Dear readers,
I’m not going to get into the various reasons you might have for wanting to go somewhere else right now — somewhere, let’s say, on the other side of an international border. The fact is that Americans have always been eager tourists and willing expatriates, game to study the histories and decode the customs of neighboring and far-flung places.
There are more and less benign versions of this roving impulse, but let’s not get into that either. Also, with due respect to hard-typing globetrotters, travel writing exhausts me. What I’m in the mood for is a scrappy, burrowing cosmopolitanism, books that dig down into the soil of a place and emerge with local dirt under their fingernails. Here are two of those, one a memoir of life in a foreign land, the other an extended excursion into an exotic literature.
—A.O.
Not long before he died, Origo’s father — an American diplomat married to an Anglo-Irish aristocrat — wrote that he wished his daughter to grow up “free from all this national feeling that makes people so unhappy.” He wanted her “to be a little ‘foreign,’ too, so that, when she grows up, she really will be free to love and marry anyone she likes, without its being difficult.”
She was happy to oblige: In 1924, she married an Italian marchese and went to live with him at La Foce, his ancestral estate in a picturesque Tuscan valley.
“It has sometimes been pointed out to me,” she begins this memoir (published as she was approaching “the end game,” in her words), “that I have had a very varied and interesting life, have lived in some extremely beautiful places and have met some remarkable people.” Her book both lives up to the implied promise of that opening sentence and wanders happily away from it.
“Images and Shadows” narrates a life of privilege and accomplishment in a style that is charmingly casual and digressive and at the same time sharply analytical. A respected biographer (of Lord Byron and the Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi, among others), Origo might have made an acute novelist of patrician manners in the line of Edith Wharton and Ford Madox Ford. She writes fondly about the remarkable people she met, and with a fine sense of their ridiculousness. For example: Her mother’s second husband was an architect and writer whose “A History of Taste” “would certainly have been a fascinating and entertaining book” had he ever gotten past the first four words, which were “It is very difficult…”
This book isn’t. It’s frank yet formal, honest without being intimate. Origo’s natural elegance leads her to understate her toughness, passion and her bravery — not least in assisting anti-Fascist partisans during World War II — qualities that nonetheless saturate this eminently civilized book.
Read if you like: Henry James, Bernard Berenson, Tuscan villas, long afternoons drinking tea with your grandmother.
Available from: The book sale at a small-town library; your friend who is obsessed with the idea of moving to Italy.
“O Canada: An American’s Notes on Canadian Culture,” by Edmund Wilson
Nonfiction, 1965
Wilson, perhaps the hardest-working American literary critic of the 20th century, had formidable range. He wrote mighty books about Marxism, the Dead Sea Scrolls and the literature of the Civil War, and innumerable collections of essays, reviews, diaries and letters. An avowed anti-specialist, proud of never holding an academic post or a staff job at a magazine, he liked to master a subject by writing about it.
After a visit to Toronto sometime in the 1950s, Wilson got sufficiently interested in Canada to begin the inquiries that would result in this volume, modestly subtitled “An American’s Notes on Canadian Culture.” I should note that the book was published in 1965 and so does not include most of what those of us down here might regard as Canadian culture. No Neil Young or Joni Mitchell; no Margaret Atwood or Alice Munro (though a little bit of Mavis Gallant); no SCTV or David Cronenberg.
Still, “O Canada” is an irresistible deep cut for Canadaphiles, a large but fittingly circumspect fandom. Wilson is a crisp, thorough writer, with a knack for making his own fascination with a subject contagious. So you can learn quite a bit of Canadian history here — not a bad thing to be studying just now — without feeling that you’re in school, and you may find yourself eager to hit the library in search of the works of Hugh MacLennan and Marie-Claire Blais.
Mostly, though, you’re likely to be swept up by Wilson’s sense that Canada, in spite of its reputation south of the border, is an intensely dramatic country. This was partly because of the Quebecois separatist movement that was gaining momentum at the time, but also because nationalism and national identity were pressing questions for an alert and curious reader. As they still are.
Read if you like: Poutine, butter tarts, Rush.
Available from: If all else fails, you can borrow my copy.
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