Sunday, September 16, 2007

THE END OF THE ALPHABET

By C.S. Richardson

Doubleday. 119 pp. $16.95

What would you do if you found out that your life would end in 30 days? Set your legal and financial affairs in order and contact the people at hospice? Forgive your enemies and send loving messages to friends and family? Or would you take a trip, stopping at all the places in the world you have loved and all those you wanted to see but never visited?

When Ambrose Zephyr learns around the time of his 50th birthday that he has only one month to live, he makes frantic plans to travel the globe alphabetically from Amsterdam to Zanzibar with his beloved wife, Zappora (Zipper) Ashkenazi. These two people have been everything to each other for all the years of a quietly happy marriage. If he wants to travel at this time, she will go, wherever the journey takes them and whatever her own feelings may be: "Don't do this don't be this don't go without me don't go at all," Zipper thinks to herself.

Above all else this is a story about love, something longer than the alphabet and wider than geography. Although at first the travel theme may bring to mind such relentless late-life guides as 1000 Places To See Before You Die, the resemblance is superficial. Despite the book's title and some of its chapter headings -- "D" for Deauville, "F" for Florence, and so on -- this elegant, spare and beautifully written tale of Ambrose Zephyr's last journey is too delicate, witty and passionate to be ruled by alphabetical order or contained within any planned itinerary.

Things go wrong. By the time they get to C (for Chartres), Zipper longs for Paris, where she and Ambrose first met. She is haunted by a nightmarish inner alphabet: "E is for Eiffel's tower, standing in Paris. L is for London and home. Z is for Zipper. T is for terrified. H is for hopeless."

As they continue on, mistakes are made and connections lost: The travelers miss E (Elba) altogether; they never reach H (Haifa). K and J are altered, and transposed.

They do get to Paris. Their time together in that city is a blend of enchantment and apprehension as deftly and lightly created as a fine souffl?.

The surprise of this little book is not that it is poignant but that it is delightful: graceful, stylish, humorous, intelligent and lacking even the faintest whiff of sanctimony. Each page shimmers with life at its gentle, everyday best: always unraveling at one end of the alphabet or the other, laced with love.

-- Reeve Lindbergh is the author of numerous books for children and adults.