Every year I make a reading goal of 50 books. Some years I achieve that goal, some years I fall short, and some years I actually exceed it. This year I hit the mark right on the money.
My favorite of the year was "The Weight of Ink" by Rachel Kadish.
Let me begin with a small confession: I bought The Weight of Ink by Rachel Kadish because of its beautiful cover and its intriguing title. Admittedly, the story, itself, also sounded intriguing, but the cover and title were simply too lovely to resist.
Now, after having read the book, all I can say is, “Wowza, what a story!”
It’s set in two time periods of London. In the 1660s, a young Jewish woman named Ester Velasquez does the forbidden -- she serves as a scribe for an old, ailing rabbi who was tortured and blinded in the Spanish Inquisition. In the early 2000s an ailing historian named Helen Watt and her reluctant assistant, a floundering American Jewish grad student named Aaron Levy, are summoned to a grand old home on the outskirts of London to look at a genizah that was found walled up under a staircase.
A genizah is a repository for timeworn sacred manuscripts in Judaism. The genizah that was discovered in the old house takes Helen and Aaron on a journey through the ancient words inked upon the pages contained in the cache.
We readers are taken on a wonderful journey, too, into a past and its people, both real ones like Sabbatai Zevi, Julian of Norwich, Baruch de Spinoza, and William Shakespeare, and fictional ones like Ester and her beloved rabbi as well as the rabbi’s devoted servant, Rivka, and many others who helped and hindered Ester as she toiled at her forbidden passion of learning. While the modern portions of the story concerning Helen and Aaron attempting to make sense of the wondrous find are indeed interesting, the real story belongs to Ester.
She fled Amsterdam in the care of the rabbi after her parents’ deaths, she wrote and learned (both of which were forbidden to Jewish women then), she survived the plague that killed roughly a fifth of Londoners, she endured and survived the continued persecution of Jews, and she found a way to pursue doing what mattered most to her -- learning, thinking, philosophizing, writing, and corresponding -- even after the rabbi’s death.
“A woman's body, said the world, was a prison in which her mind must wither.” Thus was the sentiment of the timeframe and religious constraints in which Ester lived. However, through her quill, ink bottle, and parchment, Ester’s mind soared, and her words survived, hidden away for more than three hundred years, until they were set free by two historians whose lives would never be the same.
Words matter. Being able to read, to write, and to think freely all matter more than some people realize. The title of the book comes from a passage on page 196 when the blinded rabbi tells Ester what he truly lost when he lost his sight. “. . . I came to understand how much of the world was now banned from me -- for my hands would never again turn the pages of a book, nor be stained with the sweet, grave weight of ink, a thing I had loved since first memory.”
The Weight of Ink is a weighty tome itself at almost six hundred pages, but I was sad when the story came to an end. For now, I will simply gaze once more upon its lovely cover and remember the wonderful story that lies within.
Victor Hugo published his well-known novel about a deformed bell ringer in 1831. I own a Barnes and Noble Classics edition published in 2004. In it, there is a biography about Hugo in which I learned that the writer was so beloved that two million people joined his funeral procession through the streets of Paris. That simply boggles the mind to imagine such a thing.
I also learned that when Hugo married Adele Foucher, his brother, Eugene, had a permanent psychotic breakdown because Eugene was in love with her, too. I suspect that Hugo used that breakdown as the impetus for the extreme psychological breakdown of a central character in The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
That character is the archdeacon, Claude Frollo. Anyone who has watched the Disney movie version of this novel will remember the creepy scene in which Frollo watches Esmeralda dance, and he sings the song “Hellfire.” Personally, I will never be able to watch that movie again now that I’ve read the novel. What he puts the poor gypsy girl through simply because he can’t control his inner demons is absolutely atrocious. Also, in the novel, Frollo is thirty-six years old to Esmeralda’s mere sixteen years of age. I don’t know why Disney chose to animate this story, to be quite honest.
In that animated version, Captain Phoebus is portrayed quite heroically. Nothing could be further from the truth in the novel. The only hero, the only man with a solid moral compass in the entire array of male characters, is Quasimodo, yet he is loved by no one because of his severe deformity and exterior ugliness.
The hunchback and the young gypsy are inextricably bound together from childhood until the bitter end of their young lives. When Esmeralda was one year old, a band of gypsies stole her from her mother and left the four-year-old Quasimodo in her place. The grief-stricken mother left him in a box for foundlings and then holed herself up in a small cell for penitents in the hopes that her daughter would be restored to her. A crowd of people initially wanted to kill the boy because of his deformities, but Frollo adopted the youth and set him to a life of being the bell ringer of Notre Dame. Frollo did this because, at that time, he bore a sense of fraternal love for his much younger brother who he was raising after their parents’ deaths. That brother, Jehan, never amounts to anything and suffers an ugly fate the same night that all the other main characters suffer their horrible fates.
It’s that word “fate” that led Hugo to write this novel. He saw it carved upon the walls in Notre Dame, written in Greek, one day during a visit to the cathedral. The word stayed with him, and a famous novel sprang from it. The fate of everyone in the story comes to an end on the same night, and they all hinge upon misguided love. Most die, but Phoebus doesn’t; he suffers a fate worse than death -- Phoebus “. . . also came to a tragic end: he married.”
This novel is very tragic, yet it contains a lot of humor, too, as evidenced in that quote. Hugo also interjects treatises on historical elements, architecture, and even how the printing press was considered to be a horrible invention that would ruin everything. He puts so much into this novel that one reading does not suffice to take it all in; nor does one small column suffice to give it the credit it deserves. Read the book and judge for yourself.
Each year, I tackle a few of the Pulitzer Prize winners of fiction. I read three this year. They were "Arrowsmith" by Sinclair Lewis, "Empire Falls" by Richard Russo, and "Years of Grace" by Margaret A. Barnes. Even though Barnes won her Pulitzer 90 years ago, I still thoroughly enjoyed her novel, and I wrote my first column of 2021 about it. Here it is:
Great books often find us when we most need them. After a year of very few ups and many downs, I was desperately in the mood to read something to take my mind off negative things for a while. Knowing I had over thirty Pulitzers still awaiting me, I scanned their covers until my eyes fell upon the lovely-sounding title Years of Grace by Margaret A. Barnes.
I recall thinking that our world could use a few years of grace, so I took the book off the shelf and riffled through its pages. Since my copy is a Franklin Library edition, it doesn’t have any explanatory book jacket information, so I conducted a quick online search to learn more about the story. It sounded like something I’d enjoy, and I saw that the book is largely out of print and hard to come by, so I figured I owed it to Margaret A. Barnes to, perhaps, breathe a little life back into her 1931 Pulitzer winner if her story could breathe a little joy back into me.
The novel is wonderful and as delightful as its title; yet, it’s also packed full of nuggets of wisdom from a by-gone era that are as relevant today as they were then. The 563 pages of this novel simply flew past as the story enveloped me, and I physically felt myself become more relaxed as I read.
Simply put, the story is about a Chicago girl named Jane Ward and her life from the age of fifteen to the age of fifty-one. To be honest, Jane doesn’t really do much -- she attends a couple years of college, gets married at a young age, has three children, and then becomes a grandmother -- but that’s what makes the overall story so wonderfully relatable. In the long run, most people don’t really DO a whole lot with their lives, but they still fully live those lives on an inner plane.
Barnes’ writing style is simple, yet profound. Jane’s life is simple, yet profound. Throughout the story, I was treated to Jane’s ever-changing, ever-questioning, ever-maturing inner life, and I marvelled at how very much a girl who came of age in the 1880’s is exactly like a girl (me) who came of age in the 1980’s. By the end of the book, Jane has surpassed the age of fifty, as have I, and in the final section, she has a few existential crises much like I’ve had, and much like we all have as we approach old age.
Here is a part of that: “Your inner life -- how confusing it all was! A chaos of conflicting loyalties! . . . Why had things turned out as they had? Predestination was probably the answer. Cause and effect. One thing leading to another. Free will was only a delusion. Why not turn fatalist, pure and simple, and not worry any longer? Not care.”
Jane does care, though, as do I, and as does every rational person. We all care about something. We’re in strange times, but we can be like Jane in this lovely book, and, even if our outward life may change in ways we don’t like, our inner lives can be very fulfilling. We all have a “secret stage on which the passionate personal drama” of our own lives plays out.
I’ve now read sixty of the ninety-six Pulitzer winners of fiction. I’m glad I waited until now to read Years of Grace by Margaret A. Barnes, but it won’t be the last time I’ll read this quiet, calming, wonderful book.
Rarely can I let a year go by in which I don't read something by Willa Cather. She's one of the best-known and most-beloved of all Nebraska authors. While I, too, am a Nebraska author, I will never hold a candle to Cather's mastery of story telling or the legacy of literature she left behind. This year I read "Death Comes for the Archbishop."
