I was off on vacation in Britain for the last two weeks, and, to my surprise, it ended up being a “real” vacation, which wasn’t exactly what I had intended, but I can’t say that I’m mad about it.
If you’re a sane person, you might be wondering what on earth I mean by that last sentence—basically, I’d been hoping for the impossible: to take a true break from work (that is, work-work and book-writing work) while also ticking several titles off my book-related to-read list. In the end, I probably spent more time making that list in the days before our departure than I did actually reading. Between jet lag and vacation-related exhaustion, my eyes would close a few minutes after I turned on my Kindle. After a few days of that, I quit pulling it out of my bag and instead watched a little TV and read some of my favorite British magazines. (As if to prove what an intellectually catholic or possibly just intensely confused person I am, I will note that the latter include the posh-boy’s mocking mag Private Eye, the home of the cleverest British literary lads London Review of Books, and my very favorite, the down-market-est of British women’s magazines, Take a Break, where the subjects of the stories range from medical mysteries to murderous love rats.)
Despite my reading-list failure, I did take in some books. I’m a relatively recent convert to Libby, the incredibly easy-to-use app that allows people to borrow ebooks and audiobooks from their local libraries, but I have quickly become a superfan. I listened to Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half, read by Shayna Small, and to two books by Leif GW Persson: Linda, as in the Linda Murder, and The Dying Detective, both read by Erik Davies. All three were really well done, but I was especially impressed by Davies’ narration of the Persson books. He did the voices thing very well, as in giving all the characters a distinctive sound, but he also did full-on Swedish pronunciations of all the character and place names. I think I’ve read all of Persson’s books—Linda earned me my completist badge—but I didn’t recognize many of the characters in the audio version because in my head Lars was pronounced, well, “Lars” not “Loarsh”; “Backstrom” wasn’t “Beckstrehm”; and I won’t even attempt to transliterate the Swedish place names Davies pulls off.
I’m not a lover of Nordic Noir—other than the Persson bibliography, I don’t think I’ve ever gotten further than Chapter 3 in any of the classic Scandinavian murder mysteries. They seem too grim, gritty, and blood-and-gutsy for me. But Persson’s work is weirdly compelling, and his trilogy about (more or less—he’s not a “this book is about” kind of writer) the investigation into the assassination of Prime Minister Olaf Palme, and Sweden’s loss of innocence—Between Summer’s Longing and Winter’s End; Another Time, Another Life; and Falling Freely, as if in a Dream—are among my favorite books, period. Pretty much everyone in his work is flawed, and several of his recurring characters are racist, misogynist, lazy jerks, but since he’s writing about the Swedish police, that feels like credible realism. Persson’s Wikipedia page makes me think I’d probably find him a little bit on the unbearable side if I could experience him in his native setting and tongue, but I love the English translations of his books, and now that I’ve found Libby, I’ll probably listen to the audio versions of the Palme trilogy.
RECOMMENDATIONS: The first week of the vacation was spent in Manchester, visiting my mom, and the second in Edinburgh, vacationing.
Our first museum stop was the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. I know that many people find portrait galleries a bit naff, but I love them. As I once wrote in The Advocate: “Portrait galleries are to art what pub quizzes are to information: They reward trivia over deep knowledge, identification over appreciation. In a portrait gallery, the goal is not to marvel at the artist’s skill in evoking his or her subject but, rather, to recognize the sitter. Whenever I’m wandering around one, I’m mentally keeping tabs on how many of the famous faces hanging on the walls I know, the way I might tot up the number of questions I get right on an episode of Jeopardy!.” (I’m much too cool to do that last thing, by the way. Honest.)
In Edinburgh, my trivia score was dismal—I’m afraid I’d do very badly in a quiz about eminent Scots. But I still loved it, and my affection for the place increased when, cruising the museum store, we came across some postcards featuring the work of an artist called Joan Eardley. The exhibition of paintings Eardley made in Catterline, a semi-remote fishing village in northeast Scotland, was at a different gallery, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, which was a bit of a bugger to get to, but Edinburgh is quite compact, so we made it over there in half an hour or so. It turns out that Eardley was a lesbian (I had a feeling from the photos of the artist at work!), and although she was an outsider in all kinds of ways, the people of Catterline, where she spent at least half of each year, welcomed her girlfriends, which wasn’t a given in the late ’50s and early ’60s. I confess that reading the letters Eardley wrote to her mother from Catterline, I thought this would make a great play—not a thought I have every day of the week—and as I was looking for links for this newsletter, I learned that Anna Carlisle wrote a bio-play about Eardley that was staged in 2017 to coincide with another exhibit of her work.
I realize that very few people reading this will be able to pop to Modern One to check out the exhibition, so I guess my recommendation is to Google Joan Eardley. Her work is fabulous.
LISTEN TO ME: Can you believe I went two weeks without being on a podcast? I can’t, either, but it’s true! I’m really excited about the Nov. 21 episode of Working, in which I’ll be chatting with Oliver Burkeman, author of the great book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. More about that next time.
(Ab)normal service will be resumed in the next issue of this newsletter!
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