To say that Cursive was a delightful surprise would be an understatement. Friends, this is one book I hated to put down, and the joy is greater because I heard nothing about it in advance of reading it, save for the description given by its publicist.
I gleaned no further information from the outside of Cursive. The cover is elegant and plain. I avoided reading the jacket blurbs because I actually wanted not to know more. As with movies and television shows, I want to love every book I read. I silently beg each title to be awesome, to glue me to my seat, to keep my fingers flipping the pages until the bittersweet end. Any hint I hear of how the book is good or bad (or the movie or the show) tends to skew my expectations, to lower or raise the bar, most times unfairly.
Cursive starts out in a promising way, seemingly an epistolary novel, written by one Ralph Talbot in 1933 to his lover, Lillian, left behind in England while he sets out upon an adventure at sea. Talbot is young, lovelorn, and very wordy, and the old-fashioned style of his missive, for me, was a nice counterpoint to Where’d You Go, Bernadette? which I read recently, itself a novel told mostly in emails, notes, and transcripts. That was a wonderful book, too, but very much of this time, even farfetched and satirical enough to suggest the future and our inevitable ridiculousness as we devolve into a people too plugged in to our devices to relate to each other in person.
Talbot is estranged from people more literally, aboard a ship that will take him six weeks to reach his posting at a cotton mill in Africa. The style then alternates chapter by chapter – more of Ralph’s story told in letters to the lovely Lillian, and then a character sketch of several different people from around the world starting in the 1980’s, the first of which is Ralph’s granddaughter. That chapter’s voice and language proved such a jolting departure from Ralph’s fluid tone – Samantha’s tale felt clumsy in contrast and was so peppered with pop culture references of the time that I strained my memory searching for matches. It’s not her, I thought. It must be me.
I loathe to give up reading a book once I start, so I picked up Cursive again simply because it was what I was reading at the time. I do have a book that I am reading in every room most days, and also one in the car, but this title happened to fall between book club obligations while I wait for Behind the Beautiful Forevers to come up for me at the library. And so, I turned back to Talbot’s woeful tale, and then the next more recent character, and I was rewarded in the end with a connection that I hope you, if you choose to pick up this book, will be patient enough to discover for yourself.
It’s no spoiler to tell you that Cursive is about a remarkable pen and its journey from person to person, reminiscent of “The Red Violin” or a wonderful novel called Keeping the World Away (oh look, I have happened upon what I didn’t even realize is a “subgenre”). The spoiler would be to choose for you how the book will make you feel, and whether or not you will be so entranced by the story that your eyes will dance ahead to see what happens next, then meander back to drink in the descriptions you have missed, and whether or not you will pick the book up again long after you finished it to re-read an earlier chapter to see if certain events were foreshadowed or not, and whether or not you will let your children play in the park too close to dinner time because you are almost done with your book, sweetheart, just give Mommy another minute.
So here I am, telling you I loved Cursive, giving you some information, spoiling the surprise. Oh well. Otherwise, you might not even hear of it, so I believe the end justifies the means. You’re welcome.
Cursive, by Alex Wyndham Baker. Cutting Edge Press
photo from Wikipedia
I’m putting this on my “to read” list!