A Geography of Reading

"It is by reading novels, stories, and myths that we come to understand the world in which we live." -Orhan Pamuk

Coping with a Personal Apocalypse in The End of the City

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Some events so change a generation, a society, that it’s difficult to imagine how you’d even write about them or their aftermath. In The End of the City, introduces us to one boy who’s rebuilding his life after losing his dad in events that may or may not be precipitated by the attack on the twin towers on September 11, 2001.

Alternate Realities

The narrative of this book actually takes place in two realities that alternate throughout the book. One is the land of teenaged Ben Moor living in Reston, VA and dealing with his dad’s death. He’s a pretty typical teenager–trying to mask the hurt while also trying to build a life of his own. Nevertheless, the world is carefully created and well imagined which makes it all very interesting, immediate, and personal. While Ben, Bobby Jihad (Ben’s brother) and their friends are living it up on spiked ginger ales and track meets, I worried about Ben’s sadness. I worried more about Bobby Jihad’s bravado. And sometimes I wanted to see Kitty kick Ben in the nuts.

The secondary world, that of an assassin in New York who has just been ordered to knock off one of his own crew. Although the action here takes place in 2011 New York, it’s so dark that I frequently wondered if it was an alternate history. I actually spent a lot of time wondering about its relationship to the first story. But even as the back of my brain puzzled over why both main characters drank ginger ale and had strangely similar ill-fitting suits, I was wrapped up in the cinematic pace of the action.

The Voice of a Generation

“I look down on you from the ridge, on you and what remains of you, and in your blood I see a map of your own making (and mine). I recognize it; I’m quite sure I at least half understand the language.” – David Bendernagel, The End of the City

Part what makes these two worlds so effective is the dense and evocative language Bendernagel uses. Although not as turgid as the dialogue in Rian Johnson’s Brick, The End of the City has a lingo all its own. The language–a kind of disaffected shorthand that feels very male and very much set in its generation–sets the mood immediately. It also forces the reader to slow down and inhabit what’s happening or be lost forever. For example, Ben’s reference to the events of September 11, 2001, “Jet fuel goes up. Two towers collapse.” is cryptic, but there’s a lot of story (and emotion) held just below that surface.

Cultural Referents

One distinctive aspect of that voice is the cultural referents Bendernagel uses. I beamed when reading how one character “pulled a McConaughey” and also wondered how many readers would miss the reference to Dazed and Confused. This decision between being specific (which sometimes means being oblique) is something I’ve struggled with in my own writing. Reading The End of the City, I realized how close the connection between writer and reader can feel when you’re on the inside of the jokes.

The other side of cultural referents is that they can easily be misunderstood. I struggled with this as I tried to reconcile the two story lines in this book. Bendernagel kept dropping references to Back to the Future and 12 Monkeys: two referents that signaled to me that time travel was imminent. When I finally understood the actual relationship between the narratives, I felt a little led astray.

Writing about Tragedy

In the end, it doesn’t matter if Ben’s dad’s death is suicide, a heart attack, or an accident. It doesn’t matter if it’s related to 9/11 or not. What matters is the personal tragedy to Ben of losing his dad at twelve. And that’s the perfect approach and what I love about novels–they take the whole big world and break it down into individual characters and experiences we can get inside and empathize with. I mostly avoid books about 9/11 (and, actually, the phrase “9/11”) either because I’m not sure I’m ready to deal with it or because I’m terrified of the sanctified air we apply to that day. I really appreciated how, by dealing not with the tidy euphemisms we’ve developed to talk about that day but instead with the loss experienced by one boy, Bendernagel let me feel the pure weight of the emotion. He let me get inside the feeling.

While the voice in The End of the City was so strongly male and so American that for a couple of weeks after finishing this book I found myself drawn to books about foreign lands written by women just to balance myself out, it was a treat to read something so different than what I’d been reading lately. When Bendernagel offered me this review copy, he said people had compared the book to the work of Jonathan Lethem. There’s some of that, but I’d say it’s even more grounded in the gritty and weird movies of the late 1990s like 12 Monkeys, Heat, and even Se7en. That may sound like a stretch for all the emotional impact I promised in the previous paragraph, but for a someone who fell in love with her husband while watching and discussing those very films so many years ago, it’s all a pretty good fit.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of The End of the City from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Reading The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra Against Vonnegut’s Bluebeard

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I want to write about this gorgeous little book I read and how it made me ponder questions like ,”What if your entire life could be gathered into one work of art?” I want to consider how memoirists rarely stop at one book, poets and fiction writers scatter bits of themselves throughout their entire oeuvre, and visual artists capture one image or scene at a time. I want to think about how literary critics and art historians piece the clues together, but the story of an artist’s life is rarely whole. But as I was reading In The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra by , all I could think about was Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut.

Two very different books that both revolve around a single painting. In The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra, that painting is a four-kilometer artwork painted over the course of Salvatierra’s lifetime which has been kept in a shed. In Bluebeard, that painting is a secret work that is kept hidden in a barn until the very end. Both painters, Juan Salvatierra and Rabo Karabekian, are outsider artists (although Karabekian is a museum guard and is in constant contact with the New York art scene). And while Salvatierra has casually tried to exhibit his work, Karabekian keeps his completely secret.

The Legacy of Bluebeard

So what was it that made these two books meld in my mind? For one, Bluebeard is one of those books that has stuck with me strongly in the decade since I read it. Not all parts of the book, in fact I’m sure to get a fact or two about the book wrong here, but the reveal of the painting. I think because I read the book when I was realizing that visual art was never going to be my forte and I was rediscovering how much I love writing. And then there’s the strength of the reveal. If you haven’t read the book yet, stop reading here and skip ahead to the next section.

Karabekian’s barn contains a large scale canvas that portrays what he saw on the day that World War II ended. The way Vonnegut unfurls that information, the perfect mix of visual information and letting my imagination fill it in. For years after I read the book, I’d scan gallery exhibits and find paintings that I thought were like Karabekian’s work. I was obsessed. Eventually I relegated the book to the annals of my brain, but something about the opening page of The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra where Salvatierra’s son, Miguel, is sitting in an exhibit in Europe watching a replica of his father’s painting slowly pass by brought the memories back.

The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra

None of that is to say that this book cannot stand on its own. If I had never read Bluebeard, I would have loved the opening of this book. I would have loved the spacious way that Mairal allows the reader to transition from chapter to chapter. Each chapter is so short and yet so complete as you follow the story of Miguel’s search for the one missing canvas that represents one year in his father’s life.

Mairal beautifully balances exposition about Juan Salvatierra’s life (he became mute as a child and this painting became one of the primary ways he expressed himself), the visual details of the painting, and Miguel’s search. Although I was relatively certain from the beginning that all the rolls of canvas would eventually be reunited, and I was not surprised at why that canvas had gone missing, I was so immersed in the family’s story that I couldn’t put the book down.

Some novellas achieve that perfect amount of engagement and openness that allow them to feel bigger and more complete than the longest saga. The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra is one of those novellas. It is the story of the search for the one roll of canvas that’s missing after Salvatierra’s death. It’s the story of two sons unfurling and understanding their father’s life and lifework. And it’s the story of how everything we do in our lives really does add up to one whole. I hope you’ll love it as much as I did.

I have no way of knowing if Mairal ever read Bluebeard and it’s possible that the connection exists only in my mind, but when I say that The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra brought me back in mind to Bluebeard time and time again, I mean it as the highest compliment.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Spending NaPoWriMo Writing with Stephen Dunn and Kim Addonizio

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I have the incredibly good fortune to be spending a few days in the San Juan Islands for a writing residency. When I arrived, I didn’t know which of three projects I’d be working on: 1. getting a solid draft together for my second novel, 2. writing and revising a book of poetry I’ve been playing with, or 3. whatever random thing struck my fancy along the way. So I packed a large box of books and all of the scraps of paper that comprise those various projects and headed off to devote some time to writing. What I should have realized is that the presence of Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within by Kim Addonizio and Walking Light: Essays and Memoirs by Stephen Dunn in that box, together with the fact that it’s National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo) would prove to be an irresistible shove in the direction of the poetry book.

NaPoWriMo

I’d actually been making really good progress on writing a poem a day for NaPoWriMo before I got on the ferry to come here. I think I’d created first drafts of seven or eight poems in eight days. Some of those days I’d written two poems. But throughout the process I’ve become even more keenly aware of my limitations as a poet. Talking with Nicole Hardy and Karen Finneyfrock (both poets who also write prose) last night, I kept saying things like “I haven’t written poetry since high school” and hearing how that sounded. I know that the time I’ve spent improving my fiction has definitely helped my poetry, I can feel that, but it’s far from good yet. I knew I needed help. Admitting that is the first step, right?

Walking Light: Essays and Memoirs

I’d actually placed Stephen Dunn’s Walking Light: Essays and Memoirs on my Christmas list this year and then forgotten about the book. I think I heard about it through ModPo but I can’t even remember the context. My husband scoured the internet for a copy for me and I’m so glad because it’s exactly what I needed right now. Dunn’s essays are about life and poetry in this way that makes them completely wonderful for an aspiring poet. I fell in love with the book on the first page of the introduction when Dunn describes as essayist as “a person who believes there’s value in being overheard clarifying things for himself.” That line was humorous and self-deprecating and true in all the ways that told me I could trust this man to teach me about writing and the world.

The essays in this book are accessible in the best of ways whether he’s discussing the “ambiguities that poets must honor” or how poems “must make available the strangeness that is our lives.” This is not a how-to book, but he does delve into some poems that work and some that don’t, and he writes frankly about both. And the book is filled with useful insights like, “The poem is not written in natural speech. Few successful poems are. But it does give the illusion of natural speech.” I don’t always agree with Dunn’s assessments, but the mere fact that he’s brought me to a level where I feel like I have an educated opinion about poetry is a triumph for me.

“There’s hope for someone who can be embarrassed by poor word choice.” – Stephen Dunn

His essays about life are equally good. I particularly loved “A History of My Silence” which is an essay about Dunn’s shyness. I’ve only recently realized how deeply shy I am and have always been, although I’ve covered it up pretty well at times, and reading lines like, “What a pleasure reading was: the world received in silence, at my own pace” made me feel that my shyness is a trait not a deficit, and I was so glad to know that I’m not the only one with a “history of letting you know only what is useful for me to let you know.” That’s something I fight to get past in my writing, but it feels functional in my day to day life.

Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within

Whereas Dunn’s book is so rich that I could only read a few pages at a time before passing out (seriously, I couldn’t even finish an essay), Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within by Kim Addonizio is so delightful and quick that I couldn’t put it down. This is much more of a how-to book, but it’s written so conversationally and intelligently that she can impart three lessons where you thought you were learning one. I’m savoring both books a bit, but Addonizio has already taught me about the traffic signals of punctuation in a poem and answered a question about word spacing that had bothered me so much I’d actually been running around asking people about it. I’m learning about music and detail and how rhyme is related to echo. She’s opening my work up already.

As I’ve worked my way through the book, I’ve written so many first drafts of poems I didn’t even know I had inside me. I’ll take her advice about revision seriously and take heart that some poems “are supposed to fail, to teach you that you have to keep going and try out new strategies.” I’ll even try plodding through meter, a bit.

“Dare to feel like a beginner–unsure and clumsy at first, but having a good time and doing your best to learn.” – Kim Addonizio

Ordinary Genius is also more than a how-to book–it’s a book where an established artist talks openly with an aspiring one. Addonizio’s advice on publishing is priceless to writers of all genres. And insights like, “While there is a real distinction between art and therapy, the truth is that art is therapeutic. It helps you to take something that is within you and make a place for it outside of yourself” make me want to keep writing forever and ever and ever.

I’m off to make some space outside of myself for these projects. I’d love to hear about how you’re experiencing NaNoWriMo or how you’re challenging yourself in the comments.

If this review made you want to read Walking with Light or Ordinary Genius pick up a copy from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Suspended Inside The Appointment by Herta Müller

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The appointment - Herta MüllerWhen I woke this morning, I didn’t want to pick up The Appointment by Herta Müller even though I only had a few pages left to read. I successfully avoided the book all day yesterday, too. But not for the reasons you might think. I set the book aside because it was so good, so cleanly and smartly written, that I didn’t want it to end.

Constructing Time

The narrator of The Appointment, a woman living under Ceauşescu’s regime in Romania, is riding a tram on her way to an interrogation with a man called Albu. The ride across town is to take two hours, and the way that the narrator digresses into flashback, I started to wonder if the trip would also take the entire book.

A teacher once told me, “If the bulk of your story takes place in flashback, you have a problem.” In almost every other case, I would agree. But here Müller has created this incredible sense of suspense that carried me through the labyrinthine back story back to the tram (as a touchstone, a grounding point) and then back into this woman’s life history again. It works because the stories are so fascinating. It works because she can be trusted to bring us back to that forward momentum of time. And it works because it conveys the stalled sense of her life under communism. If the narrator makes it to the appointment today, there will just be another in the future. There is no escape. The continuum is a circle.

I became so enthralled with the way time was working in the book that I had to start drawing it out for myself.

diagram - the appointment - Herta Müller

 

Teaching the Reader to Read

Another teacher told me, “The best books teach us how to read them.” The Appointment is an excellent example of this and I can see why Müller won the Nobel. The careful orchestration of time wouldn’t work if Müller hadn’t already shown us that the digressions lead somewhere. In the first few pages of the novel, she lays the groundwork of waiting for the tram and a brief look into the interrogation that waits on the other side.

Then she takes a brief step to the side to describe the routine of insomnia that precedes these interrogations. That aside evolves into a description of her life with Paul. And then a description of a label of brandy with two plums on in. I only had her to guide me, and I was willing to follow this narration because it was early in the book and I was still trying to decide if Müller was someone I wanted to follow. The narrator then gives a glimpse of her wedding to Paul (her second) and compares their faces to the two plums on the bottle of brandy. All in four pages.

That was the moment I knew that Müller was the type of writer who is laying these seemingly random details not to obfuscate, but as breadcrumbs. I knew I could trust that every detail she’d share, no matter how dizzying, would be carefully chosen and that I could trust her to bring them back around for me if only I paid close enough attention.

I was hooked and invested and I didn’t want to leave the world of the book.

Rich Characters

Then I realized that a few pages earlier, as the narrator had dipped very briefly into a memory of her father-in-law while describing the first minutes of an interrogation with Albu, Müller was also carefully setting something up. “The Perfumed Commissar” will come back later and every time we see either Albu or her father-in-law, we will think of the other. There is a relationship between the way the narrator sees the two men that enriches our understanding of each of them as individuals. When we later learn the back story of her father-in-law, it makes Albu seem even more sinister.

Müller does something similar with Lilli, the narrator’s best friend, by setting up a comparison between Lilli’s seduction of her stepfather and the narrator’s witness of her father’s adultery. These comparisons charge the text with extra meaning and they also provide contrasts to highlight where characters diverge. The narrator does have deep feelings about her father and about sex and I feared that she would mimic Lilli. What she does instead (which I won’t spoil for you here) becomes even more poignant in comparison.

Creating Order and Meaning in the World

I recently had a fantastic conversation with my husband where he told me he can see how I like to take bits of the world and digest them down into something I can understand. This distillation for me is how I create and understand order in my world. It’s how I create meaning. As a writer, drafts are my method of pruning information until I find and understand the truth hidden beneath.

One of the reasons I love writers like Müller is that I feel her process is similar. Although she drops thousands of images of daily life in Communist Romania throughout this book, and each adds to a greater feeling of life at that time in that place, I feel like the book itself is a distillation of the feeling of charged stasis.

I am glad I finished the book this morning. I am even more glad that I have the opportunity to re-open it here for you and to share with you what I love about this book and what that teaches me about myself, about writing, and about life. Next week I’ll bite off another chunk, probably Stephen Dunn’s fantastic essays on poetry in Walking Light. In the meantime, I’d love to hear more about how you process the world and about what you’re reading in the comments below.

If you can see the beauty of being trapped on a tram for the length of an entire book, pick up a copy of The Appointment from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

How Denise Levertov’s Poems 1972-1982 Made Me Stop Judging Myself

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denise levertov poems 1972-1982There are many ways I will fall in love with a book. Mysteries like Fletch wrap me up in their comforting blanket of action. Mind-bending fiction like The Trial make me question the world around me and help me learn to see. And then some books unlock the tumblers in my brain and make me want to write. Poems 1972-1982 by Denise Levertovis one of the latter. This book hit me at just the right time and it’s the first thing in a long while that made me put pen to paper on my own behalf.

The Wrong Poetry at the Wrong Time

The book of poetry I read just before Poems 1972-1982, Transfer by Naomi Shihab-Nye did not make me write. Recommended by a friend, I enjoyed some of Shihab-Nye’s language. I even related to the way she looked at the world, but her work was almost too close to me. As I read her poems, I kept wanting to edit them, to give them that last gloss that would make them mine. And as I read about her grief, I wanted it to be more resolved. That’s not to say that I’m a better poet than she–I’m a complete amateur in comparison–but I couldn’t distance myself enough from her work to let it exist on its own. It was almost like that unhealthy relationship you get into with a friend or loved one–the one where you know they could be perfect if they were just a little more like you.

It’s possible that Shihab-Nye’s work would be perfect for me at a later date when I’m more secure in my own writing, but I was not able to enjoy the work the way I hoped I would.

The Rules of Poetry

Levertov, on the other hand, grabbed me immediately. I’ve recently finished reading The Body Electric: 25 Years of America’s Best Poetry from the American Poetry Review to gain a better understanding of poetry, especially what I like, what I don’t, and what I might like to imitate. I annotated the book heavily with little rules about what makes a poem “good” in my eyes. I don’t like poems composed mostly of full sentences. I like language that isn’t too highfaluting. I like poems that are aware of themselves as poems.

In Denise Levertov: Poems 1972-1982, Levertov breaks every single one of those rules and shows me just how silly I was being. In the first poem of the collection, “From a Plane,” she uses the phrase “alluvial silvers” and I wanted to react and say that there’s a simpler word, but it was perfect. It was the perfect word for me. I had created some system for an imagined poetry I would someday write that negated all the things I like about me, and here is Levertov just doing what she’s doing and blowing my mind along the way.

Fanaticism for Beginners

Of course rules are something that many beginners cling to and proselytize–alcoholics, religious converts, and writers alike–but I’m excited to get beyond that “judging myself and others” phase and into the “judging my work for its own effect” phase. I’ll be a little patient for now because poetry is in many ways new for me. I haven’t devoted real time to writing poetry since high school and am still trying to shake some of those teacher-imparted rules (start your line with an active word and be sure to capitalize it) out of my head.

Imitation as Flattery

Levertov gave me a good start to writing my own poems in “Metamorphic Journal.” She writes:

Let me say
it is I who am a river.
Someone is walking along
the shore of me.

And that phrase, “I who am a river” struck me and stuck with me in my twilight sleep. The metaphor and how she develops it in the following lines wouldn’t let me go. Although it was far too late at night, I found a pen and wrote the words, “I who am an ocean” and several lines to follow. My poem–even in its raw state–is and is not like hers, but we are separate enough and close enough that I can see parts of who I might be in her without trying to make her me.

For some lovely synchronicity on this, read Levertov’s “Writing in the Dark” halfway down the page here.

Retreating to Write

I’m going on my first writing retreat in a couple of weeks. I swore to myself that I’d use that time to finally piece together the first draft of my next novel. But poetry is calling me and I have a project that I might be feeling brave enough to finally make some progress on. In this moment, in my writing chair where I’ve spent most of the morning looking for answers in my phone, the idea of delving into any kind of writing for myself seems pretty delicious. Maybe I’ll curl up with the rest of Poems 1972-1982 to get a head start.

Will you be celebrating National Poetry Month in April? Please share your plans–reading, writing, or avoiding–in the comments.

If you want to see if Levertov is the right poet for you, pick up a copy of Poems 1972-1982 from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.