BOOK BARN

#291: ON THE CAMINO AGAIN. It is of course entirely possible that the revered objects which make some places the site of religious pilgrimage—from the mantle of the Virgin in Chartres Cathedral to the Buddha’s tooth in that temple in Sri Lanka—are simply bogus or mistaken, and not at all the sacred things they are said to be. Among the ritual actions suggested for visitors to the cathedral of Santiago in the northwest of Spain is a visit to the crypt holding the supposed b

#290: AT THE SILVER RIVER’S EDGE. In her book Rapture, Carol Ann Duffy gives us a moving and finely observed account of a love affair, from start—”Uninvited, the thought of you stayed too late in my head”—to finish (the last verse is called “Over.”) It’s not a novel-in-verse: there are no background shots, no addresses, no names of restaurants. The whole is rendered instead in emotional detail: the startlement of intense pleasure, the sudden alertness to color and weather,

#289: THE NUMBERS THAT CAN NEVER BE COUNTED. Still another fine example of a book which snuck up on me from behind and jumped into my hands: A Hundred Movements for a Fan, poems by Paul Claudel. In the nineteenth century, a new enthusiasm in France for Japanese culture led to the discovery and collecting of that country’s beautifully painted paper fans: every lady had to have one. The poet Stéphane Mallarmé (who in his spare time edited a magazine extolling the new luxur