Reflections with Topping & Co.

Ruby Recommends… 

Morning and Evening by John Fosse 

In the morning, a baby is born. A hundred pages later, it’s evening, and an old man is dying.  

There’s that theory that when we die, we watch our lives replay in just seven seconds that feel like forever. Fosse seems to have captured those seven seconds here. In a minimalistic, stream-of-consciousness style, we follow Johannes about on his last day, where the veil between this life and the next is thinning. In these final, quiet hours, his lifetime of loves, griefs, achievements, regrets — all of it — reappears to him. His thin biography plays out not as a chronology of events, but rather the way memory unfolds, with jumps and starts and blanks, some images bright, some vague.  

Fosse doesn’t insist that Johannes’s life has had meaning. Like John Williams’ Stoner, it’s the quiet surety of life nonetheless that this book captures.  

Harry Recommends… 

The Last Days in Old Europe by Richard Bassett  

Part-history, part-travel memoir, The Last Days in Old Europe is Richard Bassett’s account of central Europe from the late ‘70s to the early ‘90s during his career as a journalist for the foreign affairs desk at The Times. 

Moving through the social circles of various regimes, the ghosts of former kingdoms are ever-present. Although the political colours of these countries were profoundly different from their imperial past, much of that late Habsburg world resonates within the people and places of old Danubia. Hungary, Austria, Slovenia, and many other places that we now consider to be separate political entities, were once part of a realm that was simultaneously deeply divided and subtly united.  

Throughout, Bassett reflects upon his encounters  with echoes of states and borders which once presumed themselves to be eternal — until they weren’t. Governments can come and go, borders can be redrawn, but people will always endure, reflect, and remember. 

Arnaz recommends…

To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

To The Lighthouse is singular, not only because of Woolf’s lyrical writing style, but because of its singular structure, in which there is an entire section named ‘Time Passes’. The reader witnesses the changes that occur over time in the house on the Isle of Skye which the characters return to, rendered unrecognisable and irrevocably changed through death, war, and the passage of time itself.

The final section of the book deals with a small number of the original cast of characters returning to the home in which they once lived, and reflecting upon the changes undergone by themselves and those whom they loved in the house, coming to realisations about life. To The Lighthouse is a profound, moving read on human connections, fitting for a time of the year when we are dealing with endings and farewells.