Chasing Eden by Howard Mansfield

It seems like it was just yesterday I was writing about Howard Mansfield’s last book, The Habit of Turning the World Upside Down. Believe it or not, that was in 2018. (Quick aside, I realized today I’ve been writing this blog since 2007 — where does the time go?) Mansfield’s new book, Chasing Eden: a Book of Seekers is as thoughtful and interesting as his previous work. I always know that when I pick up one of his books, I will learn new things, even about topics I thought I previously knew, that I will understand differently with him as my guide. He has a way of deeply considering a topic, finding new stories to tell, and making connections that is both enjoyable and edifying.

At first it seems as if the seekers Mansfield introduces in Chasing Eden can’t possibly have much in common. First, he talks about a strange (and fairly disgusting) sect of fanatical pilgrims, the Mummyjums, in the book’s introduction, and then he goes on to explore the lives of a man who befriended the last Shakers in Canterbury, New Hampshire; the strange desire to hurry from scenic vista to scenic vista in the White Mountains (and the landscape painters awed by nature in the 19th century who led us to this rushing); the lives of a Black doctor and his family who passed for white in New Hampshire in the 1930s and 40s; the terribly misleading notion of “forty acres and a mule” and what really happened during Reconstruction with regard to land for the newly freed; the residents of postwar housing developments on Long Island; and the Pocumtucks, Native American people who saved a Pilgrim community from starving in 1636 even though many of their fellow indigenous people had been massacred in New England.

How are these disparate stories connected? What meaning does Mansfield draw from a great deal of suffering and injustice in the stories he delves into, from ideals abandoned, exploitation repeated over and over throughout history, and people judging each other decade in and decade out? He finds hope in the acts of generosity, kindness, perseverance, and dignity in each story (even when he himself has to be a seeker to find them) and in the ways that in every time and place, “longing gives form and force to our lives.” And he transmits this hope, through the stories he unearths and explores, always with gentle erudition.

Mansfield never lectures, but he never fails to teach, and to provide food for thought. At the end of Chasing Eden, after sharing the truth about Thanksgiving and the story of the Pocumtucks’ “gift in a starving time,” he writes, “Three hundred and eighty years later, the question that I wish was at the table on Thanksgiving is: What will we do now in return?”

A question that deserves our full attention, and a book that can help anyone seeking an answer to it.

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Fresh Water for Flowers by Valérie Perrin

It’s been some time since I read a Europa Edition novel, but if you go back through the years of posts here on bookconscious you’ll find that I have read many titles from this wonderful publisher. Fresh Water for Flowers by Valérie Perrin, translated by Hildegarde Serle, reminded me why. Europa consistently brings interesting voices to print, and good reads.

Fresh Water for Flowers is the story of Violette, a woman who grew up in foster homes and marries at 18, has a daughter, and soon realizes that she is going to have to support her family while her husband chases other women. They work (well, she works, Phillipe fools around) at a “level crossing” — she goes out multiple times, day and night, to lower the barrier so cars won’t cross train tracks when the train goes by. Her little daughter waves to all the people on the trains.

A series of events leads Violette to move with Phillipe to another part of France, to become cemetery caretakers. Again, Violette does all the work. She takes the job after the previous caretaker, Sasha, has taught her everything he knows about gardening, and entrusts her with tending his extensive garden and caring for the people who work in and visit the cemetery. One day, a detective named Julien comes and tells her he needs to know about a man buried in the cemetery, a prominent lawyer named Gabriel, because Julien’s mother Irène has left instructions that her ashes are to be interred with Gabriel’s.

Julien reads about the man’s funeral in Violette’s records, and later returns with Irène’s journal. It becomes clear that Julien not only wants to lay his mother to rest, but also to help Violette solve some mysteries that can help her move on in life — with him. I’m trying not to give away any of the intriguing plot. It’s a lovely book, full of sensual details like the kinds of scent and clothing the different characters wear, the types of flowers, vegetables and herbs Violette grows, wonderful descriptions of food, and many musical references. There are also many details about the places the characters inhabit. It’s vivid and evocative.

It’s also very emotional — there are some relationships that are sad and harsh and hurtful, and there are beautiful friendships and deep kindnesses. At the cemetery, Violette’s circle of coworkers become a family of sorts for her. I loved the descriptions of meals in her kitchen or garden, conversation flowing, and the many cats and a dog the gravediggers and Violette have taken in swishing around the humans. I could see many scenes in my mind and read somewhere that there is already a deal in the works to adapt the book to television.

One of the intriguing things about Fresh Water for Flowers are the chapter epigraphs — every one a little poem of sorts, like this one: “November is eternal, life is almost beautiful, memories are dead ends that we just keep turning over.” Perrin uses a mixture of dialogue, narrative, and journal entries to unspool her story. In the end, I felt I didn’t want the book to end, as Violette says: “I close Irène’s journal with a heavy heart. The way one closes a novel one has fallen in love with. A novel that’s a friend from whom it’s hard to part, because one wants it close by, in arm’s reach.”

A terrific escape.

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Walking to Jerusalem by Justin Butcher

Sometime in the summer of 2019 I was in our local bookstore (where I used to work) and chatted with one of the staff who said she had been trying to get advanced reader copies of books into the hands of customers, to help find good reads and talk them up. She let me look through a pile. I grabbed Walking to Jerusalem by Justin Butcher. By the time the pandemic hit 6-7 months later, I hadn’t read it yet, and picked it up. I quickly decided my dad might like it (he recently celebrated walking the equivalent of twice around the earth) so I sent it to him. A few weeks ago he sent it back as he is weeding his collection. I picked it up again and am very glad I did.

Yes, it’s a book about a very long walk, from London to Jerusalem across 11 countries over several months in 2017, but mainly it’s a book about why the walkers did this. The event was called the Just Walk, and as Butcher explains early in the book, it was conceived as a way to mark the centenary of the Balfour Declaration, which was a statement made by the government of Great Britain in 1917 that paved the way for the modern State of Israel. After outlining briefly the political reasons for the statement, Butcher notes that it was also inspired by antisemitism — there were plenty of British leaders (and ordinary people) who felt Jews couldn’t assimilate into English life and so the idea of a Jewish nation appealed to those who wanted Jews to leave England. And although the Balfour Declaration did state that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine,” the British government’s subsequent actions were more concerned with establishing a Jewish state than with protecting the rights of the majority Palestinian population.

Along with describing what it’s like to travel on foot, Butcher provides colorful commentary about the places the walkers passed through — in particular he writes about many sites that have welcomed pilgrims traveling to the Holy Land for centuries, as the group stops in those places. As he walked he used the voice recorder on his phone as well as journaling, so there are passages where he quotes some of the local guides at length. It’s all very interesting. Their Albanian host, for example, talks not only about the way Albania protected Jews during WWII but also about the economic collapse in the post-communist era caused by a government bond scheme fraught with corruption that bankrupted people and caused a violent uprising. I didn’t know anything about that, even though it happened only a couple of decades ago.

And Butcher describes the landscape near Kryezi, Albania: “The little grove surrounding the farmstead is a Tolkienesque glade of fabulously gnarled, ancient, twisted trunks of olive trees, with huge distended girth like baobabs, sprawling and stretching over the shelves of the hillside . . . . Between the vegetation, where the mountain slopes are too steep for any cultivation, there are great pale escarpments, riddled and marbled with fantastical swirling rock formations.”

Still, the most compelling thing about Walking to Jerusalem is the stories of the many Palestinians Butcher and the others meet or knew before the trip, people whose entire lives for generations have been impacted by displacement, occupation, intimidation, and violence. There are stories of so many individuals and groups in the Holy Land trying to bring people from Israeli and Palestinian communities together. So many acts of nonviolent resistance. So many stories of illegal settlement, of Israeli police and military ignoring the systemic abuse of Palestinians by militant settlers, of houses demolished, farmland encroached upon, collective punishment. I’m not going to quote one or two, because I think the cumulative effect is what is so powerful in this book.

Walking to Jerusalem is a moving read. It’s not any better in the Occupied Territory since the Just Walk — Butcher actually writes that things are worse by the time he is finishing the book. But the Palestinians he meets tell him again and again that what he can do for them is tell their stories. Let the world know that they are people trying to live their lives as best they can in the face of systemic injustice. It’s indifference that allows oppression to continue. I’m grateful for the people who did the Just Walk and all the organizations around the world and in the U.S. who are working to end both indifference and oppression.

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