Dear readers,
I recently had a birthday. When I mention this to friends and acquaintances, they seem confused, a little offended: did I throw a party and not invite them? No, there is no party. Honestly, something in me resists celebrating my personal anniversary with those who know and love me. I call it summer birthday disorder.
As a kid with a July birthday, I never got to bring cupcakes to school. When I was a teenager, my friends were away working at the Jersey Shore or doing some kind of summer program that our guidance counselor said would look good on college applications. My calendar was supposed to line up with everyone else’s by the time I finished university, but I stayed late to the party (I graduated school), which further delayed the actual birthday parties.
A few years passed when I celebrated not with old friends but with new ones — mostly people I met at language schools in Russia and Eastern Europe. The American birthday song was replaced by the song of Gena the Crocodile, a popular character from the Soviet cartoon “Cheburashka.” It’s as melancholy a tune as you’d want from the Russians: On a rainy day, a lonely crocodile leaves his job at the zoo (he works as a crocodile; in the USSR everyone is a worker) and plays himself a birthday song for a solitary audience of a truck driver parked on his street. However he was glad. “It’s worth a tears,” he sings, “that one’s birthday only comes once a year.”
I read the analysis of this scene as subversive social commentary, the empty street a sly suggestion that everyone is waiting elsewhere in the long Soviet queue for goods. oh, I thought. I just assumed Gena had a summer birthday and was moved that a random truck driver chose to spend it with him.
I know that feeling. For a long time, I got used to hearing the Crocodile birthday song sung by people I knew for about a week before we suddenly started being together every day — no small thing during the summer, when the days are longest.
Recently, I’ve settled into a not so great trip. I signed leases. I stay all year round. I struggle with this, however, this permanence. I find myself longing, especially as the weather warms, for summers gone by with strangers, for the sweet gesture of someone who doesn’t know your last name making sure everything comes to that one bar near the language school at 8 pm to toast your birthday. I miss the concentrated intensity of those relationships that then evaporate so suddenly, just like time.
The only way back now, at least for me, is through fiction. Here are some novels that give me the same rush of feeling, two slim volumes filled with the symptoms of summer birthday disorder: a warm kind of sadness, a cooling of expectations, and when the temperatures meet — sharing an umbrella with a stranger, cheek to cheek.
—Jennifer Wilson
Crime has a way of making travel writers out of its victims. Suddenly you find yourself asking questions like: Where are you? Have you encountered anything unusual? Tell us everything you remember; even the most mundane detail can be significant in ways you don’t yet understand. The novelist Vendela Vida seems to have understood this analogy very well. His books, which often combine two genres — crime and travel fiction — show the way violence takes a person out of the land of the naive faster than any jet. In fact, the opposite for naive is worldly.
In “The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty,” we meet an American woman traveling to Casablanca. Within minutes of his arrival at the hotel, the bag containing his computer and wallet, along with all his identification, was stolen. Before long, our nameless traveler begins to create an “inventory of missing contents” for the local detective, a list that may include him as well. He is fleeing from some vaguely outlined personal disaster that occurred back in Florida. Whatever caused the divorce and the trip to Morocco he really couldn’t afford. “I am a writer for The New York Times. I’m making up a story on a trip to Casablanca,” he lied to the police, hoping to scare them into searching his belongings. “I really don’t want to include it,” he added, with the polite intimidation of an American abroad.
With no money, he began improvising, taking on new identities that further distanced himself — including, at one point, a job as a body double for an American actress shooting a movie in Casablanca. In other words, she will pretend to be another woman pretending to be someone else. While waiting for his scene to begin, he took a book from the set. This is a collection of poems by Rumi. He begins to read:
You are sitting here with us, but you are also walking outside
in a field at dawn. You yourself
the animal we hunt when you join us on the hunt.
You are in your body like a plant that is strong in the ground,
you are still wind You are the diver’s clothes
lying empty on the beach. You are the fish.
The poem captures the tension at the heart of the novel. Is it a story about sadness or adventure? Sometimes a life lived full and vibrant can seem like the absence of the people you left behind, and maybe, in a way, it is.
Read if you like: “A Separation,” by Katie Kitamura, “Intimacies,” also by Katie Kitamura, literary doubles, books about movies, creating premeditated travel itineraries that you know/hope will screw up.
Available from: HarperCollins
“The Taiga Syndrome,” by Cristina Rivera Garza
Fiction, 2012 (with English translation, by Suzanne Jill Levine and Aviva Kana, published 2018)
I’ll read anything on the taiga, the band of boreal forest just south of the Arctic Circle. The taiga crosses continents. There is Siberian taiga and Canadian taiga, for example. We do not know which of these the detective goes to in Mexican author Cristina Rivera Garza’s novel “The Taiga Syndrome” in search of a missing couple, a man and a woman. Details of nationality and language are kept vague; the detective struggles to understand his local translator when he tries to speak his unknown native language, so they resort to “a language neither his nor mine, a third space, a second common language.”
The detective is actually a former detective who has since written novels, versions of his unsolved cases, where fiction now allows him to “narrate a series of events without discounting madness or suspense .” Did madness drive this missing woman and her new husband into the snowy forest? His first wife, who hired a detective, was convinced that her ex-husband was suffering from something called taiga syndrome. “It seems,” he said, “that some inhabitants of the taiga began to suffer terrible anxiety attacks and made suicidal attempts to escape,” suicide because they were “surrounded by the same land within of 5,000 kilometers.”
The taiga found by the detective is not a repository for the legends we tell about distant places; it is, instead, a broken landscape, torn apart by deforestation, extractive capitalism and illegal businesses built to serve people in the logging industry.
The ex-husband is convinced that his ex-husband wants to be found because of a telegram he received: “WHAT DO WE DO WHEN WE SAY GOODBYE?” In Garza’s dark fairy tale of escape and pursuit in a dangerous forest, the Arctic is not pure and white as snow, and only a big bad wolf can read a line like a breadcrumb.
Read if you like: “Smilla’s Sense of Snow,” Helen Oyeyemi’s novels, the adjective “phantasmagorical,” the adverb “desperately”
Available from: The Dorothy Projectthe New York Public Library (once I return my copy)
Why do not you…
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Recite a recipe? In “A History of Cookbooks: From Kitchen to Page Over Seven Centuries” (2017), Henry Notaker writes about the popularity of cookbooks in verse, where rhyming recipes allow for instructions to be better committed to memory, even in theory. Sometimes, it just allowed poets to have a little harmless, delicious fun. From German Romantic poet Eduard Mörike’s recipe for Christmas cookies: “Now put it all while it’s hot/On a plate (but poets need/A poem here now, and therefore feed/The finished things in a pot).”
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Know why so many people are obsessed with getting to the bottom of the ocean? In “Sinkable: Attraction, the Deep Sea, and the Wreck of the Titanic” (2022), science writer Daniel Stone explores the public’s fascination with sunken ships and what attempts to revive the Titanic, a symbol of wealth and power, say about whose memories are allowed sink and who we don’t let drown.
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Listen to the latest on wax at a 1950s Harlem rent party? Rent parties appeared in Harlem in the 1920s, lasting until the Great Depression and finding a resurgence in the postwar era. Black renters face the dual burden of lower wages and higher rents. To avoid eviction, many, especially domestic workers, held house parties, charging for admission. Poet Langston Hughes collects the invitations, which usually include a catchy poem, like this one one: “You can wake up the Devil/raise all Hell;/Nobody’s going to go home and tell.”
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