So you think you can read X
Book recommendations "n" stuff for late January
Two book recommendations, a medieval fairy punch, and a moneymaking scheme for your consideration. Stay warm, amigos…
The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch
Fiction, 1973
Something Iris Murdoch has in common with Too $hort is that they are both committed to “getting freaky in the right situations.” In Murdoch’s case, the situation is: novels. Her official work as a philosopher is lucid, with a clear origin point (Plato), and feels as sensible and chewy to consume as fiber. Her novels, of which there are roughly 1 million, are fiber’s opposite. They are bizarre, sexy, easily digested objects.
The plots often feature conniving upper-middle-class British people having affairs and ruining their own or each other’s lives. Her novels veer recklessly in quality. Martin Amis, reviewing one of Murdoch’s crappier efforts, wrote: “It would be futile to summarize the plot. Life is too short. The book is too long.” Ha ha. A lot of her novels are too long. But not this one. Amis gave it a stamp of approval, calling it “intricate and fascinating.”
The story is presented as the memoir of a persnickety writer named Bradley—at first he is like Charles Kinbote if Charles Kinbote were dreary instead of insane, but then Bradley falls in love and does indeed go insane. His passion is a spark that lights the fuse of his limited social circle and soon everyone is exploding for separate but related reasons. I bet every character is based on someone Iris Murdoch knew and I bet they all stopped talking to her once the book came out.
People tend to start with The Sea, The Sea when embarking on HMS Murdoch but this is the better novel on all dimensions. One of those dimensions is, it has 95% fewer descriptions of canned food.
RIYL: Pale Fire, tricky framing devices, allowing your decisions to be influenced by dreams, getting drunk and confessing stuff
The Tattoo Murder by Akimitsu Takagi, translated by Deborah Boliver Boehm
Mystery, 1948
I can count on one finger the number of times I’ve read a book on the basis of its author bio. This is the finger:
Akimitsu Takagi was born in Japan in 1920 and went on to work as an aeronautical engineer until the end of the Second World War. He later decided to become a mystery writer on the recommendation of a fortune teller.
Sold sold sold. I gather The Tattoo Murder is a canonical locked-room murder mystery in Japan and am stumped about why it isn’t ubiquitous everywhere else, given how well the genre translates. Perhaps it is too gruesome and upsetting, both as a plot and a historical document of postwar Tokyo.
The book was published in 1948 and takes place in 1947, so the war wounds are really fresh. Stray dogs nose through burnt buildings, bathhouses open and close on the whims of fuel availability, formal gardens are converted into sustenance vegetable patches. Our protagonist Kenzo Matsushita is an ex-soldier trying to rebuild his life in Tokyo when he meets a tattooed mystery lady. After a single memorable tryst he falls in love— only to be dragged into a body-horror nightmare when the seductress’s corpse turns up in an impossible crime scene. Flawless puzzle-plot ensues.
Often flawless prose, too: “A rodent-colored dusk had fallen over the troubled city of Tokyo.” Or, “It’s the quintessential sound of lunchtime in Japan: the sibilant din of noodles being aspirated into hungry mouths at great velocity.” Sibilant din, jeez.
The novel truly is creepier than anything you’d find in an American mystery of the same time. It is also far more emotional: the characters are pummeled with grief, nauseated by gore, tearful with remorse. The anomie of the hardboiled genre is present but it is differently aestheticized; Takagi is dealing in a malaise too profound to brook “coolness.”
He was also a photographer of otherworldly talents:
RIYL: The Third Man, David Cronenberg, József Debreczeni's Cold Crematorium: Reporting from the Land of Auschwitz, tattoo culture
Department of health
A medieval herbalist once wrote of his recipe collection: “Most of [these] I am confident are true, and if there be any that are not so, yet they are pleasant.” That’s a nice attitude, doc. Pleasure is neither sufficient nor necessary when it comes to medicine, but we are all surprised and comforted on the rare occasions when it is present.
Medievalers were heavy users of fennel for all manner of ailments—swelling, eye problems, ear problems, anguished stomachs. I found a recipe in which fennel juice was poured into a mixture of milked almonds, sugar, ginger juice, and wine. It sounded like a dainty feminine punch, so I made it, and lo, it was Goode. Creamy, green, sweet. A fairy nectar.
To make it, chop a fennel bulb and a thumb’s worth of ginger and put those in a blender with 1/2 c water. Then strain the blended mixture into your almond milk, add a few spoonfuls sugar, and as much Riesling as your liver can handle. Now you are healthy.
Department of moneymaking schemes
Last time I was on an airplane I got a faraway whiff, from row 42, of the warm chocolate chip cookies that were being served in first class— and it gave me an idea: what if I baked and packed, say, 100 chocolate chip cookies in my carry-on luggage on next trip and traveled up and down the aisles of the economy section selling them at an audacious (but not insulting) markup? Could probably clear $800 as a cookie-dealer to a captive audience. What would Delta do, arrest me? If anyone has experimented with unlicensed vending opportunities on commercial aircraft, get in touch.
More book recommendations from the archive: mutant tree thriller, Gone Girl redux, noir serial killer, lesbian French militante, and countless others…
Thank you for reading. Please consider purchasing an eight-dollar cookie from me on your next flight.
Farewell,
Molly