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“The book of events is always open in the middle.”
A Chicago Sun-Times article from January 10th, 2024 is headlined: “Art Institute to defend its ownership of watercolor that New York authorities contend Nazis stole during Holocaust”
The piece in question is “Russian War Prisoner” by Egon Schiele (not currently on display). Prosecutors in New York allege that pierce is the rightful property of the family of ritz Grünbaum, a cabaret star who was killed in the Holocaust. The museum insists his sister-in-law was the rightful owner, who sold the painting. The artwork is valued at $1.25 million.
During a chapter of Teju Cole’s Tremor, the narrator Tunde shares the history of a painting, Landscape with Burning City. It is currently housed at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. It was owned by Franz Koenings in Germany in the 1930s. He took out a loan and used the painting as collateral. The painting as later sold to Adolf Hitler’s second in command, Hermann Goering. And then…?????...and then it ended up at the MFA.
“Every year a hundred people or so fell over the side of cruise ships,” our narrator Hugo tells us throughout Garth Miró’s debut novel The Vacation. It’s worth keeping this fact in mind, before we explore the choppy waters of dissecting vacation and wellness and bliss. Before the mystery of missing persons. Before we discover why everything smells like chicory.
“The more one limits oneself, the closer one is to the infinite.”
1. e4 e5
One of my last visits to Space Oddities before it closed, I found The Lüneburg Variation by Paolo Maurensig. I was not familiar with the author but a blurb compared him to Italo Calvino. The description on the back cover made it seem like it would be a murder mystery. Given a recent infatuation with chess (since waned) I decided to give it a try. Never hurts to have something lighter around to read - as light as a Calvino-inspired murder-mystery could be at least.
2. Nf3 Nc6
Stefan Zweig is a writer that I do not recall how I first heard about. Perhaps browsing in a different bookstore, perhaps he swam in the same waters as other writers and authors I was familiar with and appreciate. The novella Chess Story probably isn’t the best introduction to his work but it’s the one that kept calling out to me. Adding to cart every time the NYRB had an online sale, but never quite checking out. Until all the pieces were ready.
Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano passed away in 2015 and has been on my to-read list since. His books have remained elusive, seemingly banished from all Chicago bookstores. Eventually, I took advantage of the deus ex machina of Bookshop and ordered two books of his last fall, primarily because I wanted to read Soccer in Sun and Shadow ahead of the World Cup (required reading for any soccer fans or frauds like myself). Last week, I started reading the other book I’d ordered, the Book of Embraces. Here he wrote (as translated by Cedric Belfarge):
Chicago is full of factories. There are even factories right in the center of the city, around the world’s tallest building. Chicago is full of factories. Chicago is full of workers.
Arriving in the Haymarket district, I ask my friends to show me the place where the workers whom the whole world salutes every May 1st were hanged in 1886.
‘It must be around here,’ they tell me. But nobody knows where.
No statue has been erected in memory of the martyrs of Chicago in the city of Chicago. Not a statue, not a monolith, not a bronze plaque. Nothing.
The Journal of Albion Moonlight found its way to me as I was shelving books in the used bookstore where I used to work. A beat-up copy of a New Directions paperback with scribblings inside, I began salivating the instant I saw it. With comparisons to Camus on the back cover and praise from Henry Miller (“Nothing like it has been written…in all English literature it stands alone”), it was too on the nose, up my alley, a pair of gloves made just for me. I purchased it without giving any customers a chance.
I expected a couple punches to the gut.
“What does Aleppo mean?” asks a President. “It means to give milk to travelers as they pass through the region,” says a President.
Milk. And mice. And mothers. That’s what these stories are about (and not about).
Also, Mums, it is impossible to tell if you really love a mouse or if you only love the word ‘mouse’ for some exhausting reason.
The stories of Sabrina Orah Mark’s Wild Milk feel like a code, or a jigsaw puzzle without a map. There isn’t a legend or key or guide. It’s something obscure that’s meant to be put together, bit by bit, piece by piece. Unfocusing your eyes a little bit to see the magic three dimensional reveal.
I should have been inured to climatic changes; but I again felt I had moved out of ordinary life into an area of total strangeness. All this was real, it was really happening, but with a quality of the unreal; it was reality happening in quite a different way.
Why read science fiction? Have you read the news? Forever chemicals in freshwater. Ohio says natural gas is now clean energy. More tornadoes than average nationwide. Less snow than average in Chicago.
I could have written this post ten years ago and there would be equally as bizarre environmental concerns.
Is that what makes Ice such a good book? The confusing narrative, the hallucinations, the not knowing what is and is not real? We’re apparently hurtling towards disaster, but we still dance and party like nothing is going to happen.
