at sea with katherine anne porter

Katherine Anne Porter's 1962 Ship of Fools is one of my favorite novels, not because it's a particularly life-affirming or uplifting story, but more because it's strongly character-driven and on cruise control like the great boat that carries everyone aboard.  From August to September of 1931, various classes of people of various nationalities are passengers on the Vera, headed from Mexico to Bremerhaven, Germany.  World War II and the rise of Hitler are inevitable but not yet in full global force, though on the Vera, Germans like the obnoxious Lizzie Spöckenkieker and Siegfried Rieber freely offer Nazi-tinged attitudes and opinions seemingly every chance they can.  One of the few admirable characters is Dr. Schumann, the ship's physician.  Dr. Schumann displays more professional humanity and empathy than the majority of the other passengers, but even he notes with unhappy detachment how evil comes into being due to a "consent by default...with nine-tenths of us half-asleep and refusing to be waked up."

Porter was exceptionally skilled at short stories and novellas, and Ship of Fools was her first and only major novel. Written over two decades, the final published book weighed in at close to 500 pages.  Initial critical reviews were not quite unanimously glowing, but no one could deny that Porter was an excellent stylist and observer of the human condition.  Ship of Fools was a bestseller and quickly pursued by Hollywood.  And then Ship of Fools the 1965 film came into being, directed by Stanley Kramer and starring the likes of Vivien Leigh, Jose Ferrer, Jose Greco, Elizabeth Ashley, George Segal and Lee Marvin.

I've never felt that the movie really captured the essence of the book, but then maybe that essence isn't something that can be captured.  Michael Dunn, however, was excellent as Herr Glocken, the hunchback, and Oskar Werner was wonderful as usual in his portrayal of Dr. Schumann.  At age 40 or so, he was too young to play a 60 year old and a bit physically at odds with his love interest, Simone Signoret as La Condesa, but he did have Dr. Schumann's "crookedly healed dueling scars on his left cheek" and eyes with "an abstract goodness and even sweetness in them."  Oskar was nominated for an Oscar for his performance, but Porter herself wasn't thrilled with the filmed version.  She nonetheless earned a hefty sum for the movie rights, and I'm sure sales of the book resurged once the film came out.  Not bad for a novel that came about from Porter's own ship of fools journey, which she described as:

...the story of my first voyage to Europe in 1931. We embarked on an old German ship at Vera Cruz and we landed in Bremen twenty-eight days later...I don’t think I spoke a half-dozen words to anybody. I just sat there and watched—not deliberately, though. I kept a diary in the form of a letter to a friend, and after I got home the friend sent it back. And, you know, it is astonishing what happened on that boat, and what happened in my mind afterwards. Because it is fiction now.

bazaar style

I just got a copy of Selina Lake's Bazaar Style, originally published in 2008 by Ryland Peters & Small but in a new printing as of last month.  I love the book and I think that if you're meant to love it as well, you'll know right away when you first take a glance at the many wonderful color photos.  You're either a Bazaar Style person or you're not -- I can see this in the reactions of certain people when they first see my...well, let's call it decor for now -- if their eyes dilate sharply or they aren't quite sure where to look, then they are not fans of the eclectic and colorful.  Bazaar Style is not for champions of regimented pastel tones or people who cringe at mixing florals with stripes, or for anyone who might not put a modernist painting on a toile-papered wall.  Or for those who don't find any personal gratification in rescuing a discarded coffee table from an alley and painting it Bombay Red.  We are all different, there's nothing wrong with that, but for those of us who do like the flea markets and thrift stores and rummage sales of the world and all the treasures they hold, or for those of us who like to celebrate the past alongside the present/future in quirky yet meaningful formations, this is a lovely read that will spark your decorating imagination.  And I quote:  "The bazaar look cannot be bought on one shopping trip.  It grows organically over the years...[i]t celebrates the beauty of our everyday possessions...and loves colour."  Indeed.

You might even want to leave the book itself prominently displayed, just to show that particular sister-in-law or whoever in your life that yes, you can use an old gilt-edged soup tureen as a place to keep your house keys or you can also string twinkly Christmas lights around a print of Van Gogh's Cafe Terrace at Night.  You can most certainly put a Mexican religious candle of the Virgen de Guadalupe next to your grandparents' wedding photo -- if it feels right, yes, you really can.         

the lady killer

Masako Togawa, author, actress and chanteuse, was born in Tokyo in 1933 and it appears she will be rounding age eighty in March of this year.  (Imdb.com cites a birth year of 1931, but Wikipedia counters with 1933 -- whichever may be true, continued health and happiness to her.)  Among Togawa's novels is the mystery The Lady Killer, nominated for Japan's Naoki Prize when it first came out in 1963.  This is a twisted tale, and one that I found especially enjoyable since I'm a fan of things Japanese -- I kept visualizing it as a Japanese new wave film like Pale Flower or Crazed Fruit.  And an old 1989 item from the L.A. Times notes how The Lady Killer was once slated for filmdom, but it doesn't seem that this ever came to be:

Lewis B. Chesler, executive producer and creator of pay-TV's "The Hitchhiker," has purchased film rights to 1963 Japanese novel, "The Lady Killer" by Masako Togawa, a highly controversial and erotic thriller that dealt with role of women in that society. Screenwriter Robert J. Avrech ("Body Double") will adapt the book, and Carl Schenkel ("The Mighty Quinn") will direct. "Crimson Cabaret," the title of the film version, will film in Japan and possibly Hong Kong this spring. . . .

Well, that's a shame.  The 1985 Dodd Mead American edition was translated from the original Japanese by Simon Grove, who seems to have done an excellent job in keeping the cultural backdrop and tone of early 1960s Tokyo while also maintaining the intrigue of the plot.