CRAVAT, n. This word for a neckcloth comes up all the time in in historical romance. Usually in romances set in England in the early 1800s, it’s referring to a long piece of fine cloth, like linen or muslin, that gets wound around the neck and tied in a fancy knot. There might be lace involved. The neck in question usually belongs to a man, but I’m not here to police the fashion choices of real people in history or fictional people in books.
Anyway, it had actually never occurred to me to wonder where this word comes from—weird, I know—and I didn’t look it up so much as trip over it.
You see, I’ve been reading Rebecca West’s enormous 1941 travelogue/memoir/history/tome Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia, which I will finish in seven or eight years, maybe six if I reign in my extremely distractible nature and stop looking up place names to find out how to pronounce them or where exactly they are on the map. (We all know I will not do this.)
Anyway, the first place in former Yugoslavia that West visits is Croatia, and most of the people who live there are Croats, which in English is a two-syllable word that sounds like “crow at.” I thought the relationship between the sounds in “Croat” and “Croatia” probably indicated that we English speakers were fucking around phonetically, and boy are we ever. Croatia is, for the people who live there and speakers of the Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian language continuum, actually called Hrvatska, after the Hrvati people. Croats, in English.
A notable thing about Croats, for purposes of this newsletter, is that in the seventeenth century, a lot of them wore stylish neckcloths. When the Germans and the French saw this, they adopted the custom and they named the neckcloth itself after the people they were imitating. English “cravat” comes from French cravate, and for every neatly knotted or sexily undone one in all the pages of historical romance, we can thank Croatia.
For those of you who read all that and were like, “okay, but why are you reading a book about 1937 Yugoslavia,” the answer is “because I can’t stop.”
I ran across Black Lamb and Grey Falcon in a list of the twentieth century’s best nonfiction, saw that it was about a place I know nothing about, and then saw that Rebecca West gave this book, published in 1941, one of the most powerful dedications I’ve ever read—it begins for my friends in Yugoslavia, who are all now dead or enslaved—and decided I needed to read the next 1,200 pages.
West is a marvelous thinker and stylist. Early in her trip, she and her husband and their friends (Gregorievitch, a Croat, and Constantine, a Serb) drive through the snow to attend Easter mass in the village of Šestine outside Zagreb, and West gives a beautiful description:
On a hill stood a little church, full to the doors, bright inside as a garden, glowing with scarlet and gold and blue and the unique, rough, warm white of homespun, and shaking with song. On the women's heads were red handkerchiefs printed with yellow leaves and peacocks' feathers, their jackets were solidly embroidered with flowers, and under their white skirts were thick red or white woollen stockings. Their men were just as splendid in sheepskin leather jackets with appliqué designs in dyed leathers, linen shirts with fronts embroidered in cross-stitch and fastened with buttons of Maria Theresa dollars or lumps of turquoise matrix, and homespun trousers gathered into elaborate boots.
Of their singing, she writes, “If there be a God who is fount of all goodness, this is the tribute that should logically be paid to Him; if there be only goodness, it is still a logical tribute."
Have you ever read anything truer? There is description this vivid on every page. How could I stop reading? And yet I have considered stopping, and still might. West, a wealthy white British woman born in 1892, was a leftist, and her hatred of Nazis and empires is compelling. Alas, her alleged feminism makes no sense to me, and she’s a racist and a homophobe. The latter is evident in her frequent and hilarious assertion, spoken with approval, that there is “very little homosexuality” in Yugoslavia. Girl, they are not inviting you.
Anyway, I’ve endured worse nonsense for lesser writing, and this book really feels like traveling, so for now I’ll journey onward.
And in small-r romance:
Seduction at the Chateau (m/f, both cis and het, historical) by Delphine Roy. Obviously this newsletter had to have a historical romance with cravats in it. This one is set in France in 1801, so all the characters are traumatized but still trying to have country house parties, and there’s a fun little wink at Dangerous Liaisons: the hero makes a wager with a cruel beauty that if he seduces and casts off an innocent young woman, the cruel beauty will sleep with him. Naturally instead he discovers that he’s in love with the innocent young woman and a lot more vulnerable to emotions than he thought. I really loved all the setting details in this.
Midnight at the Orpheus (bi f/bi f/het m, all cis, historical) by Alyssa Linn Palmer. This was published by the small press Bold Strokes Books in 2015, and I chanced across it while looking at I Heart Sapphfic’s incredible bookfinder and bought it on a whim. It’s maybe more properly classified as “romantic noir” than “historical romance,” as the characters are all caught up in gang business in 1920s Chicago and their chances of a real Happily Ever After felt slim. I think that’s also the quality that kept me turning pages as fast as I could. This book feels so different from any romance I’ve read lately, and maybe that’s the noir setting, or maybe it’s the 2015 publication date—I think since then there’s been a trend toward main characters who never do or even say anything wrong. These main characters are not that. Cecilia—a dancer who’s in love with a gang enforcer and a gangster’s moll—has two lovers and neither of them consented to share, but that hardly registers. Infidelity? Slurs against queer people and Irish and Italian immigrants? Listen, we are busy doing actual murders. This is dark and propulsive and really captures the seedy glamor and the grime of Prohibition. Do be warned that Cecilia’s mother dies of tuberculosis on page, after a long struggle both in and out of the hospital, which felt more real and more depressing than anything else. (The polyamorous relationship is a V, not a triad, though it has the possibility to become a triad, but I didn’t know how to indicate that in my usual shorthand.)
This Could Be Us (m/f, both cis and het, contemporary) by Kennedy Ryan. I wrote at length about how much I loved the first book in this series, Before I Let Go, and this one is equally fearless about putting its main character, Soledad—an Afrolatina homemaker married to a white executive who is both cheating on her and embezzling six million dollars—through some tough shit. Soledad really goes through it, but she finds a way to stand on her own two feet, take care of her three daughters, and love herself. She also finds love with the forensic accountant who caught her cheating ex-husband, which is deliciously complicated. Ryan’s writing is beautiful, and I really loved all the moments where Soledad’s friends take care of her, this one especially:
It makes me want to cry how [my friends] love me no matter what, but my husband whom I’ve known half my life couldn’t manage that. There aren’t enough sonnets for friendship. Not enough songs for the kind of love not born of blood or body but of time and care.
Isn’t that lovely? With her friends’ encouragement, Soledad ends up using her domestic expertise—cooking, cleaning, making her home a welcoming space—to become a social media influencer. And here is something I’ve never written in any of the previous 170 newsletters: this book inspired me to clean my fridge.
In other things that are neither Romance nor romance, though perhaps romance adjacent, I read Alex Pendragon’s Seven Days to Squirm, which is gay erotica that is both endearing—the protagonist, Noah, is a sweet young man who is taking his friend’s dare/bet about wearing a butt plug very seriously, for reasons that won’t become clear to him until he’s had a few dozen sexual encounters with men, and that’s beautiful to me, and I love and support him—and staggeringly good sex writing. In writing sex, there’s a sort of spectrum: you can incline toward the emotional with just a gesture toward the physical, which I think is where a lot of genre romance lands, or you can go the other way and focus on the bodily sensations with a little garnish of emotion. Don’t read that as judgment; the whole spectrum is good. My point is that this book manages to be both brazenly, joyfully physical and deeply emotional. A huge accomplishment. It’s such a celebration of sexual self-discovery.
And now for something completely different: I read Premee Mohamed’s novella The Apple Tree Throne, which is a story about being haunted by wartime PTSD and also a literal ghost, set in an England that never was, and it is beautifully written and also such an excellent pastiche of 20th-century European settings. That’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently because I’m toying with it in my own work. This is so short and still manages to reveal so much about its characters and their war-loving society.
Also: Lev A. C. Rosen’s Lavender House, gay noir set in 1950s San Francisco, was excellent, as was Sarah Rees Brennan’s fantasy romp Long Live Evil, which is about what if you were dying of cancer and you woke up in your favorite fantasy series as the villain. Basically, if a book has a rooftop chase scene, I’m gonna love it, and this book has a perfect rooftop chase scene.
Lastly, an anonymous essay in Jewish Currents about being pregnant in Gaza. (The mom and the baby have fled and are alive, but it will still make you cry. Of course it will.)
That’s all for this time. I’ll be back in your inbox on November 3. See you then!