Three Great Books #18
*That* memoir, "reports from a haunted present," a doomed (?) young bride.
Spare, by Prince Harry
At heart, I found this to be a very sad story about a boy who was told from birth he wasn’t as important as his older brother, whose parents divorced messily and publicly, and who was given very little room to mourn the premature death of his mother. I have no plans to consume any of Harry or Meghan’s other media projects, but I ripped through this, and I’m sympathetic to his chief beef with the royals: He claims that his family members leaked items to the absolute worst of the U.K. media to make themselves look good at his expense, while claiming to remain above it all and telling him not to respond. (This is the same media that he blames for his mother’s death.) Harry is self-deprecating and descriptive about his trips to Africa, which allowed him to escape the pressure of the U.K., and his time in the military. And of course, there is plenty of royal dish. (My favorite anecdote involves Charles and Camilla asking Prince William’s wife Catherine to start spelling her full name with a “K”.) The book’s ghostwriter, J.R. Moehringer, previously worked with Andre Agassi on my favorite autobiography of all time, “Open,” another compelling story about being locked early on into an unwanted role and struggling to escape.
People Love Dead Jews: Reports From a Haunted Present, by Dara Horn
When Dara Horn is a teenager, she attends an out-of-town academic competition, sharing a room with two girls from Mississippi who haven’t met enough Jews to know that some of them have blonde hair and blue eyes. “I thought Hitler said you were all dark,” one of them says. Horn, showing much quicker wits than I had at 17, accurately replies, “Hitler was full of shit.” She realizes of the girls that “like most people in the world, they had only encountered dead Jews: people whose sole attribute was that they had been murdered, and whose murders served a clear purpose, which was to teach us something.” Once Horn points this out, you can’t help but see evidence of it everywhere. She writes eloquently about Holocaust literature and whose works are most popular: People love Anne Frank because her famous opinion that people were “truly good at heart” serves as a “gift of grace and absolution from a murdered Jew”, even though, as Horn points out, Frank expressed that sentiment before she met the really bad people. She writes about a city in China, now the site of a giant annual ice festival (!), that was built and settled by Russian Jews; the myth of forced name changes at Ellis Island; the Tree of Life synagogue murders and the current wave of antisemitism. “Societies that accept Jews have flourished,” she writes. “Societies that reject Jews have withered, fading into history’s night.” This is bracing and beautifully written, and I never would have found it were it not for the recommendations of two of my favorite readers: Noam and Lindsey. Thank you!
The Marriage Portrait, by Maggie O’Farrell
I read this with a pit in my stomach, because the fate of our 16th century protagonist seems certain. We’re told that the historical figure on which she is based, Lucrezia di Cosimo de’Medici, was married off as a young teenager and died, mysteriously, less than a year after leaving Florence with her husband, the Duke of Ferrara. And when we meet the novel’s version of Lucrezia, we learn in the first paragraph that she believes her new husband intends to kill her at the remote hunting lodge to which he has brought her. The only mystery seems to be how he’ll do it. To be fair, the pit in my stomach also came from the stark reminder of the limited possibilities available to women and girls at the time, even -- like Lucrezia -- the most privileged. The story of her childhood, which O’Farrell alternates with the apparent countdown to her death, is claustrophobic; Lucrezia is banished to the kitchen as a small child, cooped up in a nursery as a slightly bigger one, and promised to an older man she’s barely met at the age of 13, after her sister, the intended bride, dies. He seems charming at the beginning of their marriage, but that only lasts as long as it takes for Lucrezia to stray even slightly from her assigned role. I loved this for its lush, descriptive writing and for a fantastic ending that made me tear up. This is another recommendation – thanks to Heather and Katie for the endorsement, via my husband, that made me finally commit to it.