I sat in the corner of a crowded one-room bookshop nibbling a complimentary madeleine and listening for the words that would signal the start of a marathon reading. “For a long time,” Marcel Proust’s seven-volume In Search of Lost Time begins, “I used to go to bed early.” Bed was a long way off for…
1. Where the Dead Speak Odessa, 1923: The executioners are all drunk, of course, and the snow is slippery as Prisoner Z stumbles to join the others before the firing squad. He pulls at his shirt, sweat-soaked, though he can see his breath. He’s worn it a week now. Beside him, fellow prisoners reeking of…
The restaurant is the most popular in town, and we wait the better portion of an hour for a table. There are eight of us gathered on the sidewalk. It’s late spring, the kind of mauvish gloaming hour that Virginia Woolf would have marked by the whirling and wheeling of rooks, but there are no…
Years ago, I went to a family reunion in rural Sweden, where the houses are red, yellow, or white, and the mailboxes bear the family’s last name. My grandfather was born Birger Johansson, but because the farmers on either side of his family’s farm were also named “Johansson,” Birger’s family decided to change their surname….
[M]odern man no longer communicates with the madman […] There is no common language: or rather, it no longer exists; the constitution of madness as mental illness, at the end of the eighteenth century, bears witness to a rupture in a dialogue, gives the separation as already enacted, and expels from the memory all those…
I was rolling jeans into tubular bundles and tucking them into my suitcase, packing for Prague. This trip would be the longest that I’d been away from the kids, and also the farthest. “Don’t worry about us,” my husband said. “OK,” I said. “We’ll be fine,” he continued, sensing my anxiety. He handed me an…
“These cliffs must have many secrets.” It is a sentence that has floated, fully formed, in and out of my thoughts since I arrived in Ireland. Now I say the words aloud for the first time. Breda Roche’s expression sharpens. “That, they do.” Her gaze on the winding street ahead of our car is grave….
Childhood is self-enclosed and timeless. In adolescence, a moment comes when we sense the future, if only vaguely and ecstatically. For me, that happened on a boarding school trip to Quebec. It was 1962 and I was fourteen. The circumstances of the excursion have gotten fuzzy in my memory, but I do know we traveled…
Ace in the Hole The first Minuteman Missile—America’s first solid fuel, fully automated, push-button missile and John F. Kennedy’s secret weapon against the Soviets during the Cuban Missile Crisis—was buried in Alpha Six silo, forty miles southeast of my hometown. It took only thirty-two seconds to launch. In 1962, when Khrushchev’s threats escalated, Air Command…
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