Mortimer of the Maghreb

"Rogers felt the ground sway. He was thinking that if once a man found his path then strayed from it, all was lost." In this collection of stories and a novella, the men--a journalist, a painter, a banker--have all found their path and strayed from it. The path may be love or art or money, but its loss brings deep regret. I love a book infused with regret, with nostalgia, with piercing loss. And most of these stories unfold in a present that is liable to be swamped at any time by the living past. Chronology is not so much toyed with as bowed to: the natural true chronology of memory, so much more powerful than the time line of a calendar. The book opens with the title character, Charles Mortimer, stumbling through middle age, trying to rejuvenate his world-wandering, journalistic career. But he is ultimately derailed by the knowledge of his mistakes, of an obsession with work that overcomes all else. From a character in another story: "He knew that yes, his had been true love and he had thrown it away. Happiness--which was the same as his soul--had shriveled up in him like a dead spider. " But before the regret and the shriveling, true happiness. Shukman can plunge us into the seminal days of love, in some fearless writing. A hundred and twenty pages into the book, as I was happily reading along, he drops Mortimer and his French lover, Celeste, into the heart of the desert, where time, habits and the solid ground beneath their feet is all obliterated. They trail Brahim and his donkey into the dunes, looking for a gathering of the nomadic Tuareg, and find themselves lost in the best, truest sense: lost in each other. I've reread these pages twice, trying to figure out how the author managed to sweep me away so completely. For Mortimer himself, this history becomes the engine of his regret, and for good reason: in all his days he was never so engaged with a woman and the world around him--which is to say, happy. A powerful collection of stories, written in a muscular prose with surprising turns of phrase on almost every page. A treat, for me.