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I have written before about my love of Natalia Ginzburg’s fiction – most recently, All Our Yesterdays, a rich, multilayered novel of family life spanning the duration of WW2. The Little Virtues is a volume of Ginzburg’s essays, and what a marvellous collection it is – erudite, intelligent and full of the wisdom of life. Ginzburg wrote these pieces individually between 1944 and 1962, and many were published in Italian journals before being collected here. In her characteristically lucid prose, Ginzburg writes of families and friendships, of virtues and parenthood, and of writing and relationships. I adored this beautiful, luminous collection of essays, a certainty for my end-of-year highlights even though we’re only in January – it really is that good.

In the opening essay, ‘Winter in the Abruzzi’ (1944), Ginzburg describes the time she and her family spent living in exile in a village in Abruzzo during…

Beatniks from Venice West at LA City Hall

In a recent rambling conversation with Micaela Brinsley, who has a rare gift for drawing people out, I went on — and on, and on — about a poem from My Hollywood in which I imagine Sarah Bernhardt on the amusement pier at Venice Beach. I’ve written about my Venice diptych before, describing the area in which it’s set as “a fanciful corner of LA developed by the fanciful Abbot Kinney in 1905.” In my interview with Micaela, I add a bit to the picture, explaining that Venice is “a place that goes up and down in status rapidly. One decade it’s the worst part of Los Angeles, the next decade it’s the priciest.”

One of its low points, in terms of economic status, happened to coincide with its cultural renaissance. In the 1950s, Venice West became the hub of LA’s beatnik…

I just finished logging my currently inked pens on the wonderful fountain pen companion and I was a bit shocked to discover that I have 30 fountain pens inked up (each one with a different ink). This is of course the result of the Inkvent madness and my insistence on actually filling pens with the samples in the calendar instead of just using a dip pen.

I’ve written Solar Storm (day 4) dry and I’ve dumped Spruce (day 3) because of the smell, but I’ve kept Pick Me Up (day 15) despite the smell, because of the rich chocolate shade that it has. Since creating this list I’ve also written Jingle Berry (day 8) dry and Spiced Apple (day 5) is about to join it. I’m likely going to be forced to dump and clean out some of these pens, but my goal is to try and write and sketch…

 Another time, this same moon, which free-hands its flat arc across a fathomless slate of nighttime sky, supplied so much duplicitous reason that the warmest stretch ever of endless kissing seemed also to signal an endless love. Have others believed in such infinite moments? Maybe the fire and the jazz and the lips touching just right? The palm of conversation folding in whatever tender confidence came to mind? No way, back then, could that peaceful walk at dusk— the slow sun tingeing stray clouds pink over a tiny inland lake—have led to the sorry war to come, the saddest set of regrets that still colors my occasional wandering. How could once watching waves etching a shore have also meant the meanest goodbye would eventually roll its own way in? How could catching together the brilliance of high light glancing among bright white slopes have groomed a final run so treacherous…

As you can see from my reviews of Anita Brookner’s novels which are within the obituary I wrote on the occasion of her death in 2016, I thought I had her ‘pegged’ as an author of bitter-sweet stories of intelligent middle-class older women reflecting on their poor choices and their wasted lives.  These women were emotionally stilted, isolated from society and disappointed by men.  I admired her writing, her brilliantly perceptive descriptions and her often droll style, but I always had to be ‘in the mood’ to read a Brookner.

But…

An episode of Backlisted (about Raymond Chandler, of all people!) began as usual with the chat about who’d been reading what, and Andy Miller told the listeners about a Brookner novel I didn’t know, quite different to the others I had read:

Latecomers, he said, is an incredibly moving book about two men who came to England as…