Dear readers,
The well-adjusted quote du jour goes to Nikki Giovanni, who died earlier this month at age 81. “I recommend old age,” she said in a New York Times interview in 2020. “There’s just nothing as wonderful as knowing you have done your job.” (I also appreciate her P.S.A. from this summer about large, fearsome birds: “You have to be careful around ostriches. People need to know that.” Talk about range!)
We simply don’t hear enough from champions of aging, and that’s criminal. Motion to cut the mics of anyone whose frontal lobes are still filling out, and hoist a nonagenarian onto the nearest soapbox. All those revolutions around the sun ought to count for something.
It’s easier to find older people to hang out with in fiction, especially since crime-solving (and crime-committing) pensioners are having something of a literary moment these days. Neither of the books I discuss today fall into that genre, but they do introduce you to idiosyncratic and occasionally terrifying characters in their twilight years.
—Joumana
“Sun City,” by Tove Jansson
Fiction, 1974
Thanks to my downstairs neighbor, who finds it galling that I walk around my apartment past 8 p.m., I was beginning to sour on life in communal dwellings. And then New York Review Books brought out this Thomas Teal translation of Jansson’s 1974 novel, set at a Florida retirement home, and my bitter feelings began to dissipate into pleasant, hippo-shaped puffs.
The book was inspired by Jansson’s travels in the United States in the 1970s, where she was apparently fascinated by the American practice of retirement communities. Being Tove Jansson, goddess of proto-Scandi bliss, she did not produce an Upton Sinclair-style indictment of the institution but an affectionate, wide-ranging look at a home in St. Petersburg, Fla., from its residents and employees to its peculiar moral code. (“To move your rocking chair is an unforgivable insult in St. Petersburg.”)
Imagine the Moomins guest-starring on an episode of “The Golden Palace,” and you’ll get the idea.
The book’s real pleasure comes in its oddball composite character study, like a community kazoo orchestra. One Jesus-fearing attendant named Bounty Joe zooms around on a motorcycle and unintentionally dismisses one of my favorite characters, who bristles (with good reason). “What nerve, thought Mrs. Rubinstein. After all, I am frightening. I am incredible.”
May we all inspire awe and fear in our adversaries well into old age!
Read if you like: Baby oil, governing bodies, fresh orange juice.
Available from: Any local bookstore with a steady supply of NYRB paperbacks, Moominland.
“An Unnecessary Woman,” by Rabih Alameddine
Fiction, 2014
My mother, an Isak Dinesen zealot, introduced me to the film version of “Out of Africa” when I was too young to appreciate it, and so the ending — the protagonist left barren, her farm scorched, her heart broken — horrified me. My adolescent self couldn’t imagine being left with nothing after all that anguish.
Mom, in turn, was aghast at my reaction. “Think of the life she lived,” she said: the depth and the adventure that counterbalanced the pain. “There’s no way you can say she suffered for nothing.”
This is the kind of literary feint that Aaliya, the 72-year-old hero of Alameddine’s novel, might appreciate. Technically Aaliya lives alone, but she shares her Beirut apartment with the manuscripts she’s lovingly translated into Arabic over decades. Trust me when I tell you that Lebanese women — and I count Aaliya and her fictional sisters-in-spite — could medal in international competitions of obstinacy and pettiness. Childless and divorced for so long she’s essentially graduated to spinster status, Aaliya is seen as unnecessary (or worse) by nearly everyone around her. Her family exasperates her, as do most people she encounters. But her mind is brimming with literary allusions, which along with her memories sustain her through her solitary days. So too does her steadfast commitment to Beirut: “the Elizabeth Taylor of cities,” as Aaliya puts it, “insane, beautiful, tacky, falling apart.”
Read if you like: Menthols, the Rahbani brothers, preserving the distinction between “solitude” and “loneliness.”
Available from: My favorite bookstore in Beirut, Aaliya’s Books (no relation); consulate waiting rooms; the personal library of the biggest reader you know.
Why don’t you …
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Marvel at the cold efficiency modeled by the killer of Gu Byeong-mo’s novel “The Old Woman With the Knife”? (In its original Korean, the book was called “bruised fruit,” which is another constituency I’d like to hear from in fiction.)
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Celebrate the impending close of a year in a contemplative state, by way of Julian Barnes’s novel “The Sense of an Ending”?
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Leap between decades in New York with Bobby Finger’s delightful protagonist, a ghostwriter who’s looking for love at age 60?
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