Sometimes a writer drifts onto the dovegrey radar with an intermittent signal, little mentions here and there, snippets half-read in review supplements, perhaps a book arrives but then suddenly it all accumulates into one big important bleep on the screen shaping up to an encounter that can't be ignored a moment longer, and that's happened with a couple of writers in recent weeks.
Firstly Lori Moore.
I've had Lorrie Moore's The Collected Stories in the dayglo orange cover sitting on the bedside table since last July. I know so exactly because whenever I embark on a short story collection I jot the down the date I've read the story alongside the title. No it's no good asking, I don't know why either, other than at times like this it's useful to be able to tell you that I read the first story in July and then for some reason the collection was sidelined and sat there gathering dust. Eventually, just this week I decided the dayglo orange was clashing horribly with the soothing decor of the bedroom and it might as well come downstairs and go back on the shelf for a second attempt another year. Then I read Scott Pack's interview with Robert McCrum and most specifically a message obviously aimed at me
SP: You have interviewed many great names of literature - Vidal, Roth, Mailer - but which contemporary authors do you feel will stand the test of time well enough for the McCrums of the future to want to interview them?
RMcC: Tricky one. In no special order, here are my contemporary future greats: Kazuo Ishiguro, Alan Hollinghurst, Colm Toibin... The obvious point is that the development of literary greatness is very hard to predict. But these are all serious - and very good. America is even trickier, but I'd tip two women: Lorrie Moore and Marilynne Robinson, who are both exceptional
STOP...DO NOT MOVE THAT BOOK we already know about Marilynne Robinson and so I have now left Lorrie Moore, clashing away like crazy on the bedside table,(and now it occurs to me, I could just take the dust jacket off) and am back to a story a day from the collection, it's all looking very promising so there will doubtless be more to report soon.
But also on the bedside table, and in an altogether more soothing cover, Notes From Walnut Tree Farm by Roger Deakin.
Various people had been urging me to read Waterlog, Roger Deakin's swimathon journal and Wildwood A Journey Through Trees and I really had meant to. Then another mention of Notes From Walnut Tree Farm from a friend just days after I had read this excellent piece on Roger Deakin in the Hamish Hamilton online literary journal Five Dials and that was me tipped over the edge and tracking down the books.
It's all very well reading all-things Irene Nemirovsky then troika-laden Russian angst and now Agnes Humbert's Resistance, but these are certainly not good night time reading choices.
If ever there was a soothing book most suited to pre-slumber reading and one of which I think Clifton Fadiman might approve, then Notes From Walnut Tree Farm is it. Extracts from the record Roger Deakin kept of his daily life, work, thoughts and memories in the last six years of his life living in his much-loved house in Suffolk and also travelling around. It's edited into just a single chronological year perfect for reading short extracts in keeping with the seasons and I'd quite thought I'd read it that way and make it last the year.
Stupid idea, I'm up to March already and will probably arrive at December before January is out, but the perfect thing about a book like this is to be able to turn to the beginning and start again and I will, because Roger Deakin's eye for nature is the perfect accompaniment to life out here in the backwoods. His observations will blend seamlessly but meaningfully into the view from the window and life out along the lane.
Just wondering whether either of these are on anyone else's radar?
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