Bibliopath #1: The Email Newsletter formerly known as Things I've Read
Dear reader,
In reply to my last email, Sonia emailed me about bibliotherapists at last month's Sydney Writers' Festival. Like a therapist, you booked in an appointment, sat down and told them your troubles. Unlike a normal therapist, she prescribed you a book as your personal tonic. (See also this article about the art: "Can Reading Make You Happier?")
This is both: one of those things that I wish I had thought of first, and something that I'm going to do as if I'd never heard of it. And so, with a new direction, a new title—Bibliopath (since 'bibliotherapy' was taken; and -path in the sense of direction but also mania)—and a new tagline: "It's like an advice column where the advice is to always read books."
With that in mind, on to the recommendation ...
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Sonia,
(Tagged with: personal essays; non-fiction; female writers; clarity of style; fascinating use of the first person plural. Probably also Katharine, maybe Tess.)
Thank you for your email! As you've just seen, I love the idea of a bibliotherapist. Now, it's not particularly with bibliotherapy in mind, but I wonder if you'd like Natalia Ginzburg's A Place to Live.
Ginzburg was one of Italy's most important writers (standing with Umberto Eco and Italo Calvino), living, and writing through two world wars.
She reminds me of Helen Garner: there is a similarity in the calm economy of their prose styles, they have both written novels, non-fiction (even to the point of both covering controversial court cases of their times, Garner in The First Stone and This House of Grief; Ginzburg in True Justice), and essays. It is her best essays that are collected here in A Place to Live.
I heard of her because of a writer's recommendation (I've lost the writer unfortunately), who said that reading Ginzburg made her a better writer. I can see why: there is a roving calmness, a lack of hesitation to drive towards emotional clarity, an experiential heft to her words, and a generous embrace of 'we' such that you feel have been carefully chosen and enfolded in the unwinding of each sentence.
For example, here's Ginzburg on that realisation that we have transitioned from child to become adult:
"Now we are truly adult, we think, stunned that this is what being adult means, nothing at all like what we thought it meant as children, certainly not self-confidence, certainly not a serene mastery over all worldly things. We are adult because we carry with us the mute presence of the dead, from whom we ask counsel in our present actions, from whom we ask forgiveness for past offenses; we'd like to rip away all our past cruelties of word and deed, from the time when we still feared death but had no idea, couldn't yet fathom, how irreparable and irremediable death was. We are adult because of all the silent answers, all the silent pardons of the dead that we carry within."
And if that is intriguing, you can read a foretaste in this essay "Winter in the Abruzzi".
If you do read it, as always, I'd love to hear what you think, or what else you've been reading.
And as for you, reader? What have you been preoccupied with?
Best,
Guan