Dear Reader,
Thirty thousand feet below us are the mountains of Afghanistan. But it’s nighttime and there’s nothing to see; the windows on both sides of the darkened cabin look out onto an inky blackness.
Two hours into the flight and sleep refuses to come. I shut my eyes and shift restlessly in my seat; my legs are cramped and the elastic of my knee brace feels tight against me. Finally, I pull out my phone, plug in my earphones, and settle down to listen to the audiobook version of The Correspondent by Virginia Evans. And almost instantly, I am hooked by this story told in handwritten letters and emails.
Seventy-three-year-old Sybil Van Antwerp writes to her best friend Rosalie, to her brother Felix, to the ladies’ gardening committee, to her neighbour Theodore Lübeck, and to Basam Mansour, a customer services executive at a DNA test lab. Through the letters and their replies, the story of a life begins to unspool, and I am drawn in deeply, forgetting about my exhaustion, my lack of sleep, and the ache from my injured knee.
We reach Frankfurt early in the morning, driving through a cloudy, grey wintry day. The city sprawls around us in what seems a hodgepodge of styles—glass-and-steel skyscrapers alternating with older, shabbier buildings in beige and white, like a city that was bombed out and rebuilt in bits and pieces, which, of course, is exactly what it is.
All day I think about Sybil and how she manages her life and her relationships. A crotchety old woman who worked as a lawyer and then as a judge’s clerk, a reader, a mother, a once-wife, Sybil strikes up such authentic connections with all sorts of people—the dean of a college, a customer services engineer from Syria, a young law student. She does this by sharing her story, sharing her vulnerabilities, and by asking questions of the people around her and being interested in their answers.
At bedtime, I realise I haven’t packed any paper books. I raid the Other Reader’s bookshelf and find A Brief History of Germany by Jeremy Black. It’s a nice enough book, with quotations from T.S. Eliot and allusions to art woven into the nation’s geography. But it’s crammed with information, textbook-like—and after 10 pages, I’m asleep.
I wake up a few hours later. My Apple Watch tells me it is 6.30 am in India, time for me to pad around the house, set the kettle on, pour hot water into a teapot with a sachet of Earl Grey tea, and sit down to write my morning pages. But here in Frankfurt it’s still dark. Through floor-to-ceiling windows, the city sprawls below, mostly black except for the eerie fluorescent glow of a parking garage.
This time I don’t even try to go back to sleep. Instead, I plug in my earphones and am back in 17 Farney Road, Maryland. Sybil is having problems with her daughter Fiona, who lives far away, rarely visits, and is angry and resentful with her mother. She wonders how things are okay with her son Bruce but are so complicated with Fiona. “I seem to have made a mess of my life,” she writes.
Then it is morning, and we are swept along in the hustle and bustle of the trade fair we are here for. The olive-green carpeted corridors fill with visitors from Asia, Europe, Africa, and Australia, and the babel of many tongues swells to a crescendo, rising fifty feet up to the warehouse-like roof.
When I step outside for lunch, it is into a vast, glass-roofed, sun-filled space. For €3.50, I buy a hot dog piled high with coleslaw, fried onions, and jalapeños, all smothered in ketchup and mustard. There are no chairs in this atrium, but people are sitting on the stairs, eating gelatos and other things, and I join them.
On my phone, I am reading Show Don’t Tell, a collection of short stories by Curtis Sittenfeld. The first two stories, “Show Don’t Tell,” which is set in a college creative writing programme, and “The Marriage Clock,” are both artfully constructed and leave me with a lot to think about. But what I really want to do is get back to Sybil and Fiona, to see how mother and daughter resolve things.
But life intervenes, and it is only early the next morning, when jet lag wakes me up, that I manage to return to the letter Sybil is writing to Fiona. It’s so touching and so beautifully articulated, it makes me cry and want to take notes, as I think of my eldest daughter and our constant clashes.
The Correspondent already feels like my best book of the year so far. It’s old-world and feel-good and philosophical all at once. It’s also filled with many discussions about books. “Have you read Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro?” Sybil asks the customer services man she has struck up a connection with. “I am haunted by it.”
Other book recommendations include Outlander by Diana Gabaldon, a fantasy set in Scotland, and 84, Charing Cross Road, a delightful collection of letters between a reader and a bookseller.
But before I seal this letter and return to the world of The Correspondent, a question for you, dear Reader: do you miss writing letters and receiving letters—real ones, with stamps and actual handwriting? And if you had to sit down with pen and paper, who would you write to?
Signing off, your very own Correspondent, this week from Frankfurt,
Sonya
(Sonya Dutta Choudhury is a Mumbai-based journalist and the founder of Sonya’s Book Box, a bespoke book service. Each week, she brings you specially curated books to give you an immersive understanding of people and places. If you have any reading recommendations or suggestions, write to her at so***********@***il.comThe views expressed are personal)
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