, at some level, suicide is always inexplicable); Zoe's brain tumor from which she never recovers entirely; their mother's fear of disaster; Amy's love of language and much more.

Translation allows her to connect to the world. “Each time a Russian word meets an English word it generates a spark,” she writes. “And translation offers Amy a new kind of math, an alternative to the math of sacrifice that has ruled her life on her own until today. She can’t cancel out another person’s suffering or death with hers. What she can do is connect.”

And think about language. She told Words Without Borders, "On a basic linguistic level, Spanish is closer to English than Polish is, which makes the challenge of translation different, but not easier. For grammatical and lexical reasons, it’s obvious to me as I translate a Polish sentence that the whole must be broken down and rebuilt from scratch—but sometimes a sentence in Spanish that seemingly invites a closer parallel in English in fact requires a full dismantling, as well, and often apparent cognates do denote or at least connote something slightly other than what they might first suggest." Words to live by.

Check out this remarkable memoir by an extraordinary woman and writer.