Over the Past Week (27 cents)

Over the past week:

1. We ate at home every evening. That hardly ever happens. And the food was very good.

2.
I ate at Eli's Restaurant Tuesday for lunch. One of the two kosher restaurants within a walk of my office (the other being at the JCC), it is not bad. It is a meat restaurant, and while the food is sort of ordinary, the menu is expansive, and the service very friendly. And the atmosphere is comfortable. Sometimes it is difficult for a kosher restaurant to seem like an ordinary place, and they carry that off at Eli's. I just had a turkey sandwich, so nothing out of the ordinary. But I also had iced coffee. I had asked the waitress if she could give me iced coffee and she said she could, but with an explanation that all that meant was that they would pour the coffee in a glass with ice, that they had no special "iced coffee". I told her I understood, and the coffee came with enough ice, in a 20 oz. glass, and was one of the best glasses of iced coffee I have ever had. Whether that was by chance, I don't know.

3. So, I read one of the stranger books I have ever read - "Lying Together" by Jennifer Beth Cohen. I picked the book up because it purported to be the story of an American woman and her Russian fiance, and the complications that arose in their relationship. Well, it turned out that the Russian fiance was American and that they were both journalists working in/and interested in Russia.

They were college friends (at an unnamed university, which I will call "Tufts") who lost contact with each other for about seven years, as each went their own ways, both being somewhat successful professionally and less than successful romantically. They reconnected by internet, decided they were in love with each other, and that she would move to Russia to join him, where he had been working for years.

The initial glamor of the relationship wears off, he turns out to be an alcoholic and manic/depressive, and she turns out to be a pill pusher, and she tells the story of how she tried to save him but how, after he tried to commit suicide, it became too much, how the engagement was broken off, and how she came back to the US and lived happily ever after.

The names were changed to protect the guilty, she says, and she was not going to allow the book to be sold or reviewed in Russia (a trick which she couldn't accomplish).

Her fiance came off terribly, and she not much better in my opinion, although her description of the lives of American journalists in the Russia of the 1990s (the reason I was interested in the book) made for good reading.

I decided to look her up on the internet; she now being a producer for CBS news as I understand it.

The first thing I saw, on the website of an English language Russia based web magazine, was a rant from her boyfriend, who trashed the book, trashed Cohen, said that everyone in Russia knew who the book was about and that he was more than embarrassed and outraged, and then went on to tell his side of the story, which was quite different but still made both of them sound like just horrid people.

Then I saw a conversation with a Russian literary reviewer who wanted to review the book and asked the publisher for a copy. The publisher said, no, that copies were not available in Russia. The reviewer said, what?, I can buy it on the internet. The publisher agreed this was possible, but that he hoped he wouldn't. Apparently, all this became big news in Russia.

At any rate, someone is now making (or has made) a documentary movie about the book (I admit that I have not looked closely at this flashy website), Jennifer got married to a guy named Michael Oko, and they both talk about the book and how wonderful their life is together, and......yuck.

3. Now I am reading Margot Livesey's "Criminals", which is the story of a Scottish investment banker who finds a baby in the men's room at a train station on his way from his London home to console his sister in Perthshire, and how he brings the baby with him and his lonely sister promises to turn it over to the authorities. And how the baby's mother's boyfriend, angry at the mother, decides to put the baby on the men's room floor, and go outside and see the mother's reaction when he tells her the baby has disappeared (a joke, you see), and didn't expect an investment banker to pick up the baby and put it on a bus, but decides to follow the investment banker and get his address for reverse ransom purposes. I am half way through the book. I think it silly, but I will continue to read it.

I bought "Criminals" and "Lying Together" (the ex-boyfriend titles his story of the relationship "Cohen Lies Alone") along with two other books that I have pledged to try to read, Manju Kapur's "Difficult Daughters" and Maxine Clair's "Rattlebone".
Stay tuned.