Clarice Stasz's 3 favorite reads in 2023

This book's theme was so unexpected. When I bought it at the library used bookstore, the clerk said it was one of her favorite books ever. I hadn’t paid attention to the back matter, rather, I was attracted by the title. The cover artwork might have alerted me, but I missed the connection. (And I won’t give it away here.)

I am always fascinated by the intersection of private lives and historic events. Discovering that this book was a multi-generational family memoir of one of the Ephrussis, one of the wealthiest Jewish banking dynasties in Paris and Vienna, I expected surprises. Rather than create a standard biography, de Waal describes his journey to understand the family’s rare artistic inheritance. I became a silent companion during his trips to interview sources and dive into archives. I felt like the author’s close friend, not an anonymous reader, invited to meet his uncle in Japan or his brother in Odessa.

I read through it in two sittings. It’s a mystery, a family biography, a bit of Holocaust history, some artistic gossip, art history, and more. Just enough illustrations add to the experience, yet I also hit the internet to look up artworks and places, so it became an interactive read as well.

De Waal is one of Britain’s most acclaimed potters. As good at shaping words as shaping clay, he models how the best history must have clarity and style. His elegant writing makes the book accessible to everyone. It is a treasure chest of delights, like the hare and its companions. 

Isn’t it wonderful when you find a new author that just springs your heart open, and even better, you learn she has a pile of other books you can read written by her? This is what happened with Love, Nina. I regularly read book reviews in British newspapers and kept coming across Stibbe’s name with regard to “comedy of manners.” I had exhausted Barbara Pym, Dodie Smith, Mavis Cheek, and Elinor Lipman. Into my second year of widowhood, I needed their wise humor.

To my surprise, this book is a memoir based on actual letters she had written to her sister during her early twenties. Remember those days? Naivete mixed with certainty? Stibbe led me to recast my early adulthood with its gauche manners, hopeless ideals, failed efforts, and more. I was able to see that time afresh, the beauty of the clumsy, confused girl becoming an adult. I unearthed forgotten episodes of hilarity buried under the painful memories, stories to share with my daughter.

When I left the East Coast for California fifty years ago, everyone warned me about earthquakes. They thought I was foolish! I can recall only Loma Prieta. I had fallen asleep on the couch while the World Series was being played close by. My daughter, not the quake, woke me up to feel the shaking. Compared to thunderstorms, blizzards, and hurricanes back east, earthquakes were more mythological than actual.

Life was calm until the 2017 night when smoke coming through an open window awoke me. No fire engines or signs of burning anywhere, I went back to sleep. In the morning, I discovered that a firestorm had raged through towns and country fifteen miles away, taking an area larger than Rhode Island. Like so many that hellish night, the president of my university fled her home in pajamas, barefoot. So did Fies, a local artist, and his wife flee. He immediately began sketches that outlined this graphic nonfiction book. 

Almost 90,000 people were homeless, and 44 died horrifically. My county has been hit again, in smaller ways, each successive year. When destruction is so vast, it clouds the impact on victims and families. Fies corrects that omission by detailing the stages of recovery, from the emotional shock, the property loss, and the bureaucratic maze to building anew. Fies acknowledges how many victims (aged, poor, mobile home renters) lacked his resources, so he includes some of their stories.  

So much for earthquakes. I wish I could say people have learned from this, but I drive around the county and see neighborhoods where trees abut homes. New tinder for the next heat wave! I believe my group of ranch homes on the flats is safe, but that is what similar suburbanites thought before the fire jumped the freeway and took over 500 houses. I was once near LA when the sky raged orange over the mountains, an unforgiving and voracious monster. Fies reminds me to be vigilant. Thanks to him, I now have an escape bag.