Dear Reader,
I recently had a birthday. When I tell my friends and acquaintances about this, they look a little embarrassed and a little hurt. I threw a party and you didn’t invite me? No party. To tell you the truth, something inside me resists celebrating my personal anniversary with those who know and love me. I call it the Summer Birthday Disorder.
As a kid with a birthday in July, I couldn’t bring cupcakes to school. By the time I was in my teens, my friends were either working at the Jersey Shore or participating in some kind of summer program that a careers counselor said would help them get into college. My calendar was supposed to match everyone else’s by the time I graduated college, but I ended up staying late at the party (because I was in grad school), and the actual birthday party was delayed even further. I was.
A few more years passed, and I celebrated not with old friends, but with new ones, mostly those I met at language schools in Russia and Eastern Europe. The American birthday song was replaced by a song sung by Gena the crocodile, a popular character from the Soviet cartoon Cheburashka. It’s a song as melancholic as you’d hope for a Russian. On a rainy day, a lone crocodile quits his job at his zoo (he is employed as a crocodile, but in the USSR everyone is a worker) and plays himself a birthday song . A spectator looking alone at a truck driver parked on the street. Still he is happy. “It’s worth the tears,” he sings, “a man’s birthday only comes once a year.”
I’ve read an analysis of this scene as subversive social commentary, but the clever idea that the empty streets are waiting elsewhere in long Soviet queues for supplies. It is a hint. oh,I thought. I just assumed Gina’s birthday was in the summer, but I was blown away that the accidental truck driver chose to spend his birthday with him.
i know that feeling. For a long time, I was used to hearing Crocodile birthday songs sung by people I had just met a week ago, but then suddenly we were spending every day together. In summer, when the days are longest, it was no small thing.
Recently, I’ve settled into a life where I don’t travel much. I will sign the rental contract. It is kept all year round. However, I struggle with this persistence. Especially when the weather gets warmer, I miss the summers gone by with strangers and the gentle demeanor of strangers who make sure everyone gets to that bar around the corner from the language school. Become. At 8pm, I’m going to toast to your birthday. I miss the intense, concentrated relationships that suddenly evaporated like time.
Now the only way back, at least for me, is through fiction. Here are some novels that give me a similar feeling of elation. These two thin books are filled with the symptoms of summer’s birthday disorder. Hot loneliness, cooling expectations, and when the temperature difference is extreme, that is, sharing an umbrella with friends. Stranger, cheek to cheek.
—Jennifer Wilson
Crime has a way of producing travel writers out of victims. Suddenly I find myself getting questions like: “Where have you been?” Did you meet an unusual person? Please tell me everything you remember. Even the most mundane details can be important in ways you don’t yet understand. Novelist Vendela Vida seems to be acutely aware of this similarity. Her books, often a combination of her two genres, crime fiction and travel fiction, show how violence can carry a man out of pristine lands faster than any jet.Indeed, the antonym of naive is worldly.
In “The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty”, we meet an American woman traveling in Casablanca. Within minutes of arriving at her hotel, a bag containing a computer and wallet is stolen, along with all identification. Shortly thereafter, an unnamed traveler begins creating a “lost property inventory” for local detectives. That list might include her. She is fleeing a vague personal disaster in her hometown of Florida. I can’t afford her divorce and trip to Morocco for whatever it was that triggered it. “I am a reporter for the New York Times. rice field. “I don’t really need to include this,” she added, in a politely threatening tone like an American abroad.
With no money, she takes up improvisational music and develops a new identity that moves her further and further away from herself. This included, at one point, her work as a double for an American actress shooting a movie in Casablanca. So you end up pretending to be another person and pretending to be another woman. While waiting for the scene to start, she picked up her book from the set. Rumi’s collection of poems. She begins reading:
You’re sitting here with us, but you’re also walking outside
In the fields at dawn.you are yourself
Animals we hunt when you come hunting with us.
You are in your body like a plant is firmly rooted in the ground.
You are still the wind.you are a diver’s suit
Lying in the sky on the beach. you are a fish
This poem captures the tension at the heart of the novel. Is this a tale of sorrow or a tale of adventure? yeah.
Kindly read: Katie Kitamura’s “Separation,” also Katie Kitamura’s “Intimacy,” a literary double, a book about movies, making a detailed travel plan you know/want to fail
Available from: harpercollins
“Taiga Syndrome” By Christina Rivera Garza
Fiction, 2012 (with English translation, by Suzanne Jill Levin and Aviva Cana, published 2018)
I read anything set in the taiga, the boreal forest just south of the Arctic Circle. Taiga crosses continents. For example, the Siberian taiga and the Canadian taiga. It is not known which of these locations the detectives of Mexican author Cristina Rivera Garza’s novel Taiga Syndrome will visit in search of a missing couple, a man and a woman. Nationality and language details remain vague. A local interpreter attempts to speak her unidentified mother tongue, but the detective has trouble understanding it, so the two decide to speak “a language neither strictly his nor mine, a third space, use a common second language.
The detective, in fact a former detective, has since written novels about unsolved cases, and now fiction allows him to “tell the sequence of events without ignoring madness or suspicion.” rice field. Is it madness that drove this missing woman and her new husband into the snow forest? Her first husband, who hired her detective, is convinced her ex-wife suffers from something called Taiga Syndrome. “Some taiga residents seem to start suffering from severe anxiety attacks, attempt suicide and flee,” he says, because they are “surrounded by the same terrain for 5,000 kilometers.”
The taiga that the detectives found is not the mythical treasure trove we talk about remote places. Rather, it is a shattered landscape, torn apart by deforestation, extractive capitalism, and illegal corporations set up to serve those employed in the logging industry.
The ex-husband says he is sure he wants his ex-wife to be found after receiving a telegram asking, “What are you going to put in when you say goodbye?” In Garza’s dark fairy tale of escape and pursuit across perilous forests, the North Pole isn’t as white as snow, and only the big bad wolves can read the breadcrumb-like lines.
Kindly read: Helen Ojeemi’s novel “Smira’s Snow Sensation”, adjective “fantastic”, adverb “desperately”
Available from: dorothy projectNew York Public Library (once you return your copy)
Why don’t you…
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Recite recipes?of “The History of Cookbooks: From Kitchen to Page Over Seven Centuries” (2017), Henry Notaker writes about the popularity of cookbooks written in poetry. Rhyming recipes made instructions more memorable, at least in theory. In some cases, it just allows the poet to enjoy a few harmless and delicious pleasures. From German romantic poet Eduard Mauriquet’s recipe for Christmas cookies:Now, serve this hot / on a plate (but the poet needs a rhyme here now / put it in the pot). “
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Find out why so many people are so obsessed with reaching the bottom of the ocean.of “Sinkable: Obsession, Deep Sea, and the Titanic Shipwreck” (2022), science writer Daniel Stone explores how public interest in a sunken ship and attempts to resurrect the Titanic, a symbol of wealth and power, has allowed no one’s memory to sink. , investigating why we refuse to drown.
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Hear the latest in wax at a 1950s Harlem rental party? Harlem’s rental parties emerged in the 1920s, continued through the Great Depression, and revived after the war. Black tenants faced the double burden of low wages and high rents. To avoid eviction, many, especially domestic workers, held house parties and charged admission fees. Poet Langston Hughes collected invitations with catchy rhymes like: one: “You can wake up the devil / You can wake up all hell / No one can go home and tell me.”
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