Daylight savings hit and the season’s turning and we’re officially in April, Berlin’s most unpredictable month. My wife says spring is the worst season because the hectic pace of it all is exhausting and if the sun is shining it’s probably a trick and the wind will chase you all the way home. In case you prefer to be chased by fiction, here are book recs with weather that is present and unavoidable, even if you’d rather it wasn’t.
When you first meet Tsukiko and her old high school teacher/new barfly buddy Sensei (she’s thirty-seven now, and can rarely be bothered to remember his name), they’re making the momentous decision to venture outside from the dim bar where they’ve built their careful, courteous friendship. Outside the bright verdant summer is waiting for them, and you can feel Tsukiko eyeing her companion up in the light of day for the first time. All the same, Hiromi Kawakami’s STRANGE WEATHER IN TOKYO moves at a quiet, steady-to-slow pace, like a gentle shuffle into love. Ably translated by Allison Markin Powell, the novel is full of unexpected showers, the hot humidity before a storm, a kind of choking sense in the atmosphere that Tsukiko flares up against and Sensei gently dispels. I read this novel over one sleepy, rainy weekend, lulled and startled by it at once, a push-pull will they/won’t they that follows the same uneasy patterns as my unpredictable spring, sliding from sulkiness to fear to happiness to grief in smooth steps. A drinking buddy romance, a later life romance, a sweetheart with a sting in its tail.
(buy @ bookshop)“You have never been so hungry; you have never been so cold,” kicks off David Benioff’s CITY OF THIEVES and from there it rackets up into a 100mph rollercoaster that I scrambled through almost (but not quite) too fast to cry. In 1942 Leningrad under siege, Lev and Kolya are both arrested and under threat of execution when a colonel offers them a way out: find him a dozen eggs for his daughter’s wedding cake within the week, somewhere in the starving city. The bitter cold of the Russian winter is a formidable antagonist, and along the way Lev and Kolya also run into a husband-and-wife cannibal team, friendly and very unfriendly fire, the SS paramilitary death squads, and the hottest sharpshooter you have ever seen (no fear, she’s not a Nazi). The central trio at the heart of the novel reminded me of that slightly old school threesome, two men basically in love and a woman granted just as much integrity and ruthlessness along with a kiss for heterosexuality’s sake; I hate to throw around the term “OT3” in 2021, but, you know. Benioff is better known for being the showrunner of Game of Thrones (and you can kind of tell from this book’s cinematic sweep) but don’t hold that against him: I ate this up in a few fevered hours and am already considering a reread.
(buy @ bookshop)There’s a really good implication a little way into FOREIGN AFFAIRS, Alison Lurie’s nastily polite comedy of manners about American academics let loose on England, that actually it isn’t London our hapless hero Fred Turner hates but just its bad weather. The best cure for that is an actress: “A month ago all of London for him was like the empty country fairgrounds outside his home town on some cold evening — a sour, dim expanse of cropped stubble and stones. Now, because of Rosemary Radley, it had been transformed into a kind of circus of light.” Strange customs, strange people, the sense that tall, handsome Fred who has always been so beloved everywhere he goes might not fit in these cramped rooms — all is resolved into sunshine, which, of course, you should not trust. Foreign Affairs plays a clever switching game with its two protagonists, Fred and the cranky children’s literature specialist Professor Vinnie Miner; at first it’s Vinnie, with her grumpy squalling and fastidious habits, who is the tragicomic figure, Fred the tragic hero. But Lurie quietly upends them, sends them on elevators travelling in different directions. Fred’s life goes better for him, but it’s Vinnie, alone and anxious, who stands in the clear light of heroism at the novel’s close.
(buy @ bookshop, or go hunting on ebay for the great old edition)I briefly considered TINY MOONS by Nina Mingya Powles paired with the Benioff for an ‘adventures’ theme: the essay collection pins so perfectly the stirring misery and excitement of a year abroad. Subtitled “A year of eating in Shanghai”, TINY MOONS is a gastronomic history handled with Powles’ light, lovely touch, as deft and beautiful when she writes about loneliness or her mixed race heritage as she is on a comprehensive tour of Shanghai’s many dumplings (she describes xiao huntun as “little princesses dressed in oversized gowns”: doesn’t that rule??). The book is another tour through the seasons, meaning you get to see Powles grow into the weather and out of her homesickness until Shanghai has become its own form of home. She pairs weather and seasons with food in deceptively simple evocative prose (“What I eat for breakfast in Shanghai depends on the season, my mood, and the level of rainfall,” one chapter begins, as she unspools cold smog, yellow autumn mornings, summer downpours before you). I’d advise you not to read this book hungry, except pre-warned or not, by the end you’ll be starved: for noodles, for aubergines, for sky.
(buy direct from the emma press)ALSO CONSIDER: a good seasonal fit mentioned in a previous edition of this newsletter, The Beginning of Spring; the album Funerals by Arcade Fire, full of rainfall; the snow that gives Mr Elton his unfortunate chance in Emma; “Franklin, farsighted and anxious, bumbled villages”, a favourite poem about hurricanes; all the classic blizzards, from The Fellowship of the Ring to The Wolves of Willoughby Chase; “anything bad sliding/off them, and they would feel owned, completely owned,/in a good way, by the air, which would touch them constantly”; a deeply soothing 90 minute video of someone walking through Seoul in the heavy rain; swimming pool zine, a satisfying dive into the smell of chlorine.