Isla McKetta, MFA, Author at A Geography of Reading

Reading Dystopias: Both Fictional and Not

June 11, 2017 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

I just updated my Goodreads for the first time since early May and realized that in a time of what feels like not-reading, I’ve been reading a lot. Not the volumes of fictions or poetry I’d usually be immersed in, though some of those. I’ve been immersed in all things political. Some of that, like When the Emperor Was Divine, was fiction, and some of it, like James Comey’s statement to the Senate, I can only wish was fiction. Still, it’s been an interesting mix of media and I thought maybe it was time, after three months of not writing a book review, I reflect on what I’ve been reading.

When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka

Of all the things that have happened in the months since Trump was inaugurated, none has hit me as hard as the Muslim ban. A lot of things have upset me, but that one struck at my core values. For days after it was announced that America was no longer going to be the land of opportunity for all but instead was going to start openly turning away legitimate immigrants en masse, I was glued to the news and Twitter just waiting to see if we’d come to our senses. I was so tuned into events that I tuned out of my family and simply waited.

I know the whole land of opportunity thing is a story we tell ourselves just like we tell ourselves that those opportunities are open to everyone. Until that day, though, the story was intoxicating enough that I believed it. I believed we all valued it and were working toward it, even as we struggle with our own racism and anti-immigrant swells.

I don’t know whether When the Emperor Was Divine was sitting in my to-read pile or if I purchased it then or found it at the Little Free Library. I do know that I needed this book this year. Julie Otsuka’s story of a Japanese family living in California then interned during World War II made me look straight into what our country does, not what we say. It made me look at the people we do it to.

The book opens with a Japanese woman, a mother, we later learn, seeing the evacuation order near her home in Berkeley. She returns home and begins packing and preparing her home. Her acceptance seemed strange to me until I understood that her husband had already been arrested. She takes down their artwork, hides their valuables, feeds the stray dog her children cared for a feast and then kills it. When she killed that dog I understood a lot more about her character. This was not a woman who had given up. This was a woman who had no choice and she was going to do the best she could to help her family survive. She knew that dog could not survive alone on the streets and so she gave him the best ending she could. There are glimpses of neighbors helping her in small ways as there are glimpses of the racism her family encounters. But no one can change anything.

Spanning the entirety of the family’s internment and until they and then their patriarch return home, this book is filled with quiet details that speak loud. Otsuka lets us peek inside the experiences of each family member and we see not just the freezing cold, flu and diarrhea of the camps but also a boy’s ritual probing of his imprisoned father’s shoes, the missing of plums, and the worry of whether the porch light was left on or off. We see the family’s strength, their endurance. When the family returns to their wrecked home and works to clean and rebuild it room by room, we think it might be okay, this awful thing that our country did, because they were strong enough to withstand it. But of course it isn’t okay, not that it happened, not that it could happen again. We see this in the father, once a gentle man now broken. All because he had the wrong blood.

As a mother, I admired how well the mother took care of her family even as I ached at how she had to. As a patriot I was disgusted that we ever let this happen. That it could happen again. Sometimes, maybe even most times, we are better at conquering our fear and uncertainty and at becoming the welcoming country I grew up believing in. For example, I’m very proud to be living in one of the first states to push against Trump’s travel bans. But Otsuka reminded me that this impulse to give in to fear is something we have to fight every day or it will bubble right up in the most horrible ways.

Poetry, June 2017

Speaking of people we don’t treat all that well, I’m glad we’re finally having more concerted discussions about race. We need to do more. I’ve spent a lot of time lately thinking about my own racism, but I have much to learn to become the person I want to be— to appreciate the beautiful array of people and experiences in the world. I was delighted, then, when the June 2017 issue of Poetry arrived in my mailbox and it was a tribute to Gwendolyn Brooks. More importantly, it was filled with voices and experiences I don’t always encounter on my own.

I’ve read Patricia Smith and even seen her speak, but images like “our someday plans / grayed and siphoned flat” and “drown your baby in the mama-eye” reminded me that I haven’t read nearly enough Patricia Smith. CM Burroughs looks into the hypocrisy and humanity of us all by imagining the strong Brooks as lover with “how many times did / you posture yourself for the broad body of him or him and open // like home” and then shows me by her use of forward slashes that I know nothing about experimenting with language. Reading Roger Reeves I discover that the King Shabazz character in my son’s favorite book is actually named after Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. Jacqueline Jones Lamon’s line “I take a sip of water and tell them / every true thing that I know — that they are // the power who will save what needs saving” is everything.

Though I always enjoy reading Poetry, this is an especially fine issue and it’s expanded my reading list in all the right ways.

Walks with Walser by Carl Seelig

One of the most reassuring and also unnerving things about Walks with Walser, the book I’m currently reading, is seeing that art can both endure terrible times but that it can also remove itself completely from life. Chronicling conversations during the 27 years Robert Walser spent in an asylum after a breakdown, this book spans World War II and yet, because it occurs in Switzerland, barely even acknowledges what’s happening next door. There are some really gorgeous reflections on the life of an artist in this book, but it’s also an important reminder to me that I am not content to check out on the real world. Though I could benefit from a few more long walks.

Harper’s

A former student of political science, I’ve long subscribed to Harper’s to keep my political muscle active. It’s been an important lifeline since the election. I’m not one of those liberals who was completely surprised Trump won, I think the Democratic Party ignored the growing dissatisfaction of lower-income and blue collar Americans. But I am appalled that Trump was elected.

“Commitment to anything larger than your own life… [is] messy and chaotic and imperfect—which isn’t the flaw of it but the glory of it.” – Leslie Jamison

Though I chose not to attend the Women’s March, a thoughtful and moving essay by Leslie Jamison allowed me to experience the day and also her gorgeous reflection on the lifelong activism of her mother and to understand my own role in making a difference. In the same issue, I learned about an underground movement of ordinary women that had helped women get abortions. and read an excerpt of an essay by Mary Gaitskill that helped me understand how I can raise a son who sees “that rape is a violation of his own masculine dignity as well as a violation of the raped woman.” And I saw a revealing photo essay on what life is like in the projects now, not in some memory of the bad 80’s.

“At it’s best, [feminism] has also been about women recognizing the shifting contours of their own ignorance, and trying to listen harder.” – Leslie Jamison

That was all one issue. I’ve also been catching up on back issues with articles warning of things to come that, by the time the issue’s gone to print, or at least by the time I’ve read it, have already happened. The prescience is reassuring. It makes me believe that although I may feel like the bottom is dropping out, I am not living in unpredictable chaos and if we all think just a little harder and more clearly, we can make the nation as great (in the cooperative, generous, open, humanistic way) as I believe it can be.

Comey’s Statement

One step toward becoming that nation is understanding what’s happening now. I listened to the entirety of Comey’s Senate testimony on Thursday. This time I at least sat with my family while dwelling on current events. Though I hesitate to trust the straightforward earnestness Comey seems to present in that testimony and in his written statement, he made an excellent point about credibility being tied to consistency and Comey is consistent while Trump…

I don’t know what my role is right now in this messy time, but I can bear witness. So can you. If half of what Comey says is true, and I believe much more than that is, Comey is telling us that we have a president who is willing to lie and squeeze his employees and the values our government is founded on to get his way. That should not be a surprise. But it’s time we did something about it.

The Assault by Reinaldo Arenas

I thought I was escaping back into fiction when I pulled The Assault off my bookshelf. I remembered Arenas’ languid, gorgeous language and I really needed a little kick to get back to writing. But of course this Cuban-born novelist who was persecuted by his government is famous for writing about that experience.

This book truly is gorgeous. It’s also a terrifying reminder of what happens when democracy fails. The story of a government agent’s search for his mother so he can kill her before he becomes her, this book shows a country where humanity is reduced to means of production. For example, in one chapter we see the line of people who irrigate the fields with their spit. If they fail to spit, they get juiced and that juice is then used for irrigation. Wild and dark, nothing about the not-night portrayed in this book is wholly implausible. That’s the worst part.

West of Here by Jonathan Evison

West of Here is not a dystopian book. That might be why I sandwiched it somewhere in the middle of all this heavy reading. In fact, it contains elements of the utopias white people wrote about in the 19th and early 20th centuries as explorers went off to conquer new lands and found paradisaical locales with unlimited natural resources. It also contains stories of the people who were already here and a view into what life is like in those same paradises 100 years later. I love reading Jonathan Evison’s descriptions of places I love. I love his understanding of the simplicity and complexity of human motivations. And I love that a strange mystical vein runs through the story. Dams go up, dams come down. People settle, people perish, people endure.

This is not a dystopian book, but it is a good reminder that while our goals may seem simple, reality is not.

Not everything here counts toward my Goodreads reading goal, and I still don’t have the answers to making this country the place I dream it might be. But the somewhat odd selection does reflect the writer and the human that I am, and I’m choosing to embrace that. For better or worse, I’m going to take a little hope from Evison, a little inspiration from Comey, doses of reality from Jamison, strength from Otsuka, seeing from Poetry, and a prod of fear from Arenas and try to live my own values. I hope I can be at least a little part of the power who will save what needs saving.

And now that I’ve put that vow in print, I can finally clear this stack off my desk.

Wickedness in The Redemption of Galen Pike by Carys Davies

March 19, 2017 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

Wicked little books. They’re all I read these days when on a good night I can manage 20 pages and most nights I can’t even remember any of what I read the night before. By wicked little, I mean very short, except in the case of The Redemption of Galen Pike by Carys Davies which is short, but it is also wicked in the most delicious of ways. The stories are compact enough that I could read a few each night if I wanted to, but, more importantly, they are dincredibly well drawn which made them oh-so-memorable. Perfect for a newish mom with a dark sense of humor and an interest in the baser side of human consciousness.

I should have known I’d like this book. I was reading a review copy sent by the publisher, Biblioasis, and Biblioasis seldom does me wrong. I grabbed it off of my ever-expanding to-read shelf just for that reason, and because I needed an antidote to some of the mindless “eating mindfully” books I’d been putting myself to sleep with lately. I was a little trepidatious, though, that the book was a collection of short stories—a form I can’t usually get into because I want to invest more time in the characters. Little did I know that the distilled form would be part of this book’s strength. Let me tell you about two of my favorites…

“The Quiet”

Davies starts the first story in this collection by masterfully accomplishing something I tried desperately to in my first book and couldn’t.

She didn’t hear him arrive.

The wind was up and the rain was thundering down on the tin roof like a shower of stones and in the midst of all the noise she didn’t hear the rattle of his old buggy approaching. She didn’t hear the scrape of his iron-rimmed wheels on the track, the soft thump of his feet in the wet dust. She didn’t know he was there until she looked up from her bucket of soapy water and saw his face at her window.

With these few sentences, Davies creates a bubble of anticipation for the reader while creating an honest, believable ignorance on the part of the protagonist. We dread the arrival of this man, even as it’s happening. We dread it as much as we soon learn that the main character, Susan, dreads it. But we don’t need to know just yet how much she hates him. We just need to know that he’s creepy and he’s creeping and he’s coming. And Susan doesn’t know.

Davies goes on to describe in equally original and specific detail just how this fellow, Henry, grates on Susan’s nerves each time he comes to visit her husband. It’s soon revealed that said husband is not home on the lonely homestead just now and that Susan is alone with Henry. The power of this story is that even more than a month after I first read it, my skin is prickling with anticipation as I summarize these initial pieces for you.

I will not reveal what happens in this story. It’s too good. But I will say that Davies has complete control of her writing and of the reader as she piques our dread while unfolding a story that is very unlike what we fear might happen. I was terrified in reading it and no less terrified at the end, but the surprises she unwound for me made me question all of the assumptions I’d made and realize how very many levels a truly gifted writer is writing on all at once.

“The Taking of Bunny Clay”

Once you realize that Bunny Clay is a baby, the title of this story alone becomes any parent’s worst nightmare. But Davies is too subtle a writer to give us a straight up baby snatching story that plays to our every fear. Instead, she again creates an unexpected story that plumbs the real depths of our emotions. We quickly see how much working mother Nancy comes to depend on and appreciate her nanny, Cheryl. How Nancy subsumes the feelings she has about how her son should be raised because it’s more important that he’s well cared for. Until Cheryl makes an unusual ask…

The story gets fascinating when the point of view flips and we learn about Cheryl as a human rather than as an employee. I can’t say more except that love comes in many forms. The story is not anything you think and it broke my heart in a million pieces I never expected—even from the title. It’s a hard read for a mom, but a good one. One of the few things I’ve read or watched since parenthood that hasn’t simply yanked the “fear for baby” chain but instead led me to explore and inhabit that fear long enough to understand the good fortune that incites it.

There were stories I enjoyed less. Whether I was especially tired or the story was especially oblique, the only memory I have of “On Commercial Hill” is of scrawling “huh?” at the end of the final paragraph. And sometimes the loathsome characters are truly hard to take, especially when the current political climate makes me want to retract all empathy from a few real life characters.

But then in “Jubilee” Davies captures pure loneliness, or in “The Coat” she describes winter “like a big, dark shoulder, or the long curve of a road up ahead, and once you are round it, it is all downhill”, and I realize how much poorer I would have been as a writer and a human if I had never read this book. I may wait for a brighter day to re-read The Redemption of Galen Pike, but I will re-read it. I have to. There’s so much more to discover.

To explore your own darkness pick up a copy of The Redemption of Galen Pike from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Reading and Watching The Magicians by Lev Grossman

January 22, 2017 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

Was it magic or serendipity that a copy of The Magicians by Lev Grossman showed up in my local Little Free Library the very same week that the related Syfy series showed up on Netflix? I’m not certain, but I can say that reading the book while binge watching the series has me a little convinced that there is magic in the world around me, even if my Popper finger movements haven’t yet led to the dishwasher loading itself. It’s rare that I like an adaptation as much as the book, but experiencing the two together has added a whole new layer of enjoyment to the story and characters for me.

The World We Know

The story of The Magicians revolves around a school (Brakebills) that trains magicians and a series of children’s books about a magical place in the back of a cupboard called Fillory. While it would be easy to dismiss The Magicians immediately as derivative of Harry Potter and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, given time Lev Grossman builds his own rich story around these elements. And though even more derivative elements crop up in the one season of the series that I’ve watched, I was always interested enough in Grossman’s characters to shrug it off.

Sequences Out of Time

The TV series and the book (books, really, The Magicians is the first book of a trilogy) are a wonderful case study of how to adapt literature to screen. Apparently this adaptation was done with the help of the author, something I credit with the success of the show, but I’ve seen authorial involvement go as badly as The Magicians goes well. There are notable differences: in the books, Brakebills is a college, on TV it’s a grad school; some of the characters have different names; some of the characters from the books don’t exist in the series; one of the characters from the series barely exists in the book; the timeline in the book is much elongated; etc.

What’s gorgeous about experiencing these two together, though, is the times that they do intersect. I think that’s because are fully realized in their own rights. Yes, there were moments of the series that made a lot more sense when I realized that the characters were originally fresh out of high school, but overall I liked that the series has a little more tooth because of the adult characters and that the books are more innocent. What I liked even more, though, was that I felt like I was having my own Fillory experience where life (TV) would go on every night as we watched episode after episode and a few days later I’d encounter spots in the books (Fillory) where the action overlapped with the series.

Fluid Sexuality

One thing that’s remarkable about the generation after mine is how much more fluid their idea of gender is—both in their norms and in who they love—and I appreciate how this was reflected in The Magicians. It’s more obvious in the series, but the source material certainly exists in the book. It’s something I enjoyed about Sense8 as well, until the writers threw away a perfectly good story in favor of scene after scene of pan-sexual orgies. I’m not opposed to depictions of the latter, but please don’t take away my story. The Magicians does a much better job of incorporating the human sexuality of a gender-fluid generation into the context of the story.

Book or Series?

Let’s be honest, time is short now that I’m a mom and I’m choosier than ever about what I read. But I still watch a couple hours of TV a night because I can sit next to my husband and share an experience without applying too much mental effort.

Whereas I ran through the show as fast as possible given the above schedule, if I hadn’t had a couple of holidays and a sick day, I might not have finished the book at all. I really appreciated the compressed timeline of the series when compared to the somewhat lagging action of the book (especially after Quentin leaves Brakebills). I appreciate that it’s difficult to portray creative malaise and a post-grad slump in print, but it’s much harder to read a slow portrayal of said malaise.

I’m excited to see the next season of the show, too, because there were aspects of Fillory that I think will translate better to screen. In the books there are all these mishmashed chimeras that were underdeveloped and felt pretty throwaway. Plus, one of my favorite characters (no hints!) disappeared for far too long in the book.

As I said, I’m glad that Lev Grossman was involved in the adaptation. I think he might be a better screenwriter than a novelist and I don’t think I’ll read the next in the series.

To make up your own mind about The Magicians, pick up a copy from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Leaving Kent State by Sabrina Fedel and Learning to Stand Up for What I Believe

January 20, 2017 by Isla McKetta, MFA 2 Comments

It’s inauguration day! Regardless of how you feel about the outcome of the election, I’m willing to bet your feelings are strong. Mine are and I’m so glad Leaving Kent State by Sabrina Fedel entered my heart and my home when it did because it made me less scared to stand up for my beliefs and turned me into a better human overall.

The World I Thought I Lived in

I’ve had a lot of conversations in the past few months with my husband about vaguely remembered concepts from elementary and high school—things like tyranny of the majority and informed electorates. As much as I found myself defending the electoral college, I couldn’t quite reconcile myself with a world in which the answer to liberal fact-checkers is conservative smoke and mirrors. See, I grew up with a liberal little heart in a conservative family in a conservative state (almost libertarianly so), but I was always taught that it’s my job as a citizen to have an opinion and to voice that opinion. So I will admit to feeling more than a little deflated when a man I don’t believe won through honest conviction or means was named president elect.

The World I Wanted to Live in

“I think Vietnam has a lot to do with changing things,” I said.
“What do you mean?” Evan studied me as he asked.
“I don’t know, I guess it’s made us ask why.”

I grew up such an idealist that I fully felt I should have been a member of the flower children and that if I had been alive during that time, I too could have brought an end to the Vietnam War.

That’s why Leaving Kent State was perfect for me. This young adult novel follows 17-year-old Rachel, a native of Kent and daughter of a professor, as she negotiates her relationship with the love of her life (who may or may not love her back) as he negotiates his new life as a disabled Vietnam vet. It’s 1969 and the social revolution hasn’t quite hit Kent, Ohio, though some of the students are trying to change that. Rachel’s also struggling with her destiny, which she feels is as an artist, but her parents just aren’t on board.

If Kent, Ohio or Kent State sound familiar to you, it’s likely because of the shootings there in 1970 of unarmed protestors by the National Guard. Some people credit those events with turning the national consciousness against the Vietnam War. The book gets there, though deliciously slowly as we explore what it’s like for a young girl to love a young man who experienced something she abhors. Thankfully Evan, the object of Rachel’s love, is a very round character and we get to experience through him both the camaraderie of the soldiers in Vietnam and the regrets of someone who saw and experienced the worst of war.

Who I Can be

I purposely started reading this book on the day of the January 15 rally to save the Affordable Care Act. I needed to believe that a group of people can in fact make a difference for the better. I trekked downtown with my young son in tow and, yes, I chanted all the chants. He could only take an hour of the rally so we missed the main event, but we sang our nightly round of “We Shall Overcome” and “Where have all the Flowers Gone,” and I’m energized to try again at the Women’s March tomorrow.

See, Leaving Kent State gave me hope. I should tell you that it’s very well written and that the period details are spot on and the characters believable. I should tell you that Fedel takes the subtle (and better) path of introducing the reader to people who know people who know people who are famous rather than hitting us over the head with unlikely encounters. Or how she drops in all the right information to ground our reading and hint at where the story is going without inundating us. Or how she paints one of the most tender and accurate portraits of PTSD I’ve ever seen on paper. All of those things are true. But as much as I love good writing, I am most grateful to Fedel for that gift of hope.

As part of my new rosy outlook, I also hope that it won’t take a tragedy like the Kent State shootings to heal the rifts that have been growing in DC and in our society since 9/11. But Leaving Kent State also gave me the courage to stand up for myself and for what I believe in even when it’s hard. Especially when it’s hard. Rachel could not have known what she was getting herself into that day in Kent, Ohio, but even as events unfolded she and Evan were the best people they could be. This book helped me find out who I want to be—for myself, and for my son.

What is Young Adult Anyway?

Quick side note here about the young adult (YA) genre. When the author and I were discussing her book, she warned me that it’s YA. I personally don’t believe in those labels too much, but I can see what she meant. In this book we are deeply immersed in the moony and not very actiony heart of a teenaged girl for most of the story. I kind of loved that because I remember what that was like, but if you’re a “get on with it already” kind of person, this probably isn’t the book for you.

Whether you choose to read this book or not, please, for my sake and yours, keep asking why and pushing for the best world you can dream of.

To catch your own glimpse at what life was like during a “simpler time” and maybe recapture some hope, pick up a copy of Leaving Kent State from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Reconsidering Form in Mr. Palomar by Italo Calvino

December 17, 2016 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

I always think I like Italo Calvino because his sentences are as clean as his ideas are wildly creative. I know he was at least as interested in the form of writing and the semiotics of text as I am and I like Calvino so much that I own every one of his books that was ever translated into English (plus a few that weren’t). But that wasn’t where I was when I picked up Mr. Palomar on a recent winter’s night. I didn’t need my mind blown like it was with Invisible Cities and I didn’t need to re-imagine narrative like I did when reading If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. I wanted clean enough writing that I could get something out of it in the few pages before I passed out—something that would subconsciously help me clarify my own thoughts and sentences.

Books. They always seem to give me what I need instead of what I thought I wanted. Maybe that’s why I love them so much.

Reading a Wave: The Subtlety of Form

“The sea is barely wrinkled, and little waves strike the sandy shore. Mr. Palomar is standing on the shore, looking at a wave. Not that he is lost in contemplation of the waves. He is not lost, because he is quite aware of what he is doing: he wants to look at a wave and he is looking at it. He is not contemplating, because for contemplation you need the right temperament, the right mood, and the right combination of exterior circumstances” – Italo Calvino, Mr. Palomar

In these first few lines of “Mr. Palomar’s Vacation,” I was entranced as Calvino describes the ocean. I thought it was because I, too love watching the ocean and reading the waves. I thought it was because Calvino captured the ambivalence I sometimes feel when I’m trying to settle into a meditative activity like watching the sea or reading a book.

I think I was two pages into the story when I realized what should have been obvious from just what I quoted above. The story is a wave. Mr. Palomar laps his attention out to the sea and then pulls it back inward to experience his own fluttery anxiety. This happens again as Calvino pours all his writerly attention into the next incoming wave and then pulls back again to examine more closely Mr. Palomar’s interior state.

In the few pages that make up this story, Calvino pushes us out into the sea and pulls us back over and over. What might sound like an exhausting activity is actually a transcendent experience. As is the case with actually watching the ocean, the reader experiences a fractal-like delving into the two characters here: the ocean and Mr. Palomar where with each paragraph we see more clearly the details of both.

Calvino can do this because his language is so clean. If the story had been laden with adjectives, I might have missed the underlying form entirely and instead been mildly bored by a scene where not much ever happens except a neverending push-pull between man and nature where neither progresses much.

Instead, I sat up in bed and started rummaging for a pen to annotate this marvelous book. I needed to understand how Calvino was doing so subtly something I’ve only managed to clumsily muddle through as I divide pages in twos, threes, and fours to show the movement of energy through a poem or reconsider the shape of a text and accompanying imagery to convey a larger story than is evident from the words on the page. I’m not sorry I’m making big moves like that in my own work because I think I need to in order to understand the shape of things for myself. But I do hope I someday come close to the subtle mastery of making a paragraph that is a wave, rather than simply looking like one.

The Index: Reconsidering an Entire Work

Why might a 126-page book need an index? That was my thought, anyway, when Mr. Palomar flopped open to its back pages a few nights later to show me what else I’d been missing. Because I was only reading a fragment or two a night, I hadn’t yet registered that these tiny scenes were thematically organized. It turns out each chapter is contemplated in turn from a visual, anthropological, and then speculative angle.

To be honest, now that I’ve had time to contemplate this form a little, I’m not sure it’s necessary for this read of the book. The stories are rich and interesting enough in their own ways without being part of this larger design, but I love that it’s there for future, deeper reads as I hone my own mastery of form.

What is it About Form, Anyway?

As I plod through my own experiments with form, I feel a bit sometimes like I’m creating this narrowly-defined reading experience for an audience who might otherwise miss the subtleties of what I want to say. Calvino shows me, though, that in the hands of a master, form can be an overlay (or an underlayment) to a story. Though it sets up the conditions of the story, its existence can be as ignorable as the shapes of the pipes in the walls of a home.

The true beauty of form, though, is when it gives shape and context to a story in the way that religion or philosophy give shape and context to life. We can exist without them, but there’s something very comforting about believing that each crashing wave is part of the pattern of our existence. Maybe that’s the real reason I picked up Mr. Palomar, because Calvino always gives me the comfort of believing in a greater design.

If you want to explore the world according to Calvino, pick up a copy of Mr. Palomar from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.