Shorties Pt. 3

Three books that are really good and also roughly 100 pages or less <3

The Cook by Maylis de Kerangal

100 pages

This book was a 100000 out of 10 for me. I read it so quickly and so hungrily that I didn’t underline a single phrase, scratch a single exclamation mark in the margins, bracket even one little paragraph. And I regret it now! Because de Kerangal’s language is delicious. This is a short book, but for me it was a whole meal. Okay, I’ll stop with the food puns.

This is the story of Mauro, a young chef. It is the story of how Mauro becomes a young chef. We see him in childhood, in the kitchen with his Italian grandmother, in adolescence, baking cakes out of his recipe book like a scientist. Then as a teenager, throwing together ingredients—whatever’s cheap enough without sacrificing on quality—for his hungry gaggle of friends. Why go out when what Mauro can make is better and costs less?

So he expands his skillset in the kitchen, learns to experiment, realizes that if you cook it (well) they will come. We are assured by our narrator that he never viewed cooking as a potential profession. We sense that Mauro takes cooking more lightly than that, or more seriously, depending on how you look at it. However, a career in cooking is exactly what he ends up with. We follow him from his first kitchen job to his second and so on, until he decides to strike out on his own.

Mauro is a charming character and getting to see what it takes and what it means to actually work in a kitchen is illuminating (particularly if you are someone who enjoys eating out). But the thing that was most compelling to me was not Mauro, or the kitchen confidential vibes, or the mouthwatering food descriptions. It was the narrator—the one who tells us that Mauro never wanted to be a professional chef, along with everything else we know. She’s not just some omniscient non-specific no-one. She’s Mauro’s friend, and she’s almost certainly in love with him. One need not look further than the way she describes his hands for confirmation of this fact.

She obviously views Mauro as an artist. Even up to the point that she’s willing to forgive—willing even to gloss over—some of his less flattering moments. When he’s thoughtless or impenetrable or distant, disappearing into his work at the cost of his friendships, he’s treated with indulgence. This is not a novel concept—forgiving unpleasantness when it is tied to genius, but it’s not just that. She doesn’t love him for his art, she loves him, period.

She worships Mauro, and that’s what makes him good and that’s what makes the book good. Mauro is a beautifully painted portrait. Not in the sense that he’s two dimensional, but in the sense that he’s a work of art too. The narrator’s vision of him is a work of art. Just as the food he creates can be art to the person who consumes it. True art shuns the objective eye (or mouth, as the case may be), both in the creation and in the reception.

---

Daisy Miller by Henry James

64 pages

I finally got around to Daisy Miller and…well…I’m not really sure. I know it’s expertly crafted. So that’s one thing at least. Other than that though, I don’t have a strong opinion one way or the other. I feel like this is the kind of book that I might talk myself into loving by the time I’ve finished writing this. Let’s find out.

As it happens, it’s is another tale with an admired subject, told from the perspective of an admirer. The third book reviewed below is not, so don’t get too excited. This time, we have Daisy Miller, a modern (circa 1870) American woman—though just barely that. A modern American girl-on-the-brink-of-womanhood. She meets Frederick Winterbourne in Switzerland while traveling with her mother and younger brother. Her father stayed at home in Schenectady. Daisy arranges for Winterbourne to take her Chillon, a castle on an island off the coast, unchaperoned!

You see, Daisy is engaging, easygoing and open. She does not stand on circumstance, or worry what others might think. In short, she will act in Europe exactly as she does back home, etiquette be damned—in the most respectful way possible. Winterbourne is American too, but isn’t so familiar with American customs, having spent his schooling years in Europe. He certainly isn’t familiar with any ladies who act like Daisy Miller, or at least not any ones who do and are still respectable. But he thinks that Daisy is respectable. Is he right in his admittedly slightly biased interpretation? Or is he charmed and fooled? That’s what he spends the entire story trying to figure out.

The plot heats up when the two are reunited in Rome some months after their initial encounter. Now, Daisy has a different young man taking her about unchaperoned—this time a little Italian man. The American crowd in Rome does not, cannot approve, which increases Winterbourne’s need to answer his own question. Is Daisy being unfairly condemned, or is she behaving badly? I found the ending to be extremely well executed.

Everything is well executed. James is meticulous with the pacing, the setting, the imagery, the narration—it’s all spotless and air-tight. And all told, Even if some of the central issues are outdated, but there’s still much that can be applied to the current day, much to mull over in multiple different directions.

The idea of being ostracized for jaunting around the city with a man and without a chaperone is laughable today, but it sometimes seems like we are more determined to think the worst of each other now than ever before. The rules have changed but the way we play the game hasn’t…or something like that. From Daisy Miller, perhaps we can learn not to judge each other using such harsh and arbitrary standards.

If so, however, the other lesson, which is the flip side of the coin in a way, is that the perception others have of you does matter, whether it’s an accurate one or not. Whether it should or shouldn’t matter, it does, and we are definitely more perceived now than ever before. If you want to, you can be perceived by someone who will never even meet you in real life. You can try to craft yourself to be perceived in a specific way by these strangers, something that Daisy Miller didn’t even bother to do, but can never truly control the person doing the perceiving. Being perceived inaccurately doesn’t do anything good to Daisy. What must it be doing to us?

---

Train Dreams by Denis Johnson

117 pages

Last but definitely not least is Train Dreams by Denis Johnson. I picked this one up a while back out of the staff picks section at Rizzoli—delightful bookstore that I don’t visit nearly enough. I didn’t realize until after I bought it that Johnson also wrote Tree of Smoke, which I also haven’t read, but have certainly heard of (talk about an iconic cover). I had never heard of Train Dreams at all, but it was a staff pick, right around 100 pages, and that was all I needed.

The story opens in 1917 on a man named Robert Grainier. He is a laborer—laying train tracks, repairing bridges, logging, and whatever else-ing—in the American West. He is about thirty years old, and he has a wife named Gladys and a baby daughter named Kate and a home for the three of them together outside of Bonner’s Ferry in the panhandle of Idaho.

The book is filled with stories of the characters who populate this time and this region. There’s Arn Peeples, the oldest man on the timber crew, who knows that the trees are killers, mostly too old to be of great use except for when a tunnel had to be excavated and Arn was the man to do the blasting. There’s Peterson, surveyor of the railroad by way of Virginia who gets shot by his own dog. There’s Kootenai Bob, who knows the ways of the mountains and warns of the half-human creatures that haunt them.

The book follows, mostly chronologically, but at times out of clear order, the course of Grainier’s life. It is not an easy life, and not a particularly happy one, but it is also not a hopeless or depressing. The life and the story, they are even-keeled, maybe even hopeful on the whole. I don’t want to give anything away! There is a crazy twist towards the end that really blew my mind, kind of terrifying, kind of touching.

That sums it up pretty well. Train Dreams is a terrifying and touching portrait of a terrifying and touching life. A type of life that doesn’t exist anymore, which is surely a good thing. But then why, after settling in a bit, being torn apart a bit, acclimating to the clime of this tale, is there a prevailing, nagging suspicion that something has been lost? Maybe its just generalized nostalgia.

Ultimately Grainier is a hermitic figure, and maybe that’s the appeal. Maybe the appeal is an environment—a time and a place—that not only allows, but fosters the hermit instinct. But of course, that’s not even right either. Because between 1917, and the end of this little novel in 1968, the world wasn’t hermitic, it was explosive. It exploded in fact, seemingly beyond the realm that allowed for hermit-ism. And all the while, Grainier lived his relatively hermitic life. Maybe that is what’s so compelling. This little relief etching of a man against the blurring background of heinously fast progress and movement, ostensibly in the forward direction.

---

If you like short books, check out some of the other short books I’ve read here:

Last Month's Reads

…and here:

3 Little Books

---

If you like books in general, check out my podcast, Something We Read, here or here.

Submit your book related, or not book related questions to us at somethingweread@gmail.com, and we might answer them on the next episode! Exciting!

---