Three for the First Day of Spring: Renkl, Sukegawa and Tucker
I suppose the best kind of spring morning is the best weather God has to offer.
~I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
Happy spring! (Although the blossom is fading and, going by the temperature the past few days, you might think it was early summer here.) When I borrowed the psychological thriller The First Day of Spring from the library, I decided to consider that my built-in review deadline. As is my wont, I’ve turned it into a trio with two books more laterally related to spring: a lovely book of miniature autobiographical essays about interactions with family and the natural world, and a short Japanese novel about misfits who find belonging at a pancake restaurant.
Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss by Margaret Renkl (2019)
My favorite season is spring—until fall arrives, and then my favorite season is fall: the seasons of change, the seasons that tell me to wake up, to remember that every passing moment of every careening day is always the last moment, always the very last time, always the only instant I will ever take that precise breath or watch that exact cloud scud across that particular blue of the sky.
The memoir in flash essays is one of my favourite niche forms. (Beth-Ann Fennelly and Abigail Thomas also do it exceptionally well.) It took me a long time to promote this book from occasional bedside reading pile to daytime stack, but at a certain point it became impossible to let it out of my hands for very long. I had to smell it and browse her brother Billy’s collage artworks. Each piece is somewhere between a paragraph and several pages long, and they make up a rough chronology of a life, from her grandmother’s memories of the 1930s onward (the passages in italics are interview transcripts) through to the present day.
Renkl grew up in Alabama in the 1960s–70s, in the sort of mildly dysfunctional family that most of us probably have. She contrasts what she knew as a child with what she didn’t. It was a happy childhood but. (Her mother’s recurring mental health problems and racial tensions in the South would be two ways to finish that sentence.) There were hounds and porch seats and three kids in the backseat on vacations. There were funerals and old love songs and Bible verses and playing in the woods. Grandmother tells of births and deaths, and Renkl remembers life’s transitions: getting her first period, being so homesick that she couldn’t finish college in Philadelphia, adjusting to early motherhood and then to an empty nest – an appropriate metaphor because many of the essays are about birds Renkl watches feeding and nesting. She isn’t naïve; she knows nature is cruel. Not every fledgling will survive and majestic hawks will kill equally beautiful songbirds. She realizes how dire the situation is for monarch butterflies, too, but keeps planting milkweed at her Nashville home.
This balancing of appreciation for life and acceptance of death is at its finest in the late pieces on her parents’ death. Her mother, like mine, died suddenly after a stroke, and her words on that loss are exquisite as well as painful. Still, she asserts, “Human beings are creatures made for joy. Against all evidence, we tell ourselves that grief and loneliness and despair are tragedies, unwelcome variations from the pleasure and calm and safety that in the right way of the world would form the firm ground of our being.”
Like Ross Gay and Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Renkl brings a poet’s eye for language and an amateur’s awe at the natural world to her micro-essays. She calls a cedar waxwing “An operatic aria of a bird. A flying jungle flower. A weightless coalescence of air and light and animation.” This is a book to cherish and learn from and reread. (Birthday gift from my sister from my wish list) 
{SPOILERS IN THESE NEXT TWO REVIEWS}
Sweet Bean Paste by Durian Sukegawa (2013; 2017)
[Translated from Japanese by Alison Watts]
It was the colours (especially that wash of cherry-blossom pink) that first attracted me to this book, and the foodie theme that kept me reading. Sentaro manages a small shop on Cherry Blossom Street, Doraharu, which sells dorayaki – pancakes filled with sweet bean paste (“during cherry-blossom season petals sometimes drifted in, falling into the pancakes as they cooked”). He takes little pride in the work; it’s just a way to keep busy and pay off his debts from the time he was in prison for drug-dealing. When an elderly woman named Tokue offers to make the sweet bean paste for a pittance, he decides to give her a trial even though he usually orders it in bulk. Tokue’s homemade is so much better that the shop is soon making record profits. She trains Sentaro up in the art of making the perfect paste, which to her is a mystical process that involves listening to the beans. Not only does Tokue have new ideas for the menu, but she also makes troubled teenage customers such as Wakana welcome with friendly conversation. Along with Marvy the canary, these three form a fragile little family.
But then rumours start spreading about Tokue and her health, and Doraharu’s owner threatens to shut the place down if Sentaro doesn’t let her go. It turns out that she had Hansen’s disease (the preferred term for leprosy) and lives in a sanatorium. Even though she has long since been cured, there is still a stigma, and when she was young she could only find love and community among her fellow patients. In an Author’s Note, Sukegawa explains that the legislation keeping Hansen’s patients isolated was only repealed in 1996. His philosophy, made explicit in the letters Tokue writes to Sentaro after leaving the shop, is that one doesn’t have to be useful to have a meaningful life; simply being alive and observing is enough. I found Tokue saccharine: too wise, good and all-forgiving. This is easy reading, yet the dialogue felt stiff, the characterization thin, the letters unsubtle, and the detail of confectionery-making too technical. Secondhand – public library book sale) 
The First Day of Spring by Nancy Tucker (2021)
I’d very much admired Tucker’s first two books – The Time in Between, a memoir of her childhood anorexia; and especially That Was When People Started to Worry, case studies of young women’s mental health – so asked my library to purchase her debut novel. Tucker is a trainee clinical psychiatrist. The psychological insight she’s developed professionally and through writing about herself and others served her well in crafting this portrait of a deprived girl who murders other children. I could have included it in my Mother’s Day post because, as in the similarly dark Like Mother (by Jenny Diski), it’s the lack of a mother’s love that leaves the protagonist numb and unsure of how to bring up her own daughter.
It’s no whodunit because eight-year-old Chrissie admits in the novel’s first line, “I killed a little boy today.” The mystery is why, and how she’s ultimately caught. It’s the first day of spring when she commits that first murder, of a toddler who lives on the same rough housing estate. Her house isn’t much of a home with no money for electricity, no food in the cupboards, an emotionally absent mother and a father who comes and goes without warning. Chrissie is always hungry, always craving. She couldn’t stand that Steven was loved and coddled while she had nothing. Harbouring “a delicious secret” gives her a “belly-fizzing feeling … like sherbet exploding in my guts. … That was all it took for me to feel like I had all the power in the world.” She wants to tell people what she’s done, but knows she mustn’t.
It’s also the first day of spring when five-year-old Molly falls from a seawall and breaks her wrist. Her mum, Julia, panics when she gets a call from child social services. It becomes clear by the second chapter that Julia is the new name Chrissie was given when she left the residential home for child offenders to start a new life. Sure that they’ll blame her and take Molly away, she gets on a train back to her old neighbourhood to see Mam and her childhood best friend, Linda. “I remembered this in Mam – the pull and push, cling and reject.” The subject matter might have become unbearable had Tucker emphasized the salacious details. Instead, she casts a compassionate eye on generational patterns of neglect and incompetence – patterns that can be broken through hard work. It’s riveting reading, and Julia’s love for Molly and Linda’s enduring friendship brought tears to my eyes. (Public library) 
20 Books of Summer, #11–13: Harrison, Pym, Russell
It’s cats and butterflies in the spotlight this time, adding in a gazelle as a metaphor for Freddie Mercury’s somebody to love.
Travelling Cat: A Journey round Britain with Pugwash by Frederick Harrison (1988)
If Tom Cox had been born 20 years earlier, this is the sort of book he might have written. In 1987, saddened more by his cat Podey being run over than by the end of his marriage, Harrison set out from South London in his Ford Transit van for a seven-month drive around the country. He decided to take Pugwash, one of his local (presumably ownerless) cats, along as a companion.
They encountered Morris dancers, gypsies, hippies at Stonehenge for the Summer Solstice, sisters having a double wedding, and magic mushroom collectors. They went to a county fair and beaches in Suffolk and East Yorkshire, and briefly to Hay-on-Wye. And on the way back they collected Podey, whom he’d had stuffed. Harrison muses on the English “vice” of nostalgia for a past that probably never existed; Pugwash does what cats do, and very well.
It’s all a bit silly and dated and lightweight, but enjoyable nonetheless. Plus there are tons of black-and-white photos of “Pugs” and other feline friends. This was a secondhand purchase from The Bookshop, Wigtown. 
Favorite lines:
“Cats hate to make prats of themselves. But then, don’t we all?”
(last lines) “Warm, fed, contented, unemployable, and entirely at peace with the world. Yes indeed. Cats certainly know something we don’t.”
Some Tame Gazelle by Barbara Pym (1950)
(An example of a book that just happens to have an animal in the title.) I’d only read one other Pym novel, Quartet in Autumn, a late and fairly melancholy story of four lonely older people. With her first novel I’m in more typical territory, I take it. The middle-aged Bede sisters are pillars of the church in their English village. Harriet takes each new curate under her wing, making of them a sort of collection, and fends off frequent marriage proposals from the likes of a celebrity librarian and an Italian count.
Belinda, on the other hand, only has eyes for one man: Archdeacon Hochleve, whom she’s known and loved for 30 years. They share a fondness for quoting poetry, the more obscure the better (like the title phrase, taken from “Some tame gazelle, or some gentle dove: / Something to love, oh, something to love!” by Thomas Haynes Bayly). The only problem is that the archdeacon is happily married. So single-minded is Belinda that she barely notices her own marriage proposal when it comes: a scene that reminded me of Mr. Collins’s proposal to Lizzie in Pride and Prejudice. Indeed, Pym is widely recognized as an heir to Jane Austen, what with her arch studies of relationships in a closed community.
There were a handful of moments that made me laugh, like when the seamstress finds a caterpillar in her cauliflower cheese and has to wipe with a Church Times newspaper when the Bedes run out of toilet paper (such mild sacrilege!). This is enjoyable, if fluffy; it was probably a mistake to have read one of Pym’s more serious books first: I expected too much of this one. If you’re looking for a quick, gentle and escapist read in which nothing awful will happen, though, it would make a good choice. Knowing most of her books are of a piece, I wouldn’t read more than one of the remainder – it’ll most likely be Excellent Women.
An Obsession with Butterflies: Our Long Love Affair with a Singular Insect by Sharman Apt Russell (2003)
This compact and fairly rollicking book is a natural history of butterflies and of the scientists and collectors who have made them their life’s work. There are some 18,000 species and, unlike, say, beetles, they are generally pretty easy to tell apart because of their bold, colorful markings. Moth and butterfly diversity may well be a synecdoche for overall diversity, making them invaluable indicator species. Although the history of butterfly collecting was fairly familiar to me from Peter Marren’s Rainbow Dust, I still learned or was reminded of a lot, such as the ways you can tell moths and butterflies apart (and it’s not just about whether they fly in the night or the day). And who knew that butterfly rape is a thing?
The final third of the book was strongest for me, including a trip to London’s Natural History Museum; another to Costa Rica’s butterfly ranches, an example of successful ecotourism; and a nicely done case study of the El Segundo Blue butterfly, which was brought back from the brink of extinction by restoration of its southern California dunes habitat. Russell, a New Mexico-based author of novels and nonfiction, also writes about butterflies’ cultural importance: “No matter our religious beliefs, we accept the miracle of metamorphosis. One thing becomes another. … Butterflies wake us up.” 
I also recently read the excellent title story from John Murray’s 2003 collection A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies. Married surgeons reflect on their losses, including the narrator’s sister in a childhood accident and his wife Maya’s father to brain cancer. In the late 1800s, the narrator’s grandfather, an amateur naturalist in the same vein as Darwin, travelled to Papua New Guinea to collect butterflies. The legends from his time, and from family trips to Cape May to count monarchs on migration in the 1930s, still resonate in the present day for these characters. The treatment of themes like science, grief and family inheritance, and the interweaving of past and present, reminded me of work by Andrea Barrett and A.S. Byatt.
(I’ve put the book aside for now but will go back to it in September as I focus on short stories.)
Other butterfly-themed books I have reviewed:
- Four Wings and a Prayer: Caught in the Mystery of the Monarch Butterfly by Sue Halpern (one of last year’s 20 Books of Summer)
- Ruins by Peter Kuper (a graphic novel set in Mexico, this also picks up on monarch migration)
- Magdalena Mountain by Robert Michael Pyle (a novel about butterfly researchers in Colorado)
20 Books of Summer #4 + Substitutes & Plane Reading
You’ll have to excuse me posting twice in one day. I’ve just finished packing the last few things for my three weeks in America, and want to get my latest #20BooksofSummer review out there before I fly early tomorrow. What with a layover in Toronto, it will be a very long day of travel, so I think the volume of reading material I’m taking is justified! (See the last photo of the post.)
Four Wings and a Prayer: Caught in the Mystery of the Monarch Butterfly by Sue Halpern (2001)
I admire nonfiction books that successfully combine lots of genres into a dynamic narrative. This one incorporates travel, science, memoir, history, and even politics. Halpern spent a year tracking monarch butterflies on their biannual continent-wide migrations, which were still not well understood at that point. She rides through Texas into Mexico with Bill Calvert, field researcher extraordinaire; goes gliding with David Gibo, a university biologist, in fields near Toronto; and hears from scientists and laymen alike about the monarchs’ habits and outlook. It happened to be a worryingly poor year for the butterflies, yet citizen science initiatives provided valuable information that could be used to predict their future.
The book is especially insightful about clashes between environmentalist initiatives and local livelihoods in Mexico (tree huggers versus subsistence loggers) and the joy of doing practical science with simple tools you make yourself. It’s also about how focused attention becomes passion. “Science, like belief, starts with wonder, and wonder starts with a question,” Halpern writes.
The style is engaging, though at nearly 20 years old the book feels a bit dated, and I might have liked more personal reflections than interviews with (middle-aged, white, male) scientists. I only realized on the very last page, through the acknowledgments, that the author is married to Bill McKibben, a respected environment writer. [She frequently mentions Fred Urquhart, a Toronto zoology professor; I wondered if he could be related to Jane Urquhart, a Canadian novelist whose novel Sanctuary Line features monarchs. (Turns out: no relation. Oh well!)]
Readalikes: Farther Away by Jonathan Franzen & Ruins by Peter Kuper
My rating: 
I’ve already done some substituting on my 20 Books of Summer. I decided against reading Vendela Vida’s Girls on the Verge after perusing the table of contents and the first few pages and gauging reader opinions on Goodreads. I have a couple of review books, Twister by Genanne Walsh and The Life and Loves of Lena Gaunt by Tracy Farr, that I’m enjoying but will have to leave behind while I’m in the States, so I may need that little extra push to finish them once I get back. I’ve also been rereading a favorite, Paulette Bates Alden’s memoir Crossing the Moon, which has proved an excellent follow-up to Sheila Heti’s Motherhood.
(What I haven’t determined yet is which books these will be standing in for.) Waiting in the wings in case further substitutions are needed is this stack of review books:
Also from the #20Books list and coming with me on the flight are Madeleine L’Engle’s The Summer of the Great-Grandmother and Janet Fitch’s White Oleander, which are both terrific thus far. The final print book joining me for the journey is Transit by Rachel Cusk. I have attempted to read her twice before and failed to get through a whole book, so we’ll see if it’s third time lucky. It seems like the perfect book to read in transit to Canada, after all.
Finally, in progress on the Kindle are Summer by Karl Ove Knausgaard, the last in his set of four seasonal essay collections, and The Late Bloomers’ Club by Louise Miller, another cozy novel set in fictional Guthrie, Vermont, which she introduced in her previous book, The City Baker’s Guide to Country Living.
It’ll be a busy few weeks helping my parents pack up their house and moving my mom into her new place, plus doing a reduced freelance work load for the final two weeks. It’s also going to be a strange time because I have to say goodbye to a house that’s been a part of my life for 13 years, and sort through box after box of mementoes before putting everything into medium-term storage.
I won’t be online all that much, and can’t promise to keep up with everyone else’s blogs, but I’ll try to pop in with a few reviews.
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 