Vonnegut and Vaginal Politics: Greta Garbo's Bookshelf
I want to be alone. I just want to be alone (to read).
Short and slightly delayed post this week because I’m working full tilt on my first draft!
Oh, Garbo - we hardly knew ye. And yet I know ye quite well, mostly because of all these books that have been seized from your estate and carefully catalogued on auction websites.
Greta Garbo quit her career as a tragic actress (possibly unintentionally) in the early 40s and began to live out the rest of her life in quiet isolation. She gave no detailed interviews: much of what we know about this period comes in anecdotal form from friends-of-friends. As per some of these anecdotes, she apparently enjoyed feeding spaghetti to birds in the park and playing with Troll dolls, which she hid under her furniture. She was also a big reader.
I’ve seen a lot of ‘celebrity book’ discussion online recently: people on YouTube reviewing books that actors/singers are said to enjoy, collated lists of recommendations from famous people, etc. I’d like to contribute this list of (some of the) books owned by Garbo because I think it’s unfair that all the celebrities involved are alive and that she’s been maligned despite having amazing taste. Bring on the Garbo renaissance! Thank you to Julien’s Auctions for all the images below. If anyone would be interested in a #GretaGarboReadingChallenge (lol) let me know! Also this isn’t everything (have left out a few selections, including all her travel books) so I may do a part 2 soon.
Philosophy and Politics
The Last Laugh by Phil Berger
Female Sexuality by Princess Marie Bonaparte
The Bible as Literature [unsure of author, could be one of several books]
The English Philosophers from Bacon to Mill by Burtt
The Rebel by Albert Camus
Man Against Myth by Barrows Dunham
Vaginal Politics by Ellen Frankfort
The Intelligent Investor by Graham
Mind in the Waters: A Book to Celebrate the Consciousness of Whales & Dolphins by McIntyre
The Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan [two copies!]
Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan
[?], Crito, Apology and Symposium by Plato
The Bonus of Laughter by Alan Pryce-Jones
The Words by Jean-Paul Sartre
Situations by Jean-Paul Sartre
The First Circle by SolzhenitsynÂ
The Real Thing by Tom Stoppard
The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen
Books by European Authors
The Imposter by Jean Cocteau
Last Tales by Isak Dinesen
The Possessed (aka Demons) by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Living Sea by Jacques Cousteau/James Dugan
Irina’s Story by Hermann Hartfeld
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Penal Colony by Franz Kafka
Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe
The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough
Animal Farm by George Orwell
Voyage in the Dark by Jean Rhys
All Passion Spent by Vita Sackville-West
Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass by Bruno Schulz
Something Fresh by PG Wodehouse
Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar
Books by American Authors
Getting Even by Woody Allen
Fantastic Voyage by Isaac Asimov
Early Autumn by Louis Bromfield
Junky by William S. Burroughs
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Fear of Flying by Erica Jong
The Subterraneans by Jack Kerouac
The Modern Reader's Anthology (various, inc. W. Somerset Maugham)
Rise Up and Walk (unsure of author, could be Abel Muzorewa)
Poe's Best Tales by Edgar Allen Poe
Malcolm by James Purdy
Lucy Crown by Irwin Shaw
Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut
God Bless You, Mr Rosewater by Kurt Vonnegut
Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers by Tom Wolfe
Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe
More Books by European Authors
Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen
Justine by Lawrence Durrell
Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
Many Lifetimes by Joan Grant [this is shelved with her fiction, but is actually a past-life regression handbook!]
An Anthology of Irish Literature by Greene
1000 Years of Irish Prose by Greene
The Iliad by Homer
America by Franz KafkaÂ
Thousand Cranes by Yasunari Kawabata
The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
An Area of Darkness by V.S Naipaul
The Satires of Horace and Persius
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
The Green King by Paul-Loup Sulitzer
Poetry and Plays
Famous American Plays of the 1950s
Western Star by Stephen Vincent Benet
Four Screenplays of Ingmar BergmanÂ
Selected Poetry and Prose by Lord Byron
Poems of Robert Frost
The Poet's Cat: An Anthology by Mona Gooden
Five Plays by Lorca
Complete Poems by Marianne Moore
Mourning Becomes Electra by Eugene O'Neill
Like a Man in Love by [? can't find online]
To Be of Use by Marge Piercy
Les Mouches by Jean-Paul Sartre
Vieux Carre by Tennessee Williams