I’ve never been one for pilgrimages, or trips organized around a certain goal, or travelling for the sake of getting somewhere; I’ve always been, rather, something of a drifter, choosing my restaurants and lodgings and sometimes even villages or islands on a whim, an instinct, a desire to flee the crowds and insinuate myself into a landscape not as a tourist, but as a visitor or traveller.
For the first time in many years at the end of May I broke my own self-imposed travel formula by joining a tour of Crimea that focused on the life of Anton Chekhov and the years he spent in Yalta and its surroundings, led by a congenial Chekhov scholar and followed by an equally congenial mixture of people of all ages and backgrounds who had one thing in common: a love of Chekhov’s work and a curiosity about the world he lived in, some of which, we discovered, is still very much alive in its way. The tour came about as part of a campaign to save Chekhov’s “White Dacha” in Yalta, where he lived the last years of his life, and which has been suffering from a severe lack of funding since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The campaign, based in Great Britain with both Chekhov scholars and admirers and theatre people behind it, is raising funds for vital repair and maintenance on the Dacha (see Yalta Chekhov Campaign.) (My fellow participants from the tour know who they are and I won’t go into a lengthy description of this part of the trip here but, rather, also provide other readers with the link to the excellent agency in Britain that organized the tour and encourage anyone who’s interested to write and enquire about subsequent tours…) What I did promise however to my fellow travellers was a description of the trip that I went on after I left them, where I journeyed by rail overnight across nearly all of Ukraine from the south due north to the town of Sumy, where Chekhov spent two summers as a young man, before he became the famous playwright we all know from the portraits with his pince-nez… Continue Reading »




Every so often you find yourself somewhere and you think you are dreaming. Or that you’ve died and gone to heaven. Or that suddenly the human race has reformed, and put aside war and despoliation of the planet to turn to culture and human friendship. The feeling often coincides with a visit to a place like Italy, because despite its sizeable contribution to war and despoliation (not to mention the idiozia of its current head of state), it has also contributed perhaps more than its fair share to culture, perhaps human friendship, too.

Time to blow the horn on behalf of a lovely book I translated last year and which is now in print with
I admit, like many of my fellow translators of foreign literature who work into English, that I have often had doubts. Felt that my efforts were in vain; that apart from a few benighted yet god-sent editors and publishers, no one was reading the books I had translated. They were printed, looked lovely and readable, and then gathered dust on the shelf. Americans are fearful of foreign languages, fearful of subtitles, fearful of translations. Are they afraid to admit their own ignorance? And is it a question of their ignorance, or that of the publishers who presume American readers are resistant to translations? Are they so proud of their own authors (Roth, Oates, Pynchon, Updike, etc etc) that they don’t have time anymore for the successors to Tolstoy and Camus, who, it seems, used to be read, at least…
It’s usually a vacation thing. You go to Florence (duh), Siena, Athens, Paris, Salzburg, wherever, and you hope, pray, pay for a view. There’s something about that elusive, exclusive view (as Forster and Merchant-Ivory so pointedly showed us) that makes the time special, that makes you feel life is smiling upon you, that you are absolutely where you were meant to be in that moment. That something magical might happen, because a few Renaissance architects conspired to leave before your eyes a harmony, a serenity, a perfect proportion that your everyday life has always denied you.
A little less than two years ago, a title caught my eye in a list of newly published novels in France. L’Elégance du hérisson. Hérisson meaning hedgehog. I’ve always had a soft spot for hedgehogs, ever since visiting my friend Christina in a remote village in Bulgaria in 1974; they had adopted a stray hedgehog. Yesh, in Bulgarian. I learned a word and an affection for an oddly repellent little animal–they prickle, and smell, and have lots of bugs; they shuffle and sniffle–and yet they are in some way tender in their awkwardness. They are fragile, vulnerable little creatures, as anyone who has driven down country roads in Britain or Turkey can attest; they are secretive, and Beatrix Potter made them lovable in The Tale of Mrs Tiggy-Winkle.
Switzerland, technically, does not belong to the European Union, although they share some interesting agreements, like the one which allows me, finally, to live and work here. Nor do they belong to NATO, and they only very recently joined the United Nations. They go it alone, do things their way, don’t want to be dictated to by Brussels, let alone Washington.
Four years ago I was in Greece when the Greek team won the championship. It was wild, unheard of, one of Europe’s dark horses, little Greece beating host country Portugal in the final. I was on the staid, religious island of Tinos and even the priests were shouting and screaming. Fireworks outside the churches; honking all night long. Friends in Athens said they did not sleep.

Last week I was in my favorite bookstore, Stacey’s, on Market Street in San Francisco, trying to buy a copy of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones. Why I was looking for Tom Jones is a long story which I won’t go into. What I will mention is that, first of all, Stacey’s is an endangered species. It is one of the last independent bookstores in San Francisco. Since I began working here, I have seen half a dozen independent bookstores close, most recently Cody’s and Clean Well Lighted Place, within a few weeks of each other. When I go into a place like Stacey’s I almost feel endangered myself: there are fewer and fewer customers, and seemingly endless piles of shiny, alluring books that no one has time to read anymore. As an (erstwhile) writer in a place like that, I feel both the awed reverence that a worshipper can feel in a temple, and the vague unease that I am on a leaky ship without lifeboats. There is a sadness about the place, now.
Today we had the first of our “winter storms.” Read—where California is concerned—heavy, relentless rain, and wild winds, up to 80 miles an hour. Trees across the road. Surges of waves in the normally tranquil bay. Power outages for sure, up to a million homes, from Santa Rosa to San Jose. Traffic disrupted, accidents, freeway closures.
power went out at 4 a.m. and has still not returned sixteen hours later; the light from outdoors was dim and uncooperative: Thou shalt not read, sayeth the Lord. Candles are of little use when you have a 530 page novel to plough through; and this blog is being written on precious battery time (3:31 at the moment, and I also have a film to watch).
I recently flew from San Francisco to Dallas on my way to visit a friend in the Deep South. Ever mindful of finding a reasonably priced flight, given the recent hikes in air fare, I capitulated to the worst case scenario: a red eye for my outbound flight, a return on Christmas day. You gets what you pays for.
It seems I’m not alone.
Every now and again you find yourself in a strange wrinkle of synchronicity. You think of someone and they call; you find your friends reading the same book at the same time; you rant at lunchtime about the perfidy of Blackberries and find an editorial on the subject in the paper that very evening. Coincidence? Zeitgeist? A periodically more alert sensibility? No one has figured it out satisfactorily, but it’s intriguing when it happens, and it can even deepen your understanding of time or your engagement with the world and its mysteries.Recently, I watched two films back to back that couldn’t have been more different and more similar at the same time. They landed randomly in my mailbox through the mystery that is a “Netflix” queue—I selected the films weeks ago and with no intention whatsoever of having a mini-festival of a certain type of film. But in fact that is what happened, and what I’m writing about today; call it the Women’s Choices Film Festival, or, more ominously, The Women and Marriage Film Festival, or more reassuringly The Women and Careers Film Festival…
Just a few words for the passing of someone extraordinary. Larger than life, to be sure; larger than death too, as his voice will stay with us, after a fashion, thanks to technology, although an mp3 can never compare with a live performance. I never had the good fortune to hear him live, I’m not sure I’ve ever even heard him on an excellent sound system. My only recording, I’m ashamed to say, is a cassette copied from a cassette, a hodge podge of O Sole mio and Ave Maria and Nessun Dorma. A cassette that accompanied me on a sailboat trip to Mexico, through storms both natural and of the man-made, emotional variety. But I have always known the power of that voice, how it can move you to tears even from the tinny speaker of a second-rate television.
This has been a hard weekend. One where in my personal zone I have gone through a great searing change; and on the global scale, one where a whole country has been blazing out of control, victim to greed and carelessness and the planet’s own revenge.
Yes, it’s been a while.