Great reads in small packages
As a professional reader, I have a special affection for short books -- by which I do not mean the high-concept, desperately comical ''stocking-stuffers" that congregate around cash registers in bookshops at this time of year. What I do mean is tidy little books that pack a pleasing punch, something like Penelope Fitzgerald's ''The Bookshop," my favorite short novel of all time. Now I have before me three books suitable for slipping to friends as modest holiday gifts.
Nicola Shulman's ''A Rage for Rock Gardening: The Story of Reginald Farrer, Gardener, Writer and Plant Collector" (Godine, $20) consists of 120 economical pages of inspired and festive prose describing the life and doings of one of England's most eccentric, obstinate, and egotistical plant fanciers, a branch of humanity already remarkable for those qualities, as I don't have to tell you. In his short life of 40 years, Farrer became not only a formidable travel writer, but also the most influential champion of alpine plants in the Western world. He was, in sum, as Shulman says, ''the man who put a rockery in every backyard garden."
Born of wealthy English parents in 1880, Farrer had a congenital cleft palate (the supposed consequence of his pregnant mother having been ''surprised by a chimney sweep"). The medical treatment for his affliction -- including hot tongs -- was successful only in accustoming him to enduring physical hardship. Until he went up to Oxford, Farrer was educated at home, where he developed a vast knowledge of botany, skill in horticulture, and an eventual hatred of his parents. This consuming sentiment became a central element in his literary career, which he hoped would be that of a novelist. His generally unsuccessful novels wreaked fearful vengeance on characters modeled after his parents, but, as Shulman observes, all his work, ''including his garden writing and travel books, can be read as open letters of complaint to his parents."As for their view of him, his greatest offense was his conversion to Buddhism, to an idiosyncratic, self-styled version, to be sure, which he embellished with a costume of his own devising. This caused the strings of the family purse to tighten, and Farrer was forced to finance his search for new alpine plants in the Himalayas and elsewhere by writing on gardening.
He proved to be brilliant at this, and his style, steeped in his own sensibilities, prejudices, and wit, changed the field forever. In horticulture, it was his opinion that mattered, his personality that informed it, and his whimsy that brought it home -- as in his description of the globular show chrysanthemum as ''a moulting mop dipped in stale lobster sauce."
That Farrer was irascible, intolerant, and possessed of a gargantuan ego Shulman demonstrates with brio, but there was also something extraordinarily poignant about him. His childhood was blighted by infirmity; he was physically unprepossessing; and he cherished an unrequited passion for the handsome and gifted Aubrey Herbert, a fellow student at Balliol College. Shulman brings out the melancholy aspect of this life beautifully, not least in showing how Farrer identified alpine plants with himself. Speaking of his books, she writes, ''One cannot be long exposed to writings in which plants get bored and lonely, and need company, and must, like witty but difficult house guests, have not just food but 'such succulent delights that they will thrive, and unfold, and sparkle for you afterwards,' without detecting a second, unfloral presence here." Written with an eye for foible and the telling detail, this is a magnificent little book, as perfectly suited to the student of human nature as it is to fans of gardening and exotic travel.
The baobab is one of the most reliably odd-looking trees on the face of the planet and is the subject of ''The Remarkable Baobab," Thomas Pakenham's 142-page tribute to its arboreal weirdness and doughty endurance (Norton, $19.95). Eight species of the tree exist, some taking on the appearance of yams, others of elephant parts, and yet others of diverse entities indescribable. This book is interesting chiefly for its photographs, many taken by the author, who is utterly smitten by the trees -- as who would not be, once introduced to them. They live in Madagascar, Africa, Australia, and the Caribbean, and have played crucial roles in the lives of their human neighbors, their bark, seeds, and seed pods providing shelter, clothing, food, and water vessels. The trees, some of which are 100 feet around and perhaps 1,000 years old, have also provided hollow interiors for water reservoirs and accommodations of one sort or another, including appealing-looking drinking establishments. I don't think I know of a more generous tree, not so much for its material largesse as for its unmistakable sense of humor and air of good will.
''Mrs. Sartoris," by Elke Schmitter (translated, from the German, by Carol Brown Janeway, Vintage, paperback, $12.95), is a chilly little 143-page novel about a woman whose path you would be advised not to cross if, let's say, you had given her reason to despise you and she happened to be behind the wheel of a car and it was dark and no one else was around. I'm not pretending she was right -- not in the first case, certainly -- but then again I'm not going to say she was positively wrong -- the second case almost smacks of the providential. I will say, though, that I came away after a couple of hours of glued-to-the-page reading thinking how a dash of noir really does buck one up -- which is something to keep in mind during the rigors of the holiday season.
Katherine A. Powers can be reached by e-mail at pow3@earthlink.net.
