Last summer, on a rare visit to our home in Montana, I
took pains to investigate each and every one of the dozens of boxes of books
stored in our garage. None of these boxes had been opened in a decade.
I was looking for a paperback with a yellowish cover,
published in Great Britain, by a woman whose name escapes me. The book is about
a character who travels alone by train, drinking and smoking and pondering the
big questions. As far as I can recall, it was bought in London in 1983, from a
used bookshop in Marylebone.
I can remember loving the sentences, feeling like
their author had somehow toured the inside of my haphazard brain. But I can’t
resuscitate the details necessary to purchase another copy. Note: It is
definitely not the late, great Jenny Diski’s Stranger on a Train,
which wasn’t published until 2002.
I have thought about this book a lot, even dreamed
about it, recalling the feel of the paper between my fingers, the jolt of
recognition I experienced with every resonant scene. I have tried to find it by
searching key words and phrases online, such as “favorite novel about train
travel.” Frustratingly enough, it is easy for my entangled neurons to summon a
hazy image of the cover, but the title and author just won’t resolve into
clarity.
 |
| Illustration by Russell Chatham from Guy de la Valdène’s Making Game (Clark City Press, 1990) |
While I was hunting for this maddeningly crucial and
yet somehow forgettable book, I set aside some other titles to bring back to
Morocco: Richard Nelson’s The Island Within, Jim Harrison’s Just
Before Dark, Guy de la Valdène’s Making Game. And Richard
Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America, now 53 years old.
Perhaps
the problem is that my memory storage device is even more of a museum piece than
that . . . .
