A Lovely Fairy Tale and a Not-Quite Parable

 Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia

Emily Wilde’s Encyclopedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett
(published 2023)

Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries is an absolutely delightful fantasy: or better said, a great fairy tale. It’s set in a mythical Scandinavian country (sort of like Iceland but closer to Europe) in 1909. The two main characters are academics who work at Cambridge University in the Department of Dryadology — that is, they are engaged in the scientific study of fairies and the many types of fairy creatures that abound in the world of the novel. Emily Wilde is doing field work in the strange and forbidding Scandinavian country, hoping to gather data for her comprehensive encyclopedia of every species of fairy. After arriving at her little rustic cabin, Emily quickly meets at least one fairy, a small creature that she calls Poe — and she meets many other fairies in the course of the remarkably suspenseful tale. 

Emily has a very prickly personality, and one of her challenges is adapting to life with the villagers in her research location. They extend friendly and helpful offers of food and assistance with her life in the rustic cabin — but she doesn’t grasp emotionally how to accept their friendship. In her narration of the events of her stay, at first she portrays them as hostile, but eventually we learn, with her, to see them quite differently. The catalyst for grasping their better character is a colleague of Emily’s — a researcher in the same department where she works, who shows up unexpectedly not long after she moves into her cabin.  She also has a hostile and suspicious view of him, and in fact suspects him of having falsified the research in his quite successful publications. Her gradual discovery of his virtues and his honesty — as they face many dangers from the hidden and menacing fairy world — is as interesting as her discovery of the strange nature of the fairies they are studying.

Although there are similarities to what we would call the real world, mostly the world of this novel is fantasy, and also is ahistorical. The reader must suspend disbelief in the existence of fairies as well as in many of the features of Emily’s personal and professional experience. Specifically, academic life at Cambridge University as it exists in the novel isn’t what would have existed in 1909. Conditions there are much more like life in a twenty-first century US or Canadian university than it would have in early-twentieth-century England. There are many hints of technology and style that would be anachronistic if the novel pretended to be historical rather than fantasy. 

Emily, as a researcher with a doctorate in Dryadolgy, had more professional opportunities than a woman who lived in that actual historic period. (Note that historically, the first woman Professor at Cambridge was Dorothy Garrod in 1939). Systems of tenure, academic hierarchy of titles, publication conventions, peer review, formal citations and citation tracking, and the like would have been different than they are portrayed in the novel — but  what difference do those details make? After all, the main plot is about exploring vast and dangerous fairy realms where magical powers, spells, enchantments, magic words, and invisible and malevolent characters are all part of the natural setting. Here’s one of my favorite more-or-less anachronisms in Emily’s narration: “Even the forest is rendered in black-and-white; I feel as if I am in a movie. I must have something to rest my eyes upon.” (p. 225)

The review of this book in the New York Times put it this way: “what seems on its surface to be a twee romp is in fact a stirring exploration of mythography and storytelling, with a dark and twisted heart.” (source) 

Note: A sequel to this book has been published but I’m not a big fan of sequels to fantasy books. I learned my lesson when I was in third grade and read the sequel to my favorite book, The Princess and the Goblin — I was so disappointed that I cried. So I may not opt to read more about Emily.

Amor Towles’ Dystopia

“You Have Arrived at Your Destination” is a story by Amor Towles. 
Short. Not as enjoyable as his other works.

Blog post © 2024 mae sander

"The Lincoln Highway" by Amor Towles

Amor Towles’ new book, The Lincoln Highway, is fun to read. I couldn’t put it down. It’s full of little gems and big themes. At the center is a road trip in a Studebaker in 1954. The novel is full of little details about maps and about driving on the Lincoln Highway, which was the first trans-continental US interstate highway. It’s full of stereotyped details about the 1950s, but they are charming details that add up to more than a bunch of trivia. Raiding Wikipedia and searching with Google, I’ve added a few photos of 1950s scenes that play a role in the vivid descriptions of the novel, which is mostly not illustrated, at least not in my Kindle version.

A Studebaker sedan, similar to the one in the novel.
These were very funny-looking cars, even for the 1950s.

One character, Emmett, starts out as a typical unlucky guy. Stuff happens to him because he is naive, and he’s way too trusting. But as he travels, he learns to watch out for himself. I think this is one of the most satisfying elements of the novel.

Train travel is also a part of the plot — riding for free in a boxcar. Or seeing what it’s like in a luxurious private Pullman car. Along the road, are Howard Johnson’s Restaurants. The free maps at the gas stations had a different level of detail than the maps on the place maps at Howard Johnson’s:

“We were sitting in a booth at the HoJo’s waiting for our breakfast. In front of each of us was a paper place mat that was also a simplified map of the state of Illinois showing major roads and towns along with some out-of-scale illustrations of regional landmarks. In addition, there were sixteen Howard Johnson’s, each with its little orange roof and little blue steeple.” (p. 179)

A roadside Howard Johnson’s: recognizable because of its blue steeple.
Its familiar orange booths are a comfort to Woolly, a troubled character.

Details about the road trip, like the distinction between a simple map and a gas station map, make for fun reading: 

“When a gas station map is handed to you, it’s almost the perfect size—like a playbill at the theater. But in order to read a gas station map, you have to unfold and unfold and unfold it until the Pacific Ocean is up against the gear shift and the Atlantic Ocean is lapping at the passenger-side door. Once a gas station map is open all the way, just the sight of it is likely to make you woozy, because it is positutely crisscrossed from top to bottom and side to side by highways and byways and a thousand little roads, each of which is marked with a tiny little name or tiny little number.” (p. 186)

The four main characters, of whom three are around 18 years old, each have a particular problem with their parents. They are all looking for their parents, living or dead, or trying to understand them. This sounds trite or corny but Amor Towles makes sure it is neither. The plot seems linear: they get in the car and drive towards New York on  the Lincoln Highway. The plot deviates as each one goes in search of what he needs to find. The details as they each experience New York City are also very enjoyable reading, especially as Towles creates a variety of levels of New York life from the richest homes to the poorest camps for homeless wanderers. And always a consciousness of how New York was the start of the Lincoln Highway.

"When I asked Woolly where we should meet,
naturally he suggested the statue of Abraham Lincoln
in Union Square." (p. 366).

Adventurers and travelers from the past play a role too, such as Ulysses and Greek myths. The youngest of the travelers, Emmett's little brother Billy, reads a book of stories about such adventurers, and he wonders whether there are such people still alive in the 1950s. The answer is yes, and a character named Ulysses puts in an appearance to prove it. (The character of Ulysses, a black man from St.Louis who rides the rails in a search for his lost wife, will probably be the subject of some critical analysis about how racial history is treated in current historical novels, but I'm not going to try to do this. I'm afraid he might be viewed as another version of  "The Magic Negro," a problematic literary type. See this review, for example.)

Big brother Emmett is always trying to understand how literature and imagination relates to life. He objects to Billy’s favorite book that mixes stories of real heroes (like Thomas Edison) with fictional or mythic ones (like Ulysses):

“Wasn’t it hard enough in the course of life to distinguish between fact and fancy, between what one witnessed and what one wanted? Wasn’t it the challenge of making this very distinction that had left their father, after twenty years of toil, bankrupt and bereft?” (p. 240)

The Lincoln Highway is about so many things, but they add up to one big thing: who you are, where you are going, and what that means. “After all, aren’t gluttony, sloth, and greed all about staying put? Don’t they amount to sitting deep in a chair where you can eat more, idle more, and want more? In a way, pride and envy are about staying put too.” (p. 463)

Book review © 2021 mae sander. 

Photos from random internet sites.

Tiramisu

Tiramisu that we enjoyed at Villa Mozart, Fairfax, VA, in 2015. Alas this restaurant is no longer in business.

My first introduction to tiramisu was some tine in the 1980s while Len was attending a meeting in Sicily. The Europeans with whom we were having dinner were familiar with this creamy dessert, which was new and very popular in restaurants where they had eaten. By the end of the 1980s, little cups of tiramisu were available in French supermarkets, as the dish had become very trendy. In the US, its popularity started a bit later, but now it's everywhere!

A recent Costco purchase: imported tiramisu from Italy.
It’s delicious! It’s eternally popular! But it’s not an old tradition!

Tiramisu in the Movies

Remember in "Sleepless in Seattle," the widowed hero Sam (played by Tom Hanks) is worrying about how to act on a date, and his friend brings up tiramisu, as something that’s been invented since Sam was in the dating pool. Sam responds: “Some woman is gonna want me to do it to her and I’m not gonna know what it is!” In fact, the 1993 film seems to have created a demand for the introduction of tiramisu to restaurants all across the US. More about this:

In the DVD commentary, director and screenwriter Nora Ephron says “It hardly seems possible there was a time when all of America didn’t know what tiramisu was.” But that was indeed the case. The food was so unknown in 1993 that TriStar Pictures, the distributor of Sleepless in Seattle, reportedly received 25-30 phone calls per day from moviegoers asking the meaning of the joke. (source)

Tiramisu in the News this Week 

This week’s tiramisu news offers some background about the originator of this now-popular dessert: from THE GUARDIAN October 31, 2021:

Italy’s father of tiramisu dies aged 93

Restaurateur Ado Campeol launched the coffee-flavoured dessert, whose name means ‘lift me up’, in 1972

An Italian restaurateur known as the “father of tiramisu” has died aged 93. Ado Campeol died at his home in Treviso, in the Veneto region, on Saturday.

Although the dessert’s origins are often disputed and the family never asserted copyright over the recipe, Campeol and his wife, Alba, the owners of the restaurant Alle Beccherie, are widely considered to be its inventor. 

According to historians, the dish – featuring egg yolks whipped with mascarpone cheese, layered over coffee-soaked biscuits and topped with bitter cocoa powder – was added to their restaurant’s menu in 1972.

Tiramisu in Literature 

Now I would like to do a moment’s trivia peeving with Amor Towles, a very popular and otherwise wonderful author. In his new novel, The Lincoln Highway,  Towles depicts a road trip that takes four characters across the USA in the summer of 1954. One character shares a vivid memory of a wonderful New York-Italian restaurant, including a long description of the way Leonello, the owner, works the room and tends to his customers:

After giving the ladies a few compliments, he’ll signal the bartender. Hey, Rocko. Another round over here for my friends. Then he’ll move on to the next table, where there’ll be more shoulder patting, more compliments for the ladies, and another round of drinks. Or maybe this time, it’s a plate of calamari, or some tiramisu. Either way, it’s on the house. And when Leonello’s finished making his rounds, everybody in the place—and I mean everybody from the mayor to Marilyn Monroe—will feel like tonight is something special. (Amor Towles, The Lincoln Highway, p. 163). 

The details about life in 1954 seem very well researched, and I've been enjoying everything about the characters and the setting of the book. But I wonder why Towles didn't seem to do his background checks about the food he names, and I wonder what else he didn't quite get right. He even repeats the mistake: Billy, a curious and very bright kid, asks these questions: "What’s a trattoria...? What’s a paisano? What’s an artichoke and pancetta and tiramisu?" (p. 435). 

I'm almost finished with The Lincoln Highway, and will probably write a glowing review of it soon. But I'm always disappointed when an author disrespects food history!

"A Gentleman in Moscow"

What is an aristocrat? I think this is the essential question of the novel A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles.

The book begins in 1922 with a trial. Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov -- descendant of many counts and other nobility, product of a genteel upbringing by his oh-so-proper grandmother, graduate of elite Russian schools, and all-around member of the czar's upper crust -- is condemned to permanent house arrest in a grand hotel in Moscow. He thus becomes a "former person." In the new Soviet state, there's no place for him, but thanks to some poems he had written in youth, the court has judged him not to deserve a death sentence.

Count Rostov spends more than thirty years in the hotel, years that the author creates in an amazing and rich way. Perhaps the count is sometimes bored, but as a reader I was never at all bored by the narrow venue in which the Count is forced to spend his days and nights. Though forgotten by the authorities and by many of his former friends and schoolmates (that is, those who survived) he succeeds in creating a series of responsibilities for himself within his limited environment. The hotel offers him more stimulation than one would expect, as it continues to some extent to preserve its former luxury and to house visitors from abroad. He even manages to preserve "the Rostovs’ long-standing tradition— of gathering on the tenth anniversary of a family member’s death to raise a glass of Châteauneuf-du-Pape." (p. 84)

The count, with his knowledge of the wider world, is able to speak to them in their own languages and meet them on their own terms. Though he eventually takes a job as a waiter in the hotel's fine dining room, the Boyarsky, he retains his aristocratic dignity forever. Here's how he does his job:

"At 5:45, with his five waiters standing at their stations, the Count made his nightly rounds of the Boyarsky. Beginning in the northwest corner, he circulated through the twenty tables to ensure that every setting, every saltcellar, every vase of flowers was in its proper place.  

"At table four a knife was realigned to be parallel with its fork. At table five a water glass was moved from midnight to one o’clock. At table six a wine glass that had a remnant of lipstick was whisked away, while at table seven the soap spots on a spoon were polished until the inverted image of the room could be clearly seen on the surface of the silver. 

"This, one might be inclined to observe, is exactly how Napoleon must have appeared when in the hour before dawn he walked among his ranks, reviewing everything from the stores of munitions to the dress of the infantry— having learned from experience that victory on the field of battle begins with the shine on a boot."  (p. 203)

The count is not the only fascinating character in the book: there are many, both men and women. I wondered about both the characters and the hotel itself and especially about its kitchens and head chef Emile Zhukovsky:

"Along the wooden tables the junior chefs are chopping carrots and onions as Stanislav, the sous-chef, delicately debones pigeons with a whistle on his lips. On the great stoves, eight burners have been lit to simmer sauces, soups, and stews. The pastry chef, who seems as dusted with flour as one of his rolls, opens an oven door to withdraw two trays of brioches. And in the center of all this activity, with an eye on every assistant and a finger in every pot, stands Emile Zhukovsky, his chopping knife in hand.  

"If the kitchen of the Boyarsky is an orchestra and Emile its conductor, then his chopping knife is the baton. With a blade two inches wide at the base and ten inches long to the tip, it is rarely out of his hand and never far from reach. Though the kitchen is outfitted with paring knives, boning knives, carving knives, and cleavers, Emile can complete any of the various tasks for which those knives were designed with his ten-inch chopper. With it he can skin a rabbit. He can zest a lemon. He can peel and quarter a grape. He can use it to flip a pancake or stir a soup, and with the stabbing end he can measure out a teaspoon of sugar or a dash of salt. But most of all, he uses it for pointing." (p. 175). 

How did the author manage to create this historic ambience full of such vivid characters? Amor Towles' web page explains some of the matters that intrigued me. Above all: he imagined! "None of the novel’s central characters are based on historical figures, or on people that I have known," Towles states. I also wondered about the factual basis for the hotel.

Towles writes:

The dining room of the hotel from Amor Towles' website

"The Metropol is a real hotel which was built in the center of Moscow in 1905 and which is still welcoming guests today. Contrary to what you might expect, the hotel was a genuine oasis of liberty and luxury during the Soviet era despite being around the corner from the Kremlin and a few blocks from the head quarters of the secret police.

"Because the Metropol was one of the few fine hotels in Moscow at the time, almost anyone famous who visited the city either drank at, dined at, or slept at the Metropol. As a result, we have an array of firsthand accounts of life in the hotel from prominent Americans including John Steinbeck, e. e. cummings, and Lillian Hellman." (Amor Towles Q & A)

I've read one of this author's books before: The Rules of Civility (my review here). I found the historical reconstruction in that book less than perfectly convincing. I find the reconstructed situation in A Gentleman in Moscow much more convincing and compelling,