Two Perspectives on Getting Old

Neither of these two books is explicitly about aging, but both of them made me think a lot about getting old.

It started with The Madonnas Of Leningrad, by Debra Dean. About a third of the way through the book, I was so upset that Garrett was urging me to read something else. As the central character, Marina , slips into the never-never land of Alzheimer's disease, her family struggles to get a grip on how to cope with the disease and how it will affect their own lives. That was the part that I found so terrifying, but there's another whole story being told that is really fascinating and that eventually, I could appreciate. During the siege of Leningrad in 1941-43, Marina had been working at the Hermitage Museum, carefully packing away paintings and other treasures to protect them from Nazi bombs. She and her colleague committed each painting to memory and these are the memories that stick with her, along with memories of starvation and death, when she can't even recognize her own children some 60 years later. It's a really interesting device to tell the story of the siege while also exploring the nature and permanence of memory.

Next I read Any Human Heart by William Boyd. This novel is written in the form of a series of journals written by (the fictitious) Logan Mountstuart beginning in the early 1900s. Born in Uruguay to British parents, Mountstuart goes to prep school in England and then on to Oxford, where he decides to become a writer. There is nothing extraordinary about Mountstuart... his story meanders through the decades and he is modestly successful at pretty much everything he does. But in the process of living his ordinary life, he crosses paths with some extraordinary people, including writers such as Evelyn Waugh and Ernest Hemingway, as well as the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Ian Fleming recruits him to be a spy in the Naval Intelligence Division during WWII, and that leads to some interesting adventures. Boyd stays true to the journal format, writing in a very personal way about the major events of the 20th century, particularly about the decline of British power. There's humor, romance, sex, and heartbreak, and through it all Logan continues to move along on not much more than inertia. As he approaches his later years, he adjusts his life to accommodate his declining health in a way that is refreshing in its ordinariness. Getting old no longer felt so frightening.