DISCOVERIES

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Scenes From a Receding Past

A Novel

Aidan Higgins

Dalkey Archive: 208 pp., $12.95 paper

Soda bread with black currant jam, plum pudding hanging from kitchen hooks, zinc chamber pots and holidays by the sea: These are a few of the gems from a treasure of childhood memories in “Scenes From a Receding Past,” a novel of remembrances strung together by master Irish storyteller Aidan Higgins.

Dan Ruttle’s life is a series of dreams driven by longing and fear: “An old reality, a recurring dream. An old stone bridge, low grey houses of Sligo town, open-window town ....Old pipe-smoking men wait on the bridge and spit tobacco juice into the Garavogue. They lean on the bollards down on the quays. I see an acid-faced man sketching there.” “What do they want of me, that speechless pearl-grey company?”

Dan is haunted by gypsies, tinkers and circus creatures. He falls in love with Hazel Ward, a young nurse who “smells of ferns.” He is sent to boarding school. His brother Wally breaks down. (“One day he closed up and after that you could get nothing out of him but grunts.”)

In this mysterious, evocative novel, each detail is a door worth walking through.

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The Devil’s Pool

A Novel

George Sand

Translated From the French by Andrew Brown

Hesperus Press: 132 pp., $14 paper

George SAND, whom the poet Charles Baudelaire once accused of being possessed by the devil, wrote the seemingly innocent pastoral novel “The Devil’s Pool” in four days. It is painted in the colors of her childhood home in Berry, a region in central France that, at least in the mid-1800s when the novel takes place, is a place of spirits and witches and wildness.

Musing on the charms of the “primitive life,” Sand finds the ploughman “a finer figure of a man than the one in whom knowledge has stifled all feeling.” One particular ploughman, Monsieur Germain, old at 28, has just lost his wife. He has three young children and is on his way with one son to the village of Fourche to meet a prospective replacement. A neighbor asks him to take along her 16-year-old daughter, Little Marie, who is going there to work for a farmer.

The three travelers lose their way in the forest and stop for the night at the bewitching Devil’s Pool. Germain falls in love with Marie, who knows her way around the woods, cooks a delicious meal of partridges and chestnuts and feigns surprise when he proposes marriage. She refuses. In Fourche, the farmer makes a pass at Marie and she flees to Germain.

This is passionate stuff and strangely resonant, with its many references to ogres and witches and the vulnerability of children. An afterword to the novel (which the original publisher in 1846 believed was too short) describes a traditional wedding from the Berry region, complete with hemp crusher, gravedigger and cabbage (a Celtic symbol of fertility), a ceremony that was fading even in Sand’s time. Her writing is reminiscent of Yeats and his fairy kingdom, the kind that keeps legends alive and ancient rituals from vanishing.

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Teaching the Trees

Lessons From the Forest

Joan Maloof

Georgia University Press: 156 pp., $24.95

“My students are not used to hearing someone speak with such tenderness, with such fiercely protective words, about the nonhuman things of this world,” writes biologist Joan Maloof, a self-confessed tree hugger.

Her “Teaching the Trees” is a series of essays on different species -- loblolly pines, bald cypress, sweet gum, holly, beech, sycamores and many more from the Eastern forests. It is illustrated with 200-year-old prints by naturalist John Abbot and is full of useful information. For example, there are 120 chemical compounds in forest air, only 70 of which have been identified by researchers in the Sierra Nevada.

Maloof writes of insects and animals that live in and around trees, about the many colors of light falling through beech leaves and the importance of preparing, the way plants do, for future generations.