Brian Berrett

In July of 1939, at the age of 31, the British writer Olivia Manning met Reggie Smith, who was on leave in England from his position as British Council lecturer in Bucharest, Romania. They were married the next month, and, just a few days after the ceremony, found out that Reggie was recalled to Bucharest. They apparently left in a matter of hours and arrived in Bucharest on September 3, the day Britain declared war on Germany. Soon the couple found themselves moving from Romania to Greece (arriving there not long before Greece entered the war), to Egypt and finally to Palestine as the war consumed Eastern Europe.

She memorialized these experiences with her husband in two trilogies of novels, The Balkan Trilogy and The Levant Trilogy, which follow Harriet and Guy Pringle. Though the series of novels, known collectively as The Fortunes of War, are not strictly autobiographical, the Pringles follow a similar course as Manning and her husband did a few decades before.

The first book of the Balkan Trilogy, The Great Fortune, was published in 1960, and was followed by The Spoilt City in 1962 and Friends and Heroes in 1965. In the 1970s, she published The Levant Trilogy, which began with The Danger Tree in 1977, The Battle Lost and Won in 1978, and The Sum of Things in 1980.

Olivia Manning died on July 23, 1980.

NYRB Classics published their edition of The Balkan Trilogy in January of 2010 and their edition of The Levant Trilogy in June of 2014. And those are the books we’ll be talking about in Episode 13 of The Mookse and the Gripes podcast.

In Episode 14 we will be talking about John Williams’ Augustus, which was just released this past week. With that, we will have talked about each of John Williams’ three masterworks.

Please send us your thoughts and we’ll share them on the show.

In this episode we look at what NYRB Classics will be releasing in the first part of 2014 (and a bit beyond).

• Intro
• Brief discussion of each book (the individual times are below): 03:20
• Our most anticipated titles: 49:48

Here are the 20 books you can look forward to in the near future, along with their tentative release dates at the time of recording:

• (03:20): The Burning of the World, by Béla Zombory-Moldován — August 5, 2014
• (05:41): Augustus, by John Williams — August 19, 2014
• (09:08): The Captain’s Daughter, by Alexander Pushkin — September 2, 2014
• (10:44): Totempole and Conversations with Beethoven, by Sanford Friedman — September 2, 2014
• (16:40): The Use of Man, by Aleksandar Tišma — September 9, 2014
• (16:58): Journey by Moonlight, by Antal Szerb — September 16, 2014
• (20:58): You’ll Enjoy It When you Get There: The Selected Stories of Elizabeth Taylor — September 16, 2014
• (21:19): On the Abolition of All Political Parties, by Simone Weil — September 30, 2014
• (23:27): In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, by William H. Gass — October 7, 2014
• (25:30): Tristana, by Benito Pérez Galdós — October 14, 2014
• (27:53): The Woman Who Borrowed Memories: Selected Stories of Tove Jansson — October 21, 2014
• (31:43): The Land Breakers, by John Ehle — November 4, 2014
• (34:25): Midnight in the Century, by Victor Serge — December 9, 2014
• (36:52): Zama, by Antonio di Benedetto — January 13, 2015
• (38:08): Thus Were Their Faces: Selected Stories of Silvina Ocampo — January 27, 2015
• (41:32): Ending Up and Take a Girl Like You, by Kingsley Amis — February 3, 2015
• (45:34): Primitive Man as Philosopher, by Paul Radin — February 10, 2015
• (48:00): The Door, by Magda Szabó — February 17, 2015

Release dates can change. In fact, some of these have already changed. I keep a relatively up-to-date list of release dates of forthcoming books on the NYRB Classics GoodReads pages, which you can see here.

Other books or artists brought up in the podcast:

• The Mad and the Bad, by Jean-Patrick Manchette
• The Balkan Trilogy, by Olivia Manning
• The Levant Trilogy, by Olivia Manning
• Butcher’s Crossing, by John Williams
• Stoner, by John Williams
• László Krasznahorkai
• Imre Kertész
• Gyula Krúdy
• Dezsö Kosztolányi
• On Being Blue, by William H. Gass
• Luis Buñuel
• Fair Play, by Tove Jansson
• The Summer Book, by Tove Jansson
• The True Deceiver, by Tove Jansson
• Memoirs of a Revolutionary, by Victor Serge
• Where There’s Love There’s Hate, by Silvina Ocampo and Adolfo Bioy Casares
• The Other, by Thomas Tryon
• The Green Man, by Kingsley Amis
• Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure, by Artermis Cooper
• The Broken Road, by Patrick Leigh Fermor

NYRB Classics published their edition of Irretrievable in February of 2011, and it is the book we’ll be talking about in Episode 12 of The Mookse and the Gripes Podcast.

I’ll get show notes on this post in due time. Meanwhile, here is the NYRB Classics blurb:

Opposites attract, and Helmut Holk and Christine Arne, the appealing married couple at the center of this engrossing book by one of Germany’s greatest novelists, could not be less alike. Christine is a serious soul from a devout background. She is brooding and beautiful and devoted to her husband and their two children. Helmut is lighthearted and pleasure-loving and largely content to defer to his wife’s deeper feelings and better wisdom. They live in a beautiful large house overlooking the sea, which they built themselves, and have been happily married for twenty-three years—only of late a certain tension has crept into their dealings with each other. Little jokes, casual endearments, long-meditated plans: they all hit a raw nerve.

How a couple can slowly drift apart, until one day they find themselves in a situation which is nothing they ever wished for but from which they cannot go back, is at the heart of this timeless story of everyday life. Theodor Fontane’s great gift is to tell the story effectively in his characters’ own words, listening to how they talk and fail to talk to each other, watching them turn away from their own true feelings as much as from each other. Irretrievable is a nuanced, affectionate, enormously sophisticated, and profoundly humane reckoning with the blindness of love.

In Episode 13 we will be talking about Olivia Manning’s The Balkan Trilogy and The Levant Trilogy. Please send us your thoughts and we’ll share them on the show.

In this episode we look at what NYRB Classics will be releasing in the first part of 2014 (and a bit beyond).

While we do discuss all fourteen of the titles, the fun part of the episode is when Brian and I step back and list our top five most anticipated releases from this group. There’s some great stuff coming, of course, so this was a bit difficult. Please let us know what you’re most looking forward to.

• Intro
• Brief discussion of each book (the individual times are below): 00:03:27
• Brian courageously offers the “least anticipated”: 00:31:45
• Our top five anticipated titles: 00:37:50

Here are the fourteen books we talk about:

• (00:03:27): The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos, by Patrick Leigh Fermor — March 4, 2014
• (00:04:27): On Being Blue, by William H. Gass — March 18, 2014
• (00:06:09): The Use of Man, by Aleksandar Tišma — April 29, 2014
• (00:08:08): Shakespeare’s Montaigne — April 8, 2014 (Brian and I both muddled this one. It’s the translation of Montaigne that Shakespeare would have read.)
• (00:11:07): During the Reign of the Queen of Persia, by Joan Chase — April 15, 2014
• (00:13:10): Fortunes of War: The Levant Trilogy, by Olivia Manning — May 13, 2014
• (00:14:40): Agostino, by Alberto Moravia — July 8, 2014
• (00:17:06): Last Words from Montmartre, by Qiu Miaojin — June 3, 2014
• (00:18:46): Zama, by Antonio di Benedetto — October 21, 2014
• (00:20:16): The Mad and the Bad, by Jean-Patrick Manchette — June 17, 2014
• (00:22:08): Fear, by Gabriel Chevallier — May 20, 2014
• (00:25:20): The Professor and the Siren, by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa — July 15, 2014
• (00:27:48): You’ll Enjoy It When You Get There: The Selected Stories of Elizabeth Taylor — August 12, 2014
• (00:30:05): The Captain’s Daughter, by Alexander Pushkin — August 19, 2014