A Short List for 2008
Happy new year, bibliofans! I hope you’ve all resolved to read more books. It goes without saying that I have. If you’re anything like me, the piles by the bedside are reaching alarming heights.
This year, however, I’ve resolved to read more nonfiction. Namely, Agatha Christie’s autobiography titled Come, Tell Me How You Live, a witty and incisive account of her travels in Syria accompanying her archaeologist husband, Max Mallowan. (I’m guessing this is where she got some of her material for such Middle East-inspired classics as Murder in Mesopotamia, Death Comes as the End, and They Came to Baghdad, to name a few.) I got my copy from the library, but as far as I can tell, the book is still in print and available from Akadine Press ($18.95).
Also: a collection of essays on painting called Mysteries of the Rectangle ($18.95) by Siri Hustvedt, whom you may recognize as the author of the novel What I Loved (also on the TBR pile). And another book about chess, this nonfiction, called King’s Gambit: A Son, a Father, and the World’s Most Dangerous Game, which was published this fall and is available for $24.95.
But before I set out on my reality-driven 2008 reading plan, I thought I’d see out 2007 with one from Ruth Rendell. The Chimney Sweeper’s Boy (Simon & Schuster, $14.95), which she wrote under the nom de plume Barbara Vine, proves itself a deliciously tangled web of fiction.
When the daughter of acclaimed author George Candless is asked to write a memoir of her recently departed father, she quickly discover that he wasn’t at all the man everyone assumed him to be. Woven into this psychological thriller are portraits of rejection, manipulation, emotional cruelty, secrecy, alcoholism and of course, heaps of Rendell’s signature literary allusions.
What I like best, perhaps, about The Chimney Sweeper’s Boy is how in attempting the write a biography of her father, Sarah is forced to revisit his novels (and he was quite prolific), which sparks an obsessive and futile quest to sort out fact from fabrication. Are the characters based on people Candless knew? Did he experience the events he describes so cannily? Suddenly every detail takes on ominous significance, from a palm cross in the writer’s desk drawer to a black moth that appears on his books’ dust jackets.
At the first go it may not seem so, but The Chimney Sweeper’s Boy is in fact a very clever work of metafiction. Plus, each chapter begins with a pithy epigram taken from the fictional Gerald Candless’s works of fiction. Are they clues to his identity? I’ll leave it to you to find out.
I’ve not read all of Rendell’s work; yet of what I’ve read so far, I do tend to favor her writing as Barbara Vine. Check out the Edgar-winning A Dark-Adapted Eye as case in point. And if you’ve not yet gotten around to A Judgement in Stone, I’m going to ask what you’re waiting for.
Rendell’s works are, in my mind, psychological fiction at its best.
Happy reading,
Elizabeth Frengel
