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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

Bringing Light to Characters in In Darkness

July 19, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

Writing rich characters can be difficult. I’ve been told I should take a stereotype then add something unexpected—as though two dimensions plus one quirk equals a round character. But humanity is more than two layers deep and your audience can tell the difference. Agnieszka Holland’s film In Darkness, written by David Shamoon, displays some of the richest characters I’ve seen in a while.

I will admit to Holocaust fatigue and I was leery of this film for that reason. I’ve been reading various memoirs and histories of the horrors for over two decades. While there is no end to the human suffering that the Nazis inflicted, there is a limit to the nuance I can absorb from these stories. It was daring to try and tell a new story. But the movie succeeded.

I don’t normally review movies (though I might start doing more) but this one is related to TWO books: In the Sewers of Lvov by Robert Marshall and The Girl in the Green Sweater: A Life in Holocaust’s Shadow Krystyna Chiger.

Our Hero

The protagonist, Pan Socha, is a Polish sewer worker during WWII who makes extra money on the side by looting the homes of recently relocated Jews in Lvov. When he hears some Jews trying to escape the ghetto by breaking into the sewer, he could make the obvious choice—the one that is “in character,” but his character is richer than that. Throughout the movie he continues to wrestle between his selfish motivations (greed, not getting shot by Nazis) and his need to do the human thing and help save those lives.

Socha continues to wrestle with his base greed throughout the film, but he also displays growth. There is a moment where he defends Jews as a people (a very dangerous thing to do) while lecturing his friend in a public place. At another time, he steps from the shadows to save the life of a Jew who had given him nothing but trouble.

Socha made Spielberg’s Oskar Schindler look two dimensional. Yes, there is the moment at the end when Schindler cries because he could have saved more Jews, but it felt like a tacked on emotion rather than a breakdown. Socha evolves and grows throughout the film, and though he is imperfect, I loved him for it.

Other characters

Socha’s wife has a central conflict that is very simple, but the way it manifests is beautiful and rich. She initially teaches her husband that Jews are just like everyone else and gives him a lesson on religion to prove it. But when she finds out he is helping Jews, she is livid. You can see her wrestling between her humanity and her need to preserve her family. She does this over and over throughout the film.

Klara Keller also has conflicting desires—she is trying to keep alive the sister she never really liked. Yanek is forced to choose between his wife and his lover and even then can’t find peace. In fact, every character in this film seems torn which befits a movie about such a turbulent time.

Perhaps that’s where some Holocaust portrayals fail—they turn into tales of good and evil. Holland and Shamoon forced me to examine the good and evil within myself. Perhaps the best reason to create robust, lifelike characters is to encourage your readers to examine that complexity within themselves.

Note: I completely failed to credit the writer in the original post. This has been revised to reflect the exemplary work of David Shamoon.

If this review made you want to watch the movie, pick up a copy of In Darkness from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Filed Under: Eastern Europe, Film, Other Media Tagged With: characterization, Holocaust, Poland, round characters, World War II

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting: Variations on a Form

July 11, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

book of laughter and forgetting - milan kunderaMilan Kundera discusses variations in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting: “Variation form is the form in which concentration is brought to its maximum; it enables the composer to speak only of essentials, to go straight to the core of the matter.” He goes on to write, “This book is a novel in the form of variations. The various parts follow each other like the various stages of a voyage leading into the interior of a theme, the interior of a thought.” The form he chooses to use for this book, the form of variations, provides the majority of the structure for the novel.

Without acknowledging this structure, the sections of the book are only loosely related through theme or geography. Mirek is a Czech writer who in visiting a former lover leaves his political writings and letters at home exposed and vulnerable to seizure by the secret police. Marketa and Karel are being visited by their lover, Eva, and Karel’s forgetful mother, Mama. Mama helps Karel remember a childhood attraction to his mother’s friend, a woman who reminds him of Eva, and this one clear memory reconciles him with his mother. Two American girls discover the power of laughter in a small French town. The narrator recounts a story of clandestinely writing a column and his musings on circles (having stepped outside and being unable to rejoin). Then there is Tamina, who is by Kundera’s admission, the focus of the novel. She fled Prague with her husband who died tragically soon after. She longs to have the letters and journals she left behind to relive their life together. She allows Hugo to have sex with her, but he never retrieves the letters. Kristyna is an older woman from a small town who has an unconsummated affair with a student poet. Tamina is spirited away by a man who asks her to “forget your forgetting” and then she travels over water to a place where children molest her and she cannot swim home. Jan goes to a beach house where everyone has sex with everyone.

Themes emerge, laughter and forgetting of course, but also litost, dangerous papers, meaningless sex. The characters sometimes show up again, but never outside of their original context. Their lives never physically overlap with anyone from other sections. What do recur are variations on themes. Papers are lost and it turns out the value wasn’t contained in the papers themselves, but in the writer’s memory. Characters grow close through their connections and shared experiences, not through sex. Sex is itself meaningless or sometimes a violation. Some steps, whether leaving your country or giving up on life, cannot be retraced (the circle cannot be re-entered).

To be honest, the book was a bit over my head, and I struggled to see the connections between the sections. I did enjoy, though, the way it made me look at the themes more closely. Because the characters were not related to each other and did not recur outside of their own contexts, my attention was directed to the elements that recurred and I started to make meaning from those connections. I don’t think I would go this far in my own work, I am still married to a more traditional narrative, but I can see how Kundera allowed me as a reader to use the natural human tendency to seek meaning to engage me in this work. I am interested in seeing whether themes can take on the same importance without removing as much of the connection between the characters and the reader as Kundera has.

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

Filed Under: Books, Eastern Europe Tagged With: Czech Literature, fractured narrative, Repetition, Variations

The Intimate Lives of Munro’s Girls and Women

July 9, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

lives of girls and women - alice munroIn Lives of Girls and Women, Alice Munro exposes the reader to the inner world of her first-person narrator, Della Jordan. The psychic distance throughout the book is always close, as I would expect in a first person narrative. However, Munro makes use of a full range of narrative distance from distant:  “[t]he snowbanks along the main street got to be so high that an archway was cut in one of them” to close: “the thought of him stayed in my mind like a circus net spread underneath whatever I had to think about at the moment.” When Munro presents scenes of Della’s burgeoning sexuality, she uses the combination of the close psychic distance and a close narrative distance to explore the fullness of Della’s contradictory feelings.

As Della begins to fantasize about Mr. Chamberlain, we are treated to thoughts like: “Mr. Chamberlain’s voice in my mind…acted on me like the touch of rayon silk on my skin, surrounded me, made me feel endangered and desired.” The reader falls in with Della and is treated to her most intimate thoughts as she first begins to see herself as a sexual creature. I felt her naïveté as she mulls over the implications of the conversation she has just heard:  “[t]hey mature earlier in those hot climates…A man paid you to let him do it. What did he say?  Did he take your clothes off or did he expect you to do that yourself?” The questions she is asking herself reveal the shallowness of her experience, but her observations about Mr. Chamberlain imply how willing she is to explore this new, forbidden realm farther.

“His face contained for me all possibilities of fierceness and sweetness, pride and submissiveness, violence, self-containment. I never saw more in it than I had when I saw it first, because I saw everything then. The whole thing in him that I was going to love, and never catch or explain.” -Alice Munro, The Lives of Girls and Women

Della begins to fantasize about being seduced by Mr. Chamberlain, but “[t]he moment of being seen naked could not be solidified, it was a stab of light….in the corner of my daydream he was featureless but powerful, humming away electrically like a blue fluorescent light.” Because I am deep inside Della’s thoughts, I am privy to the innocence of her inability to fully imagine the scene and also to the lustiness and force of her emotions. Although Della’s hormones are coursing through her like mad, she has no concrete experience on which to base her fantasies. If Munro did not place the reader so deep in Della’s mind, it would be difficult to convey the same complexity of Della’s childlike lasciviousness. She could be a Lolita through Humbert’s eyes or a victim, but not as fully both.

I was involved with Della as she read through Fern’s papers and finds the bawdy poetry. I understand Della’s relationship with the word “fuck, which I had never been able to look at….I had never been able to contemplate before its thrust of brutality, hypnotic swagger.” Della is taking a word that she has seen and for the first time is really starting to understand. Mr. Chamberlain has already groped her and she has willingly gotten in the car with him and the word sits out there as a possibility rather than a profanity. Della is on the cusp of asserting her sexuality.

I enjoyed being so intimate with Della. I think more so because this came so late in the book. She was already a friend and I understood her to a certain extent. I felt like I was willing to grow with her through her contradictory emotions. At some points I felt like Munro was pulling thoughts out of my own adolescent head and I think that is due to the tortured duality of the thoughts. As people, especially as adolescents, we experience uncertainty. When Mr. Chamberlain finally exposes himself to Della, her observation that his penis is “[n]ot at all like marble David’s” says everything. The parts of the fantasy she couldn’t quite imagine are right there in front of her and she could (would) never have imagined them in that way.

My narrator in Polska, 1994, Magda, is of a similar age and sexual experience level as Della. As I think back on this book, I realize how much I learned from the realism of the contradictions in Della’s thoughts. And the stark contrast between the fantasy of sexuality and the reality made the reality of Mr. Chamberlain even more grotesque than a grown man molesting a teenager would stereotypically be. At the same time, the naturalness with which Della faces her sexual desires portends the healthy sexual relationship she will have with Garnet. She is not victimized by Mr. Chamberlain, he is simply one step on her path toward sexual awakening.

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

Filed Under: Books, USA & Canada Tagged With: Canadian Literature, first person, Murmurs of the River, sexuality

The Diaspora According to Mukherjee’s Darkness

July 5, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

Darkness - Bharati MukherjeeIn a rapidly globalizing world, we are all moving away from our ancestral homelands. As an American, I have too many ancestral homelands to even choose between them, which I think means I cannon truly understand what a homeland is. Bharati Mukherjee captures beautifully the feeling of displacement in her story collection, Darkness.

For at least the last century it has been possible and not uncommon to uproot oneself and seek a better fortune and life elsewhere on the globe. People from different cultures have migrated at different times and for different reasons. Sometimes they take their family or neighbors with them and parts of their ancestral culture as well. Sometimes they are forced to give it up in the name of assimilation.

Mukherjee’s characters hail from what used to be the British colony of India—from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India. They are Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh. What they have in common is that they are far from home. This is never more evident than in “The World According to Hsü.”

In the story, a half-Indian, half-Czech Canadian woman (Ratna) and her Canadian husband vacation on an island off of Africa that finds itself in the midst of a civil war. In that chaos and among people of many nationalities, Ratna is for the first time at ease.

“She poured herself another glass, feeling for the moment at home in that collection of Indians and Europeans babbling in English and remembered dialects. No matter where she lived, she would never feel so at home again.” –Bharati Mukherjee, “The World According to Hsü”

When I reviewed The White Mary, I wrote about how I was once a traveler. Having lived on three continents, I wonder sometimes where home is and what it means.

“The traveler feels at home everywhere, because she is never at home anywhere.” –Bharati Mukherjee, “The Lady from Lucknow”

It was very important to me to make a home in Seattle with the man who became my husband. I wonder sometimes if we would have been freer to make adventures and live life if I had a stronger sense of a homeland—someplace I could have returned to. Like Ratna, I have more trust in the chaos of the world than in a homeland that has shifted beneath me. And I am finding that home is what I make of it rather than something I can rely on.

As people travel farther and more frequently away from their ancestral homelands, I wonder what is lost. I am not sorry for the many experiences abroad that have made me who I am. There are parts of my soul that are deeply Chilean and Polish—even though those countries as I knew them no longer exist. But I do sometimes wish there was one place on the globe that I could always return to. Someplace I could call home.

Perhaps that is why I have always found comfort in this quote:

“One never reaches home….But where paths that have an affinity for each other intersect, the whole world looks like home, for a time.” –Hermann Hesse, Demian

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

Filed Under: Africa, Books Tagged With: Displacement

First Impressions Matter in Atwood’s The Robber Bride

July 1, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

the robber bride - margaret atwoodMargaret Atwood writes in the first chapter of The Robber Bride, “Where to start is the problem because nothing begins where it begins and nothing’s over when it’s over, and everything needs a preface” but she knows exactly where to begin. She begins by creating a world in which the reader could not possibly like Zenia and she does it while the actual character remains almost entirely offscreen.

“The sun moves into Scorpio, Tony has lunch at the Toxique with her two friends Roz and Charis, a slight breeze blows in over Lake Ontario, and Zenia returns from the dead.” –Margaret Atwood

When Zenia she first appears, we know only that she is supposed to be dead and that people are glad. We have met her through the Tony’s memories and Tony’s reaction to her appearance. Zenia does not interact with any of the main characters at that time.
Atwood switches the focus to Charis and then Roz and we come to know and love them and to see their hatred of Zenia, but we still haven’t met her. I sympathize with Tony and Charis and Roz and I believe in their interpretation of Zenia because I have come to know them as full, round characters. I know from them and from their friends their virtues and their faults. The only character who has only faults in Zenia.

What I love about this book so far is that Margaret Atwood is too smart to have Zenia be merely a flat, despicable villain. She has to have a backstory. But at this point Zenia could be the nicest person in the world and she would still have difficulty convincing me of it because I have made friends with Tony, Charis, and Roz, and she is the enemy of my friends. I cannot wait to see how Atwood changes my mind about Zenia.

Introducing a character through rumor is something Fitzgerald did well in The Great Gatsby. I had all kinds of preconceived notions about Gatsby before I ever met him and I loved seeing where the truth of reading proved and disproved them. Though I can see what Atwood is doing, I am loving the process of being manipulated and I am so excited to find out what she does next.

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

Filed Under: Books, USA & Canada Tagged With: Canadian Literature, round characters, Withholding

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Polska, 1994

Polska 1994

Clear Out the Static in Your Attic

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Recent Posts

  • Silence and Speaking Up in Aflame and The Empusium
  • Small Things Like These, Getting to Yes, and Seeing “Now” Clearly
  • Reading for Change in the New World
  • Seeking Myself in Dorfman’s The Suicide Museum
  • Satisfying a Craving for Craft with Warlight and The Reluctant Fundamentalist

What I’m Reading

Isla's bookshelf: currently-reading

Birds of America
Birds of America
by Lorrie Moore
The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc.
The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc.
by Jonathan Lethem
The Souls of Black Folk
The Souls of Black Folk
by W.E.B. Du Bois
Bomb: The Author Interviews
Bomb: The Author Interviews
by BOMB Magazine
On Writing
On Writing
by Jorge Luis Borges

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