In the annals of archaeology, it ranks as the most bizarre excavation team. Led by a handsome British aristocrat, its members included a Swiss psychic, a Finnish poet, an English cricket champion and a mustachioed Swede who once piloted a steamboat on the Congo River. None had any training in the field.
Nor was the object of their search ordinary. This motley assemblage arrived in Jerusalem in 1909, when the Holy City was still under the authority of the Ottoman Empire, ruled from Istanbul. They sought nothing less than the famed Ark of the Covenant, along with treasures gathered by King Solomon 3,000 years ago that, according to legend, were later hidden.
Long before Raiders of the Lost Ark was a box-office smash, this band of unlikely explorers launched a secret dig that blew up into an international scandal that shook the Middle East, with consequences still felt today.
It’s easy enough to find banana and fudge or banana caramel ice cream at your local deli these days, but the flavor I miss from my childhood, and which is far harder to track down, is just plain banana. No chocolate, no nuts. It tasted only of cream, bananas and sugar, and was much more luscious and profound than the sum of its parts. At Eddie’s Sweet Shop in Forest Hills, Queens, it is just as I remember it, as if seasoned with a dash of nostalgia.
A depressed protagonist poses a particular challenge for the writer: How do you get your story moving forward when the person at its center has a hard time getting out of bed? In his briskly entertaining debut novel, “The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven,” Nathaniel Ian Miller solves this problem by focusing on the transforming possibilities of friendship. Sven Ormson, the eponymous hero, is introduced as a gloomy, bookish and somewhat pretentious young man who fantasizes about swapping the dismal daily grind of early-20th-century Stockholm for the unpeopled expanses of the Arctic, yet lacks the energy and wherewithal to make a change. His melancholic tendencies are apparent from the beginning, but as the novel unfolds Miller helpfully supplies Sven with a series of companions who are able, whenever needs must, to prod him into action and bring out the better, more cheerful aspects of his character.
Glück’s new book, Winter Recipes From The Collective, comes seven years later and a year after she won the Nobel Prize. It is quite brief, only 15 poems, and gives an impression of exhaustion, as though language and material have been nearly depleted. Glück has often drawn on mythology, a way of supplementing one’s life material; you may need just a touch of your own pain or memory to breathe life into the old, familiar myth. Here, as in her last book, the poems often feel like fables or strange little fictions, positing characters with unclear relation to the poet — there is fictive distance, but how much distance? “The Denial of Death” is an almost novelistic poem in which the speaker recalls how her life changed after she misplaced her passport; her companion goes on with the journey as planned, while she is stuck in place and therefore time. The concierge of the hotel tells her, “You have begun your own journey, / not into the world, like your friend’s, but into yourself.” “Everything returns,” he goes on, “but what returns is not / what went away.”
She cooks to Ella’s soaring, playful voice.
The bright, three-minute songs have changed and lifted
her mood. The speakers rattle the kitchen cabinets.