Paradise Bulletin: Cherry Blossoms and Kathryn Davis at Third Place Books
Paradise Bulletin: Cherry Blossoms and Kathryn Davis at Third Place Books
Spring has come in earnest and the city has been opening up. The cherry no blossom season, two weeks at best, is at its height and furnishing me, as it usually does, with writing material, this week’s almanac entry for example. The University of Washington campus is well known for their trees, almost a century old, and they were a definite highlight of studying there, a definite highlight of still living where I am, in Seattle, even when the premium for it seems more and more unreasonable.
For the first time in two years, since the pandemic began in earnest, Third Place Books, a local smallish bookstore chain, hosted a live event, a reading by one of my favorite contemporary authors, Kathryn Davis. She has a new book out, Aurelia, Aurélia, an unconventional work, even by her standards, a memoir that began life as a craft book on writing, which, on revision, shed its didactic elements. Neither genre appeals to me personally in of themselves, and Davis said as much herself, except for the exemplary works, of course; she mentioned Chateaubriand and his Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, being a friend and colleague of a translator of that massive work. I didn’t ask but suspect it’s the recent edition published by NYRB.
At the book signing, I mentioned to Davis that I had visited the Chateaubriand family chateau in Normandy, where a significant portion, in terms of importance and not space, of the first volume takes place. The young Chateaubriand, a dreamy isolated boy, is frightened by what he believes to be the ghost of a cat. This is seen, in later history, to have been truly portentous, since an actual cat was found mummified and entombed in the castle walls, buried alive there as a ward against evil, as per medieval superstition. Davis got the somewhat rushed and mumbled secondhand version of this story, and then wrote a nice note referring back to it. Many writers see readings and other promotional events as a chore. Davis says she does not and this was evident. A very charming and thoughtful person.
As for her new book, what I’ve read of it so far has the key elements that make her fiction so engaging. The style is simple, not plain, composed in brief sentences, brief paragraphs, brief chapters. The subject of the book, when it was a craft book, was transitions, and Davis can command very abrupt shifts in time and space, all while still maintaining an approachable, almost conversational style. There are the usual late life accoutrements: aging, illness, death, depicted with light brushwork, not time regained exactly, but a brief span—bookwise—well spent.
