Manic Bookstore Cafe

In Alexander Solzhenitsyn's novella of life in a Soviet labor camp--the 1962 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich , ushered into print by none other than Nikita Khrushchev--his protagonist has one particularly treasured possession. His spoon. The reader notices right away that Ivan Denisovich cherishes the spoon, though it may take a while to understand. Early in the text, instructed to wash the floors in the guardroom but not wanting to spend his own precious pre-work time to do the extra task, Ivan Denisovich removes his felt boots and sloshes a full bucket of water on the floor, annoying the guards. "Who washes the floor like that?!" they complain, and eventually agree that he should just sop up the water he has spilled and go back to his bunk. The perspicacious reader (Nabokov's favorite reader -- but that's a different post) noticed something other than the relations between guards and prisoner, than the argument over how best to wash a mud-encrust...

Chekhov loved to travel, and he travelled a lot. I have to admit that I too love a peripatetic life. In this, I want to be like Chekhov. The view from our window, with the shadow of the church's dome. And last week I finally made it to Genoa, Italy. I hadn't even considered going to Italy, really, until I started writing about Chekhov and cemeteries. (Gratuitous promo: my piece on cemeteries in Chekhov's fiction comes out this spring in The Antioch Review .) In Genoa, we stayed in an apartment next to a 12th century bell tower, and when the bells tolled out, I felt transported to another time. Or no, that's not quite right. Even though the bells were marking the time, they connected me to all times, to a timelessness that reached back to Chekhov and beyond. The sound connects the listener not only to ages long past, but to the city itself, and the natural surroundings. In one recording I made the birds sing out as if in answer to the bells: nature and the b...