Discoveries

The Driveway Diaries

A Dirt Road Almanac

Tim Brookes

Turtle Point Press: 236 pp., $15.95 paper

What makes this record of seven years in a house in Vermont so amusing is that the writer is British. “In England,” he writes, “you can’t have ten acres unless you are an Earl.” Earls and lords come up frequently, as Brookes contemplates wasps, spiders (decisions on whether or not to kill), mailboxes, neighbors (after four years he still has not seen his neighbor’s house, which is up a long driveway), driveways (they are the “vital umbilicus”), wells (in England we don’t have wells, “we have municipal water boards”), trash (“an affront to my English sense of good housekeeping”) and septic systems. Many of these challenges call for “a bit of a lie down.” Let’s just say that Peter Mayle would self-implode if faced with the frustrations that flummox our hero. Vermont makes owning property in France or Italy look, as they used to say, like a comic Valentine.

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The Long Voyage

A Novel

Jorge Semprun, translated from the French by Richard Seaver

Overlook Press: 240 pp., $14.95 paper

You begin to piece the Second World War together -- maybe in a living room in the San Fernando Valley where children of survivors are gathered, or in a classroom. Or with the help of art or documentaries or literature. Jorge Semprun, in his masterpiece “The Long Voyage,” gives us a huge piece of the puzzle.

It is 1944. Semprun, 20, is in a padlocked boxcar with 119 other men going through Germany’s Moselle Valley to Buchenwald. Semprun, a Spaniard, has been fighting with the French Resistance. The man next to him, referred to throughout as “the guy from Semur,” wants to talk about Moselle wines and how they compare with Chablis. They’re on the train for six days, after which Semprun spends more than a year in Buchenwald. He emerges fighting the urge to apologize for surviving. In the memoir, time is collapsed. His mind wanders between past and future, returns to the present on the train, the beautiful valley rushing past, the people on “the outside” going about their business. “I’m a veteran of the future,” he thinks, meeting a girl in the strange days after he is released from the camp.

“Why were you arrested?” A guilty German guard asks him on the way to Buchenwald. “I found it necessary to exercise my freedom,” he answers. There’s so much more than life and death at stake, Semprun reminds us: freedom, human-ness, pride. His memories lend these words fresh meaning.

“Don’t leave me, pal,” says the guy from Semur, who dies upright beside him on the train. In thinking about him, writing about him, Semprun doesn’t. “The Long Voyage,” with its mockery of time and all things physical, makes aspects of the war clear in a way that few other tellings have.

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Four Tenths of an Acre

Reflections on a Gardening Life

Laurie Lisle

Random House: 240 pp., $24.95

Laurie LISLE, who has written biographies of two of America’s fiercest artists, Georgia O’Keeffe and Louise Nevelson, returned to her gardening roots after an overdue divorce and way too much time in Manhattan. Lisle, who hails from generations of New England gardeners, bought a house in Sharon, Conn., with an odd rectangular space behind it and decided to write about her life “through the ‘green glasses’ of a gardener,” to “try to turn sadness and deep disappointment into something better.” But Lisle does not possess the quiet mind of many garden writers. The questions come thick and fast: Is gardening a form of escapism? A kind of female exile? Outdoor domesticity? Which is better, gardening or writing? Can you improve on nature? What is the relationship between gardening and painting? How willful should a gardener be? How much control ought one to exert over nature? Lisle’s writing reminds a reader of Capability Brown, a bit of Gertrude Jekyll, a bit of Katharine White. Lisle locates humanity in the garden, preferring for herself the gentle “middle distance” over distant wilds.