Literary coincidences

I'm reading "Tender Is the Night," which is dedicated to Gerald and Sara, as in Gerald and Sara Murphy, the wealthy American expatriates who in the 1920s held court in the French Riviera and created a haven for artists including Picasso, Hemingway and, yes, Fitzgerald. ("Many Fetes," the dedication also says, and oh, the fetes they must have had.) Last week I was carrying this book while visiting friends a couple of floors below me, and one of my friends, noticing it, said she happened to be reading a biography of the Murphys.

A few days later I got my Vanity Fair in the mail, and what should one of the articles be but a profile of Sara and Gerald Murphy.

Then this week a friend who wanted to meet for martinis did a little digging on the Internet and decided we should rendezvous at a bar on 26th Street called Gstaad — as in Gstaad, winter playland of les tres riches, and onetime destination of the likes of, oh, the Fitzgeralds. But that's not all: The same day I was to meet my friend, I happened to be reading Part 2, Chapter 13 of "Tender Is the Night," which begins:

With his cap, Dick slapped the snow from his dark blue ski-suit before going inside. The great hall, its floor pockmarked by two decades of hobnails, was cleared for the tea dance, and four-score young Americans, domiciled in schools near Gstaad, bounced about to the frolic of "Don't Bring Lulu," or exploded violently with the first percussions of the Charleston."

Dick Diver and company spend the entire chapter at Gstaad, and then it ends: "Good-by, Gstaad! Good-by, fresh faces, cold sweet flowers, flakes in the darkness. Good-by, Gstaad, good-by!"

This sort of thing happens a lot. Whatever book I'm reading, whether a contemporary memoir or a work of nonfiction or a classic novel, something in life will jump out to mirror something I've read on the page. It's not a matter of, for instance, reading about a hot-fudge sundae and then deciding, My god, I'd really like a hot-fudge sundae about now. It's more like I'll be sitting there already eating a hot-fudge sundae, reading Page 6 of my book, and then as I eat, and as I read, and as I flip to Page 12, the characters on Page 12 will decide that nothing would taste better at that very moment in their little world in the book than a goopy, gloopy hot-fudge sundae.

It's downright eerie. And it happens again and again. Does it often happen to you?

Comments

[Bigg_Al]

It happened last week, Jen ... and I had to go drop $7.29 at Ben's Chili Bowl.

Yum.