NIGHTSTAND

 

 

BACKSTORY: A Literary Life On The Run by Dean Faulkner Wells and Lawrence Wells

 

University Press of Mississippi, $25

 

 

The first pleasant surprise in this wonderful collection of articles by husband and wife team Lawrence and Dean Wells, was to discover myself named as one of the editors the book is dedicated to, having often edited Larry on WONDERLUST. For my part, this is an honor barely earned, as he is always an easy edit. The book is full of pleasant surprises —- 25 nuggets of journalism that range from subjects as which town in England is the true home of the author of Shakespeare’s plays (the whole Shakespeare authorship debate always reminds me of my favorite conspiracy theory, which is: Lee Harvey Oswald shot Kennedy!). to going into caves at Mammoth Cave National Park, to a profile of Cormac McCarthy, and one of Willie “Suicide” Jones, the wing-standing, daredevil partner of Dean’s barnstorming pilot father, who died before Dean was born.

 

Dean, who died in 2011, was the last living Faulkner who knew the great, Nobel Prize winning William Faulkner, and she is an excellent writer herself. Just before her death, she published a crisp and entertaining memoir, Every Day By The Sun: A Memoir of the Faulkners of Mississippi. Larry is the author of most of the articles compiled here but hers are warm and insightful and I would have liked more. She did write almost all of the backstories.

 

The biggest surprise is that no-one thought of this before: telling the backstory behind how the authors got their stories (they traveled together, regardless of who had the assignment). Those, in many ways, are more intimate than the ultimately published piece.

 

                                                                         ~ Bob Guccione, Jr.

 

 

ROMAN YEAR by André Aciman 

 

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024, $30

 

 

Not every sixteen year old boy’s life is a page turner. But André Aciman’s memoir is magnetic and draws us into the unsentimental story of the teenage year he spent in Rome. Being Jewish and needing to leave Alexandria, Egypt, he and his deaf mother (as he refers to her) and brother move to a shabby flat on Via Clelia in a working class section of Rome. André’s father stays behind in Egypt for a short time, and since he and his wife have a rocky relationship, he moves not to Rome but to Paris where he makes his stumbling way in the city he’s always romanticised from movies and books. André describes the father he loves, “He was in so many tiny invisible ways and without drama, already giving up on himself, on his future, while life, like an evil croupier, had begun raking the chips back, one by one.” 

 

This isn’t at all a typical coming of age story, but it checks some adulting boxes: first infatuation with a young woman, and later a young man, the travails of student high school life, plus the added travails of being an outsider in Rome, and the telluric shame of poverty from which he’s helpless to extricate himself. 

 

That shame will never leave him: “Shame, which is the reluctance to own up to who we are, could end up being the deepest thing about us…”  We learn Andre’s deepest secrets. We meet his relatives and friends, each person so meticulously vivid, we’d know them if they passed us on the street. And some of us might share Andre’s sentiment, that the farther away we are from being young, the happier we are. 

 

                      ~ Helen Mitsios 

 

 

Out of Print Books We Love…

 

Out of print books are recyclable and inexpensive. If you don’t mind reading on a screen, they can be downloaded for free. No virtual strings attached.

 

I, MAYA PLISETSKAYA by Maya Plisetskaya

 

Yale University Press, 2001.

 

 

Remarkably, at age sixty-one, Maya Plisetskaya danced the dying swan passage of the famous Swan Lake ballet in a Tokyo performance. In this equally remarkable book, she tells the reader that a journalist tried to ghostwrite her memoir, but she found his writing “wordy and pompous…filled with false wisdom.” She says, “I wrote the book by myself. And therefore it took a long time.” So begins this memoir by the Bolshoi prima ballerina who was one of the greatest ballerinas of the 20th century.

 

Maya spares no one, including herself. She unflinchingly reveals the good and the bad: her thoughts on politics of the day, the jealousies and machinations of other dancers in the company, life with her famous composer husband. She shares the excitement of performing at New York’s Lincoln Center. And she mentions that President John F. Kennedy was an admirer who made private visits to her dressing room. Here she stops short of saying more, but in person she told ballerina friends — one of whom is my ballet teacher who lunched with her long ago. The answer is yes.

 

~ Helen Mitsios

 

 

 

In 2022,in Nashville, TN, Larry Wells speaks and presents a slide show about both his memoir, In Faulkner’s Shadow and William Faulkner: The  Cofield Collection, a book of photographs of the great American writer and his life in Oxford, MS