Foreign Correspondence

When I saw this book listed on one of my usual book sites, I was imme­di­ately attracted to it. Geral­dine Brooks grew up in Aus­tralia, with a Cal­i­forn­ian father and an Aus­tralian (half Dutch and half Irish) mother. I grew up in the high­land jun­gle area of Peru, with Texan par­ents of Scots-Irish and, in my mother’s case Nor­man, her­itage. Geral­dine found pen pals a source of infor­ma­tion on the rest of the world. I wrote to one or two pen pals myself. She and I are around the same age (some of the fam­ily pic­tures in this book even look famil­iar due to the sim­i­lar­ity in cloth­ing and hair­style fash­ions), so we would have lived through sim­i­lar inter­na­tional polit­i­cal sit­u­a­tions at about the same time in our lives. There are a lot of dif­fer­ences in our growing-up sto­ries, but in addi­tion to the inter­na­tional sub­ject mat­ter which inter­ests me, there is enough of a famil­iar feel­ing here for me to want to read more.

When Geral­dine grew up, she became an inter­na­tional jour­nal­ist — a for­eign cor­re­spon­dent. At some point she decided to track down sev­eral of her old pen pals. That’s about as much of the story as I know so far. I’ve just started the book and already I know I’m going to enjoy it. As I men­tioned in a pre­vi­ous post, I have been work­ing with some old let­ters from my par­ents’ attic, writ­ten to and from my great-grandparents, my grand­par­ents and my great-aunts and uncles. Well, when I read the first chap­ter of For­eign Cor­re­spon­dence I found this descrip­tion from Geraldine:

“…I am in the base­ment of my par­ents’ house…sorting through tea chests.…My father squir­reled away everything…yellowed news clippings…dog-eared photographs.…And there are let­ters, piles of them. Replies to every piece of cor­re­spon­dence my father ever wrote.”

She goes on to describe let­ters from the White House, media mogul Rupert Mur­doch, Albert Ein­stein and Win­ston Churchill. Even one from an acoustic expert thank­ing Geraldine’s father, a for­mer stage musi­cian, for his sug­ges­tions. My great-grandfather used to write to math­e­mat­ics pro­fes­sors about his math dis­cov­er­ies and to politi­cians about his opin­ions, so Geraldine’s descrip­tion strikes a chord. I am look­ing for­ward to read­ing the rest of the book.