Culture

A man ignores his wedding anniversary and is so sickened by the bowl of flowers his wife has placed by his bed that he drops them and breaks the precious cut glass. Another man is so enraged by seeing his wife close the kitchen door when he comes in from work that he enters a state of fevered reverie where he concludes ‘nothing in his life made sense’. In a different story, the mess and argument caused by an improperly laid fire makes Mrs Derdon leave the house, sure that she ‘was not coming back’. The stories in Maeve Brennan’s The Springs of Affection (first published in the New Yorker, and, after her death in 1993, as a collected edition in 1997) are not about dramatic flights of fancy or the memorable red-letter days of a life.

Memoirs by poets – the Top Ten? It’s an admittedly niche category, and since no one would ask this in normal conversation, or even in a pub quiz, here is the chart. It is based not on official sales or downloads but rather on my own tastes, prejudices and relatively recent reading: Last Night’s Fun, Ciaran Carson; It Goes With the Territory, Elaine Feinstein; A Fly in the Soup, Charles Simic; The U.S.A.

The only thing I’m uncertain about in this uplifting and beautifully written book is its subtitle. Granted, the landscape Kapka Kassabova invokes does sound like ‘a place that struck you dumb with its majesty’, but we are not in some Shangri-La beyond the reach of mortals. The valley in question is a two-hour drive from a modern European capital. Elixir is set on the banks of the Mesta River (known as the Nestos in Greece), where its life-giving waters meet the forests and mountains of the western Rhodope range in Bulgaria. Mesta’s montane flora has provided wild crops and herbal medicines for centuries This is the author’s country of origin; but she left it 30 years ago and is unflinching in her judgment of its recent past, which she divides into three phases.

The most important thing to know about ancient Greek mathematics is how little anyone knows about it. The scant evidence available today is tremendously indirect: reconstructions from unrepresentative survivals of fragments of translations of transcriptions of commentaries on compilations of summaries of allusions to refutations of excerpts of documents produced as part of an oral culture of learning in which the original writing may never have been expected to encapsulate what really mattered. Many centuries separate the people we want to know about and even the oldest materials we have to know them with, and most of what they did and thought is simply and definitively lost. But that is only the start of the difficulty.

Around dinner time on 21 November 2000, a nervous 19-year-old man knocked on the door of Maria Joel Dias da Costa’s house, located in the backcountry Amazonian town of Vila Rondon. The unknown man asked to see her husband Dezinho, a union leader, but he was out. She invited the visitor to wait, which he did for a while, but then he got up to go. As he was leaving, Dezinho was just arriving home. Seconds later, Maria Joel’s husband was lying dead in a ditch, the life blasted out of him by a .38-caliber revolver. So runs the centrepiece of Masters of the Lost Land, a compelling and forensically researched piece of investigative reporting by the Spanish journalist Heriberto Araujo.

‘Islands of stone’ would have been a good name for the Orkney archipelago, George Mackay Brown once wrote. The salt Atlantic winds mean that very few trees grow there, so stone provides for the dead – in the burial chamber at Maeshowe, for example – and the living. Less than a century ago, there were Orcadians sleeping in stone box beds. For Beatrice Searle, one Orkney stone proved life-changing. While still a teenager, she felt the stirrings of a vocation to work with stone. It spoke to her, almost literally: ‘There is information to be found in the sound of the stone, just-audible messages from the deep past to be drawn out.’ She attempted to eat it (but ‘nothing about stone eating is instinctive’).