Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: My Year of Magical Reading
An avid reader isn鈥檛 necessarily a deep writer. This may be the key to the profound limitations of Nina Sankovitch鈥檚 Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: My Year of Magical Reading, an amateur memoir of loss pegged to her eldest sister鈥檚 death. The book owes its subtitle to acclaimed journalist and novelist Joan Didion鈥檚 own 2005 account of exquisite grief at the deaths of both her husband and daughter, in 鈥淭he Year of Magical Thinking." But Sankovitch boasts none of Didion鈥檚 brilliance 鈥� at least, not as an author.
Trained as an attorney, Sankovitch, 48, does her due diligence in this stolid recapping of the 12 months that she spent reading a book a day, as a salve for losing an adored sibling to cancer several years before. Every tome that she picks up is exhaustively detailed, along with any similarity that its heroine bears to her idealized late sister, Anne-Marie.
Not that Sankovitch isn鈥檛 bright; she earned her J.D. at Harvard. But a lack of independent thought marks her narrative of the family life created in the US by her Catholic immigrant parents 鈥� an academic and a doctor from Belgium and Belarus, respectively 鈥� along with her parroting of their tales of suffering endured by European relatives during World War II, all without wonder at their conclusions.
On learning that three of her father鈥檚 siblings were executed by partisans while his mother hid in an adjoining room, Sankovitch never asks an obvious question: Why didn鈥檛 she intervene? Instead, the lawyer offers what sounds like a sermon. Her grandmother was 鈥渦nable to save them,鈥� she says of her aunt and uncles, then intones, 鈥淏ut remembrance is the bones around which a body of resilience is built.鈥�
Exculpating explanations aside, if survivor guilt is a family legacy that鈥檚 dropped by one generation onto the shoulders of the next, then the weight of it seems to have settled on Sankovitch. What drives her memoir is an outsized sense of responsibility for her sister鈥檚 death 鈥� or at least, for enduring when her more meritorious sibling (in Sankovitch鈥檚 view) cannot. 鈥淲hy do I deserve to live?鈥� she moans.
It鈥檚 a question that spurs her to seek comfort in a regimen of reading. 鈥淚 was reminded of Anne-Marie in the characters I was meeting,鈥� Sankovitch swoons. 鈥淪he was the kind of heroine authors like to put in their books, with her quiet strength and resilience, her utter lack of petty or trivial concerns, and the superlative combination of her beauty and her intelligence,鈥� the author continues. 鈥淎nne-Marie had her negative traits, but even those always seemed to me to be ubertraits.鈥�
Quite a mash note. What did Anne-Marie do to earn such adulation? Her virtue seems to rest largely on having stopped the author, at age 12, from riding the wrong bus into a down-at-heel district of Chicago, one with bars, liquor stores, pawn shops, and decrepit apartment buildings.
鈥溾�橸ou saved my life,鈥欌�� Sankovitch recalls gasping to her sister at the time. Four decades later, she never really reconsiders the drama of her statement or leaves off its adolescent credulity.
That makes her memoir not complex but rather sweet, profoundly sincere, and wholly devoted to its subject: the search for sustenance in the face of sorrow. The book鈥檚 lack of skepticism may fail to spark reader interest in the author鈥檚 close relationships. But it鈥檚 intriguing at least for the role that ritual plays in her grasp at meaning.
Facing guilt or loss, some turn to old rites: making confession, sitting shiva, or gathering together with friends. In this age of the self, however, Sankovitch has adapted the tradition of shared mourning into a novel form of solace. Hers consists of curling up with a book a day 鈥� and then posting a review of it, the next day, online.
In fact, she developed a following for her blog, ReadAllDay.org, and fans wrote to suggest favorite titles. 鈥淚 received an e-mail from a man in New York City who had been doing research for a book club meeting,鈥� she gushes, adding, 鈥淗e and I, complete strangers, made a connection through our love of books. A reader reached out from Germany, the sister of a friend wrote from Brazil,鈥� she enumerates, and 鈥渁 woman wrote from Singapore, and I had a whole slew of British book lovers writing in with recommendations.鈥�
Whether or not such effusing makes for a strong memoir, it鈥檚 a marker of the times. Calling into the void for reassurance is a universal trend. Through the magic of cyberspace, sometimes 鈥� often 鈥� someone replies.
Susan Comninos is a journalist and poet in New York. Her articles recently appeared in the Forward and Albany Times Union. Last year, she won Tablet Magazine鈥檚 Yehuda Halevi Poetry Competition
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