It would be easy to mistake Notebooks of the Mediterranean for a small book. It is not. It is a precise one.
An issue from the Hudson archive — essays, verse, and review of the season's most necessary books.
The prose moves like weather. Sentences gather, break, gather again. What looks at first like restraint is, on closer reading, a kind of generosity — the writer trusting the reader to feel the storm without being shown the lightning.
A Question of Form
The prose moves like weather. Sentences gather, break, gather again. What looks at first like restraint is, on closer reading, a kind of generosity — the writer trusting the reader to feel the storm without being shown the lightning.
“There is no false note here, only a writer working at the full reach of her instrument.”
Character, here, is not announced; it accumulates. We learn who these people are the way we learn it of our neighbours: through small refusals, half-finished meals, the books left face-down on a kitchen chair.
The dialogue is doing several jobs at once. It tells us where we are. It tells us who is listening. And, more rarely, it tells us what the silence between two people actually costs.
A Question of Form
The prose moves like weather. Sentences gather, break, gather again. What looks at first like restraint is, on closer reading, a kind of generosity — the writer trusting the reader to feel the storm without being shown the lightning.
It would be wrong to call Notebooks of the Mediterranean flawless. It is something better than that: alive.
