“The Old American Artist” by Felipe Adan Lerma

Occasionally, you start reading a book and think you’re reliving a part of your own youth. 

Arturo is an artist. He’s living in Italy with his wife Rosetta. Their children are grown and busy at careers back in the States. Rosetta has also been there, visiting, but she’s now due back to Italy. It’s a big day and evening for Arturo – with the evening will come an exhibition of his paintings. Yes, it’s a small town, but it’s still a big deal.

The story of The Old American Artist by Felipe Adan Lerma happens over the course of a day. But it also happens over the course of more than three decades, stretching back to Arturo’s 20s when he lived in Galveston and was just beginning to discover his art.  The story of Arturo’s day, and the story of Arturo’s life, are interspersed to form the story’s narrative. 

The reader moves back and forth, ultimately realizing that one story is being told. And it’s a love story, both the love story of Arturo and Rosetta and the love story of Arturo and his painting. It’s a love story that doesn’t run smoothly. The couple face difficulties and separations. Arturo experiences times of artistic drought and doubt. A question even arises whether or not Rosetta is really returning for the big exhibition. 

Felipe Adan Lerma

The story is a work of fiction, but it is clearly based on Lerma’s life. The part of the story set in Texas is what’s personally familiar to me, with scenes from Galveston and Houston reminding me of my own 20s living in Houston. I know the freeways Arturo drives, and I know the malls where he sometimes sells his work. I even know the “east side” of town where Arturo meets Rosetta; I did volunteer work at a children’s home in that area. 

Lerma is himself an artist and photographer, not unlike Arturo. He’s also a poet, a novelist, a short story writer, and a mystery and thriller writer. He’s written a series of works on visiting Paris, including a day-by-day itinerary in how to visit the city in 5 ½ weeks. Like his fictional hero, he’s lived in Texas, Vermont, and Italy. The Old American Artist is the first of three short novels in a series, the second being Rosetta and the third being The Children.

The Old American Artist is a charming delight to read, the story of an older artist who understands his life and the depth of feeling he has for the two great loves of that life – his wife and his art.

Dancing King Stories: Sarah Kent-Hughes

The story of Michael Kent and Sarah Hughes begins in Dancing Priest, the first novel in the Dancing Priest series. And while other narratives will stream through the series, the love story of Michael and Sarah remains the core.

They meet at the University of Edinburgh. She’s an art student at the University of Southern California, studying a year abroad with her brother David Hughes. She and Michael share a class in medieval church history; he sees her sitting a few rows away and is instantly smitten. He introduces himself after the class, she thinks she’s been hit on for the fourth time that day; and she dismisses him with an Anglo-Saxon profanity, believing his statement about studying for the priesthood to be a come-on line.

But they both get passed that, and at a school festival, dance what comes to be known as the “last tango in Edinburgh.” And it’s during that dance that the dancing priest of the title is born.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

“Notes from Underground” by Roger Scruton

Prague, 1985. A young man named Jan Reichl works as a street cleaner, because it is the only work he’s allowed to do. His father was arrested , tried and imprisoned for anti-state activities; as a result, Jan is not allowed to go to university. His mother spends most of her free time typing samizdat manuscripts – how works by dissident Czech authors and others were circulated during the communist area (samizdat was not limited to what was then Czechoslovakia; it existed is virtually all European countries in the soviet orbit and in Russia itself).

Jan, through his imagination, lives in what he calls “the underground,” a kind of alternative existence, even if only in his mind. When he rides the Metro, he imagines lives for the people he sees on the train. He fashions these imaginings into stories, one of which, entitled Rumors, has slipped into samizdat circulation under a pseudonym.

One day on the Metro, he sees a girl, a girl so vivid she breaks through his imaginings. He’s so overwhelmed that he leaves a typewritten copy of Rumors on the train. It ends up in her hands. And they meet, Jan and this young woman named Alzbeta Palkova, or simply Betka. And Jan soon finds himself increasingly enmeshed in another kind of underground, a real one, one comprised of dissidents and intellectuals.

Notes from Underground by Roger Scruton is the novel that tells the story of Jan and Betka, but it does so almost indirectly. It is a novel about a specific place and time – Prague in the waning does of communist domination before the end of the Berlin Wall. It is a novel about a love affair. It is a novel about a search for truth, both collective and individual. It is a novel about history, and how history is not something that happened years before but almost a living thing that continues to shape and direct the reality of today. It is a novel written as a memoir, with the writer describing events of 30 years previously.

Roger Scruton

Scruton, a native Briton and currently a Fellow at the Ethics and Policy Center in Washington, D.C.  has written both novels and short stories over his long career as a writer and philosopher, but he is better known for his non-fiction works, such as Our Church: A Personal History of the Church of England (2012); Beauty: A Very Short Introduction (2009); The Uses of Pessimism (2010), and Green Philosophy (2012; published in the United States as How to Think Seriously About the Planet). He is also a well-known lecturer (he recently spoke at the Ethic and Policy Center on “The Future of European Civilization: Lessons for America”).

He is also that relatively rare species of conservative philosopher, and a novel like Notes from Underground (with a title borrowed from Dostoevsky) might have fared poorly in less experienced hands, becoming too much of a political discussion. What is different about this work is its heart of the love story of Jan and Betka, a story of a love that the reader understands early is likely doomed but only gradually coming to understand why.

And it is in that unfolding of the “why” that the story of an era is told, and told well.

Photograph by the Prague Castle at sunset by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.