Buffalo Gals, etc.

Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences (1987) is a mixed collection of stories and poems by Ursula K. Le Guin, including reprints together with one new story ("Buffalo Gals Won't You Come Out Tonight"). All concern some aspects, usually mythic, of animals  or other sentient presences, and their interaction with humanity.  In the new story, a young girl spends time with an older woman who is the trickster Coyote.  The best story in the book is science fiction, part of Le Guin's Hainish tales, "Vaster Than Empires and More Slow," from 1971.  Some stories read like writing-class exercises, like the extracts from the purported Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics, which includes a discussion of the poetry written by ants, and how to approach the sea-literature of the penguin. Another story, "May's Lion" tells the same story twice, from a realist perspective, and from a fabulist one. The volume as a whole is not Le Guin at her very best, but even middle-of-the-road Le Guin is rewarding and well worth reading.

Alberto Manguel's Many Libraries

Alberto Manguel's new short book is called Packing My Library. The subtitle, "An Elegy and Ten Digressions," hints at the quirky formlessness of the book.  It could as easily have been subtitled merely "An Elegy" or "Twenty-one Digressions." These meditations are bookended at the beginning of the book by Manguel packing up his personal library of some 35,000 volumes in rural France before a move to small apartment in Manhattan, and to Manguel at the end having become director of the National Library of Argentina, thus responsible for another library on an even larger scale. In between these endposts are Manguel's reflections on a lifetime of reading, and on his own relationship with books. He notes at one early point that “my libraries are each a sort of multi-layered autobiographies," and later wonders:

“What quirk made me cluster these volumes into something like the colored countries on my globe? What brought on these associations that seemed to owe their meaning to the faded emotions and a logic whose rules I can now no longer remember? And does my present self reflect that distant haunting? Because if every library is autobiographical, its packing up seems to have something of a self-obituary. Perhaps these questions are the true subject of this elegy."

Further on he notes:  “The books in my library promised me comfort, and also the possibility of enlightening conversations." And occasionally he turns wistful:  “The constancy we seek in life, the repetition of stories that seems to assure us that everything will remain as it was then and is now, is, as we know, illusory. Our fate (Ovid has been telling us this for centuries) is change, our nature is to change.”

Overall this is a fine introspective book about reading and books, and their value not merely to one man but to humanity.

The Sins of Jack Saul

Jack Saul (1857-1904) was a male prostitute in Dublin and London. He was famously involved in the Cleveland Street Scandal of 1889, in which the involvement of highly-positioned society figures was covered-up during criminal prosecutions related to a London homosexual brothel located on Cleveland Street. Saul was also the central character and contributor to an infamous volume of pornography, The Sins of the Cities of the Plain (1881). The Sins of Jack Saul tells Jack's story, and provides a detailed look at the Dublin and London gay underworlds of the mid-Victorian era, based on archival documents. I could wish that the sources were better detailed, but the narrative itself is well-written and the subject covers in detail aspects of the Victorian underworld that are usually glanced over if discussed at all. I found the book fascinating. The copy I read of The Sins of Jack Saul is labelled the "Second Edition" and was published in 2016.  It doesn't say when the first edition appeared. (The cover photograph is not of Jack Saul—no photographs of him are known to exist).