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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

The Story of Steffie Cvek’s Patchwork Life in Lend Me Your Character

June 10, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

I picked up Dubravka Ugrešić’s Lend Me Your Character to work my way through the lingering jet lag from our trip to Croatia and to soak up a little more information about the human side of the Bosnian War, but sometimes you get what you need not what you ask for. Because most of the stories in the book dated from the 1980s, I got to read about pre-war Yugoslavia—something I had been craving when reading Saša Stanišić and Ismet Prcic. Though constrained by the Iron Curtain, Steffie’s life is remarkably and enjoyably ordinary.

Ugrešić has always challenged my expectations as a reader. In The Ministry of Pain, she shocked my sensibilities and created a direct pipeline to what it must feel like to be without a country and a language. In The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, she pieced unrelated fragments together to convey the experience of a fractured life. The initial novella in Lend Me Your Character is similar in construction to The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, but the tone is delightfully different.

Ugrešić calls “Steffie Cvek in the Jaws of Life” a patchwork, and that’s just what it is, figuratively and literally. Using fragments from Madame Bovary, advice from women’s magazines, and sewing instructions, Ugrešić creates the story of Steffie’s misadventures in love and life. Though Steffie is depressed, the narrative is playful enough that I was optimistic for Steffie. But it isn’t just the tone that I loved. Ugrešić manages to make feel like a collaborator not just a reader. As we stitch together the narrative, she tells me about the choices she is faced with, how she makes them, and the options she discards (including an entire section on what she could have written for one of Steffie’s love affairs). The casual, inside view of a story could feel haphazard if it wasn’t so masterfully handled.

I don’t know what’s next in this book, but I am looking forward to seeing how Ugrešić will challenge me. I do know that I have a lot to learn from her about successfully fracturing a narrative—something I look forward to using in my next book.

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

Filed Under: Books, Eastern Europe Tagged With: book review, Croatian literature, Dubravka Ugrešić, fractured narrative, ismet prcic, Lend Me Your Character, Saša Stanišić, Steffie Cvek in the Jaws of Life, The Ministry of Pain, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender

Kira Salak and Adventures in Travel (Writing) with The White Mary

June 10, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

the white mary - kira salakI read The White Mary by Kira Salak on a flight from Seattle to Paris at the start of my first trip abroad in four years. The story of a journalist on a quest for her idol who the world thinks is dead but she thinks might be alive in the deep jungles of Papua New Guinea seemed like an auspicious start to my own (much tamer) adventure: a family trip to Croatia.

I used to be a citizen of the world. I’ve visited twenty-four countries, lived on three continents, and can converse in five languages. Except that most of that was before I graduated high school. Though I have done a lot since then to become the person I want to be, I have neglected my wanderlust and let my language skills fester. I had become someone who only travels in the company of a tour director and I became afraid to step outside that bubble.

Contemplating the rigors of travel with a coffee in the ruins of Roman Emperor Diocletian's palace
Contemplating the rigors of travel with a coffee in the ruins of Roman Emperor Diocletian’s palace

In contrast, Kira Salak is a travel writer by training and it’s evident in her lush descriptions of foreign people and places. Her protagonist, Marika Vecera, is determined, culturally aware (mostly), and savvy. Things I used to believe about myself. As I read about Marika’s kidnapping in the Congo, I was worrying I wouldn’t be able to communicate well enough to order breakfast. When she was coordinating her trip to the deep interior of Papua New Guinea, I was trying to figure out if I was capable of getting bus tickets from Dubrovnik to Split. I realized how fearful I had become.

The White Mary is engaging overall and I liked reading it. The love story is a little empty—it feels like Salak was as uninvested in it as Vecera was—but I am glad I read this book and even more glad that I passed it along to a fellow traveler.

Croatia, though a fantastic trip, turned out to be much more mundane than the wilds of the South Pacific. I managed to communicate in very basic Serbo-Croatian, German and Slovenian, though most people spoke English. We were never more lost than a missed freeway exit, and I even got to take a train. I was mistaken for a local (my favorite!) once and very briefly.  I don’t think I’ll become a travel writer in the near future (unless…), but at least I now remember that the world is full of people, not scary monsters, and I can navigate the globe if I only try.

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

Filed Under: Books, South Pacific Tagged With: book review, Croatia, Fear, Kira Salak, Papua New Guinea, The White Mary, Travel Writing

Dubravka Ugrešić: The Language of a Refugee in The Ministry of Pain

June 8, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

the ministry of pain - dubravka ugresicWe’re coming back from Croatia today, so here, at long last, is a post on Ugrešić.

In an interview with James Marcus, Dubravka Ugrešić said The Ministry of Pain “is all about language.” Ugrešić uses language as a metonym for culture to express the complexity of Tanja Lucić’s identity in terms of her relationship with her homeland, Yugoslavia, and her language, Serbo-Croatian, “a subject that officially no longer existed.”

Tanja is a well-educated and hyper-articulate professor of Serbo-Croatian living in self-imposed exile in Amsterdam. She has difficulty processing who she is in the aftermath of the Yugoslav Wars, and because she is a professor of language and literature, she is able to articulate her experience best in the context of her language. Tanja experiences a kind of “linguistic schizophrenia” where “[t]here were times I felt like a student of Croatian as a foreign language” and she experiences her “native language as alien.” She is trapped in a no-man’s land between her native language, Serbo-Croatian, and the newly defined Croatian, unable to express herself fully in either. Language, which is the comfort of any writer or student of literature, has become her torment, and because this is a first person narrative, the reader is painfully aware of Tanja’s inability to define herself.

Tanja has lived in Berlin and Amsterdam and her husband is in Japan, but all of these places are temporary. She knows that because she cannot return permanently to Zagreb, she has no home anymore. Her identity belongs to a country, and a language, that has been divided like a schizophrenic mind. This foreignness of Tanja’s own language mimics the feelings she is having as a displaced person—a refugee. Because she comes from a country that no longer exists, she is unmoored and must create a new cultural identity for herself. “I sometimes feel that here, surrounded by Dutch and communicating in English, I am learning my native language from scratch.” She must also create her identity from scratch away from a home that was irrevocably changed.

Even in her dreams Tanja is best expressing her feelings through the metonym of language. She dreams of “a native language that had turned into three languages like a dragon with a forked tongue.” The dragon is a menacing figure and the image is of dividing something that was once one whole into parts that can whip and lash and hurt. The image evokes language emerging along with a dragon’s fiery breath. In another passage she recounts a dream where “I speak an unchecked, uncontrollable language, a language with a false bottom, whose words leap out like a jack-in-the-box and thumb their nose at me.” This captures her tenuousness as she finally begins to learn Dutch and integrate herself with her host country at the end of the book. Language can drop out from under her at any time. Words, formerly her intimate friends, can now jump out and mock her. Tanja is completely exposed in the area she was once most comfortable—language.

Language fails Tanja as returns to what remains of her native country for a short visit. The street names have changed in Zagreb and she can no longer navigate what used to be home. Of getting lost in familiar streets, she writes: “[t]he refugee trauma, the equivalent of the sudden disappearance of the mother from a child’s field of vision, had surfaced where I’d least expected: ‘at home.’” Tanja is stripped of all that is familiar to her. She has left behind her home and her language, but when she returns home—to the place that should bring the comfort of a mother’s arms—she finds it changed and is slapped in the face with how unmoored she truly is. When she discusses it with a man on the plane back to Amsterdam, the experience really comes alive:

“You had every reason to get lost….So many street names have changed”

“But the streets are the same.”

“Not if they have new names”

The renaming of the streets makes the change real. It is the act of naming, the words, that define the new Zagreb. The old names are being erased and covered up with new names just as Tanja’s history is being erased.

Language is explicitly political in The Ministry of Pain: “[a] language is a dialect backed by an army.” Tanja tries to broker a peace between the Croatian, Serbian, and Bosnian in her classroom by focusing on the similarities of the Yugoslav peoples in the same way she has “no interest in dividing [Croatian, Serbian, and Bosnian] up by the fifty or so words that distinguished them.” Though Tanja perceives the differences in her students, the “Zagreb way of talking,” she unites them with reminiscences about their childhoods in Yugoslavia and reminds her students of their commonalities. Tanja is returning her students in memory to the “happier” times when their ethnic factions had a common enemy. Though she cannot return to Yugoslavia, she can create a proxy in her classroom.

Tanja projects her own torment over language onto her students. Some of the students are integrating with their host country as their language is “being taken over by a half-baked English and, more recently, half-baked Dutch.” Nevena is “‘more comfortable in Dutch,’” “as if Dutch were a sleeping bag.” Shell-shocked out of their mother tongues, “[l]anguage was our common trauma” “my students had an easier time saying what they had to say in languages not their own.” This connotes Tanja’s concern that her students have lost their cultural identity, and the cultural identity she would like to ascribe to them and have them identify with along with her is Yugoslav.

Initially, Tanja asks her students to write in English because “using ‘our language’ would lead them to adopt a confessional mode.” She is afraid that if she allowed her students to use Serbo-Croatian, they would relinquish control of their emotions. What she finds is that “writing in a foreign language had provided an excuse for being dry and brief.” The students use the opportunity of writing in English to separate themselves further from their experiences and efface the vehemence of emotion associated with their linguistic differences. Later, Igor tells her that the students were trying to please her and that she never fully grasped what they needed. They were acting out her denial.

Tanja presents herself as a Yugoslav in exile, but her compatriots are acknowledging the division and therefore destruction of Yugoslavia and are finding new identities and new languages. Tanja laments the students’ loss of their culture. Even when implying that the survivors of the Balkan Wars will move forward, she forecasts a hollowness in their futures: “[t]hey will be linguistically gifted, speaking several languages and creating a Eurospeak of their own, peppering it with personal coinages.” Eurospeak is at once all languages and none. It has no homeland associated with it and what Tanja longs for most is a homeland. Ironically, Serbo-Croatian was itself a melding of languages, but Eurospeak belongs to the identity “European,” and in her heart, Tanja is Yugoslavian.

Violence is inherent in the imagery of Serbo-Croatian: “‘in other languages children sleep the sleep of the just and in mine they sleep the sleep of the butchered.’” Boban reminds the class of the inherent danger of speaking his mother tongue as he tells of his dream of being lost in Zagreb “‘afraid to ask for directions, because people would hear that he was from Belgrade.’” The reader wonders if in acknowledging this, the students feel the violence in themselves and between their cultures is inevitable. At the end of the book, Tanja muses: “I keep wondering whether a language thus maimed, a language that has never learned to depict reality, complex as the inner experience of that reality may be, is capable of doing anything at all, telling stories, for instance.” How does one rebuild a life in the ashes of a pogrom?

This violence manifests in the end, when Igor, a former student, ties Tanja up and holds her captive. He lectures her on the part language plays in culture and forces her to confront the alienation she is experiencing:

“[y]our course was about a culture that totally compromised itself, and you neglected to mention that fact….when you lectured on Andrić, you neglected to mention that the current cohort of culture butchers have chopped him in three….when you lectured on literary history, you neglected to mention that the Sarajevo University Library was bombed out of existence.”

Igor has forced Tanja back into seeing how her beloved language and literature are inseparable parts of the culture for which she has been pining. After he leaves her, she reminds herself that “there is only humiliation and the pain of endless memory.” She can no longer hide within her metonym, and she now has to live through the entirety of her loss. From the ashes of her cultural identity, she finally begins to build anew.

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

Filed Under: Books, Eastern Europe Tagged With: book review, Croatian literature, Dubravka Ugrešić, Eurospeak, Language, metonym, The Ministry of Pain

The Bare Suffering of Elie Wiesel in Night

June 7, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

night - elie wieselIn Night, a memoir by Elie Wiesel, the author describes the horror of his experience during the Holocaust with only the scantest details. The scant use of adjectives allows the reader to fill in their own worst fears and makes the story more poignant than shocking in its horror.

Wiesel grew up in an isolated part of Transylvania where the Jewish population was deported relatively late in the war. It wasn’t until 1944 that he and his family were removed to Auschwitz. But earlier in the war, there were indicators of the horrors to come, such as when one of the deported foreign Jews returned to Sighet and told Wiesel about what had happened to the rest of the deportees, “The Jews were ordered to get off [of the trains] and onto waiting trucks. The trucks headed to a forest….Without passion or haste, [the Germans] shot their prisoners….Infants were tossed into the air and used as targets.” The events themselves are revolting, but that revulsion stems entirely from the action. The passage (including the omitted portion) contains only two adjectives: waiting (re: trucks) and huge (re: trenches). Wiesel is letting the events speak for themselves.

The description is similarly stark when Wiesel and his fellow travelers are unloaded at Auschwitz:

An SS came toward us wielding a club. He commanded:

“Men to the left! Women to the right!”

Eight words spoken quietly, indifferently, without emotion. Eight simple, short words. Yet that was the moment when I left my mother….I didn’t know this was the moment in time and the place where I was leaving my mother and [sister] forever.

He is remarking on the emotionlessness of the officer’s speech, and yet his own description here is emotionless. The emotion lies in the event itself—in the loss of his mother. He could have engaged in histrionics and described the horror of the loss, but somehow the flatness of the delivery and the lack of adjectives is more poignant than any full description could have been.

There are moments in the book where Wiesel elaborates on the description, but they tend to set scenes at the beginning of a section. For example, the chapter on his march out of the camp starts with these words: “An icy wind was blowing violently.” But the weight of the emotion in this chapter is not in the adjectives. This is how he describes the march: “The idea of dying, of ceasing to be, began to fascinate me. To no longer exist. To no longer feel the excruciating pain of my foot.” The one adjective, “excruciating” takes on so much weight because it rests alone in the passage. I was left with the feeling that while he fails to mention the degree of pain elsewhere, this pain must truly be awful to be described at all.

Often when people experience trauma, there is a deadness to the experience afterwards and Wiesel’s spare use of adjectives reflects that experience. But he is trusting a sympathetic reader to interject their own feelings into the narrative. There is no room for ambiguity here. Babies used for target practice, being separated from your mother, running toward your death—Wiesel doesn’t have to convince the reader that these things are horrible. The story speaks for itself without heavy description. Although this is a work in translation, it seems unlikely that Wiesel’s wife (the translator) would have taken the initiative to remove his adjectives, so we can be relatively safe in assuming that this element of craft is attributable to Wiesel.

I am thinking about this in relation to my own novel, Polska, 1994. Magda undergoes two major moments of trauma—losing her mother and rape. She also re-lives those moments later. I think it is important that in the initial incident the detail is spare and that the events speak for themselves because these are also not ambiguous experiences. Wiesel also uses the tersest of sentences (several quoted above) and that really gives a sense of the character living in the moment and getting through it in any way he can. I have read many accounts of World War II and the Holocaust and to me this one in its spare-ness seemed among the most emotionally credible. How do you describe the indescribable?  In contrast to Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird, Night is less shocking, but more human.

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

Filed Under: Books, Eastern Europe Tagged With: Adjectives, book review, Elie Wiesel, Holocaust, Jerzy Kosinski, Murmurs of the River, Night, The Painted Bird, Trauma

Enduring Mundanity with William Trevor in After Rain

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

After Rain - William TrevorIn After Rain, William Trevor presents many stories that play with the reader’s plot expectations. Often he creates a compelling, even dangerous, scenario, but then the story unfolds to reveal that the reader was watching the magician’s assistant rather than his hands. Whether the crooks are the protagonists or the antagonists, the result is always the same: Trevor pulls the rabbit from the hat as we expected in the first place, presenting the triumph of conventionality.

In “Timothy’s Birthday,” Trevor writes of an old couple anxious for their son, Timothy, to come home and celebrate his birthday with them. The initial scene is warm and homey as Charlotte cooks and Odo prepares a fire. Timothy convinces a friend, Eddie, to go in his place and say he is ill. Charlotte is the picture of a concerned mother: “[Timothy’s] tummy played up a bit once.” Eddie makes himself at home, fixing the toilet and helping himself to gin and trinkets. The reader starts to worry for the old couple. Is Eddie going to hurt them?  How can he show such disrespect for people who have treated him so kindly?  But Eddie leaves and when Odo and Charlotte discover the missing decoration, “[t]heir own way of life was so much debris all around them, but since they were no longer in their prime that hardly mattered….Their love of each other had survived the vicissitudes.” They are beyond caring. They have endured and their life remains fundamentally unchanged.

“A Bit of Business” follows a similar pattern except this time we meet the crooks first as they rob the neighborhood while everyone is out waiting for the Pope. When we learn that Mr. Livingston is at home and elderly, the story seems to be set. Surely these youths will come upon Mr. Livingston and something dire will happen. The tension rises as Trevor cuts between the points of view of the thieves and of Mr. Livingston. “At once Mangan knew there was a bit of trouble.” They tie Mr. Livingston up and leave. So they haven’t hurt him, but still “[h]e’ll squawk his bloody guts out.” and they’ll get what’s coming to them. Surely they’ll go back to finish him off or at least they’ll get caught, but no, they pick up a couple of girls. In fact, it is the crooks who are changed by the encounter with Mr. Livingston: “[t]he lean features of Mr. Livingston were recalled by Mangan….they’d bollocksed the whole thing” and “there was nowhere left to hide from the error that had been made….Privately, each calculated how long it would be before the danger they’d left behind in the house caught up with them.” By having the thieves changed by their interaction with the normative Mr. Livingston, Trevor again creates an aura of the persistence of mundanity.

In “Widows,” Trevor set up a rivalry between sisters Catherine and Alicia with passages such as: “[i]n her girlhood she had been pretty – slender and dark….Alicia, taller, dark also, had been considered the beauty of the town.” But when Thomas Leary appeared and tried to bilk Catherine out of £226, my attention shifted to Thomas as Catherine’s antagonist. His deceit was compelling and I found myself wanting Catherine to stand up to him. Trevor kept Alicia present on the page through simple actions like “replacing forks and spoons in the cutlery container,” which built the expectation that the sisters have banded together in crisis. Alicia does back Catherine up against Thomas in conversation “‘[a]nything could have happened to the receipt….In the circumstances.’” However, when Catherine decided to pay Thomas, Alicia’s hopes were dashed and she turned on her sister: “[h]er expectation had been that in their shared state they would be as once they were….If Leary had not come that day there would have been something else.” The power struggle is once again between Catherine and Alicia. The story is not at all difficult to follow, but the shifting dynamics not only shows the complexity of the relationship between the sisters, it also conveys the sense that something would have come between Catherine and Alicia eventually. Thomas was merely a catalyst, interesting though he was, and the story remains as it ever was the rivalry between the sisters. In comparison to Thomas’s thievery, the sisterly feud seems quotidian and conventional, just where I have come to expect Trevor will leave me at the end of a story.

What was interesting to me about the structure of Trevor’s stories was how clearly they articulated a singular world view without seeming forced. He feeds the reader’s interest with some of the more seedy aspects of life, but his real interest seems to be conveying the fact that ordinary endures. I can learn from the complexity of the relationships he builds between characters such as Catherine and Alicia and Charlotte and Odo. Their encounters with the seamier side of life portray the characters’ normative lives much in the way that Gatsby was drawn through the negative space around him. There were other aspects of Trevor’s work that I can learn from as well, for example, the way he handles the letter in “A Day,” by never giving us the exact text of the letter but giving us enough information to infer it. I may in the long run look at his point of view shifts versus Mary Gaitskill’s.

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

Filed Under: Books, Western Europe Tagged With: After Rain, book review, British, Gatsby, Literature, Mary Gaitskill, William Trevor

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Polska, 1994

Polska 1994

Clear Out the Static in Your Attic

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Recent Posts

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What I’m Reading

Isla's bookshelf: currently-reading

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The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc.
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On Writing
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