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Love, Death & Rare Books

Robert Hellenga

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May 02, 2020 Mary Warnement rated it really liked it

Shelves: book-history, bedside, fiction, michigan, academic-novel, chicago, literature

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. I expected to check my Goodreads bookshelf/tag "Italy," but Hellenga surprised me. There were traces of Italy throughout this book, but we did not end by the author describing the main character’s trip to Italy to meet his mother who left Gabe and his father in Chicago to return to her native Italy with her Italian lover.

I learned of Hellenga’s latest novel a couple weeks into our stay-at-home advisory (oh how I hope I need that prompt to recall this time someday in the future when I read this I expected to check my Goodreads bookshelf/tag "Italy," but Hellenga surprised me. There were traces of Italy throughout this book, but we did not end by the author describing the main character’s trip to Italy to meet his mother who left Gabe and his father in Chicago to return to her native Italy with her Italian lover.

I learned of Hellenga’s latest novel a couple weeks into our stay-at-home advisory (oh how I hope I need that prompt to recall this time someday in the future when I read this and that we are not still living separate lives within our own private spaces). I enjoy spending time with Hellenga’s academic characters. I won’t try to recreate the plot of copy all the places and quotations I jotted on the final fly leaves. I learned of this the same time the documentary “The Booksellers” appeared, but I prefer this novel’s Chicago setting to the NY focus of the movie, although I certainly enjoyed and recommend that too. Of course the Chicago and Michigan settings felt familiar. I often miss that area and my mom. I love where I am and try to live without regrets, but especially now—with a visit for mother’s day cancelled—I’m regretting how far I am from her. I learned a little about Michigan history. The first mention of the lake by that name in 1682. Ring Lardner. Carl Sandberg. James Fenimore Cooper set a novel in Kalamazoo.

Why isn't reading considered living? Several characters advise Gabe, even his father--the bookseller, although that was on his deathbed—to live life rather than read it. (Pages 12, 26, 106I believe reading is living. It’s yet another way to expose yourself to new viewpoints, places, emotions. Not instead, in addition. I suspect Hellenga shares that without explicitly arguing it. Many of his characters live it. Innumerable quotes pepper the pages. Sometimes it feels false, even to me, whom Jim calls the bookworm. Maybe not false so much as a stretch.

Sent me to pull out my Montaigne, the Penguin pb I read in college, omitting “On Solitude,” which I know I read sometime. Had to get that. Chose a Penguin Greats, good reading for the subway or plane. Then I needed his complete works. My Penguin is the Screech translation, so for comparison I chose an edition with Frame’s American translation. I was not readily available and I bid (and won) an edition on Ebay. (I try to avoid buying books on Ebay where the sellers aren’t reliably knowledgeable about books. They tend to say “very good” when really it is fair or acceptable.)

137 I know and love this sensation: “The air was warm but the san was cold on our feet.”
219 “There’s nothing really out there except what we project.” [Why fear that?]

One quibble: 266 “Augie gave Olivia away…” Olivia would never have allowed herself to be “given away.”

I knew where the book was heading (even if Hellenga chose not to show us the ending I expected), but I didn’t mind. I enjoyed the journey.

I didn’t know Raymond Carver wrote poetry. Hellenga uses “At Least” as his epigraph, and the characters mention (267). I wonder, why wasn’t the last line chosen for Olivia’s tombstone? Instead of “just wait, to see what’s going to happen” he chose the Hebrew: Blessed is the True Judge.” At first I thought the first wasn’t chosen because he doesn’t believe in an afterlife, but if you don’t believe in an afterlife, is the true judge?
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