eptivity

So I just finished listening to the audiobook of The Invisible Wall: A Love Story that Broke Barriers by Harry Bernstein. Who was NINETY-THREE YEARS OLD when he wrote it, pretty much older than I can count. He wrote his second memoir at 96, and is now working on number three at age 98; one of his Amazon reviewers implores him to “Please write the next book quickly, Mr. Bernstein!” I can’t imagine why she would be in such a hurry, other than the first (and I presume second) being really a very good book. Similar to Angela’s Ashes (alcoholic father, perpetual poverty on a British Isle), but a slightly more meaningful story than Angela’s dreary catalog of despair and tuberculosis.

He does have a habit of describing people as clapping or rubbing together their two hands (as opposed to their one hand or 17 tentacles), but I’ll chalk that one up to being NINETY-THREE YEARS OLD and let it slide. I do not extend the same grace to The Dive from Clausen’s Pier, in which one character or another buries her face in her hands every other page. I personally have never seen anyone do this, ever, but maybe it’s a Midwestern thing. Or a tic. Or a Midwestern tic.

None of those in The Invisible Wall, though, so you can go ahead and read that one instead.