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

Symmetrical Composition in The Unbearable Lightness of Being

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In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera presents the same scenes over and over again throughout the narrative. Like waves lapping up onto the shore, these incidents never completely overlap and the repeated introduction of the same events has the effect of giving the reader a more nuanced view of these events and the characters while reinforcing the importance of the scene. Kundera refers to something he calls “symmetrical composition–the same motif appears at the beginning and at the end” and insists “human lives are composed in precisely such a fashion.”

Tereza’s photographs of the girls in miniskirts holding flags in the faces of Russian soldiers during the autumn of 1968 are one example of this symmetrical composition. Each time the pictures recur throughout the story the reader gains a greater understanding of the development of Tereza’s character.

At first, the pictures are a triumph for Tereza: “The days she walked through the streets of Prague taking pictures of Russian soldiers and looking danger in the face were the best of her life.” The next time the photographs are mentioned begins with great promise and it casts Tereza as having been part of a movement to “preserve the face of violence for the distant future.” But the very next section dampens the excitement. A magazine editor proclaims Tereza’s pictures beautiful but no longer au courant. Then a photographer tries to give her encouragement by suggesting she shoot cacti as a vehicle for starting a career in fashion photography. The pictures become a symbol of the world’s fleeting interest in her country. For Tereza the pictures meant freedom and standing up to oppression, but for the world they were merely an illustration.

The pictures take on another meaning when Tereza returns to Prague and finds women yielding the same pride with which they had held the flags to fight for umbrella space on a crowded street. Then, while working in the restaurant, Tereza is confronted by the implications of the photographs she took as images from Time begin to be used by the secret police as evidence against fellow citizens. The pictures which had brought her so much pride have become Tereza’s contribution to the persecution of her fellow citizens. She reflects, “[H]ow naïve they had been, thinking they were risking their lives for their country when in fact they were helping the Russian police.”

The pictures also function as an objective correlative by giving the reader access to Tereza’s triumph. The pictures carry the weight of her triumph and the reader is reminded of her strength of character when she took the pictures, but the pictures have are greater flexibility than a typical objective correlative. As the pictures recur throughout the narrative, Tereza’s feelings about (and the reader’s understanding of) them become more complex. They continue to reappear (which is the symmetrical composition part) but they no longer have the same meaning.

Kundera achieves the same effect with stories of Tomas and Tereza visiting and eventually moving to the spa town and also the encounter Tomas has with his son and the editor Tomas accidentally denounced (this latter example is freshened by recounting the event from two different viewpoints). Each time these incidents are recounted or places visited the story changes enough so that the reader gains new insight into the incident and how the characters retrospectively view it. As in life.

I attempted the same effect in my novel, Polska, 1994. By bringing a scene back up, in my case the arrest, in echoes, I can refresh the reader’s memory and provide further insight into how my characters, particularly Magda, are relating to it. This re-framing speaks volumes about the evolution the characters are undergoing and helps the reader feel as though they are evolving along with the character. It is also pleasing to a reader to encounter the same images more than once in a novel. It helps create the illusion of a finite world which could be explained within the confines of a book, and when well done, it does not feel manipulative. I would argue that the changes evoked when images and events recur in this novel keep the items fresh, as repetition can become quickly stale and make the reader wonder whether there is any sense in continuing with the narrative.

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

Pynchon’s Crazy Voice in The Crying of Lot 49

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In the The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon weaves together a series of unlikely events using the voice of a compelling narrator to form the story of a postal conspiracy. From the first sentence of the novel as the narrator takes the protagonist Oedipa from Tupperware party to being the executrix of the estate of a real estate mogul, the novel is full of wild and unexpected turns. These turns might be difficult for a reader to navigate if it weren’t for the extraordinary voice of the narrator.

The voice is whimsical and often strays off topic. For example, just after Oedipa hears about her role in the Inverarity will, the narrator muses:

[s]he tried to think back to whether anything unusual had happened around then. Through the rest of the afternoon, through her trip to the market in downtown Kinneret-Among-The-Pines to buy ricotta and listen to Muzak (today she came through the bead-curtained entrance around bar 4 of the Fort Wayne Settecento Ensemble’s variorium recording of the Vivaldi Kazoo Concerto, Boyd Beaver, soloist); then through the sunned gathering of her marjoram and sweet basil from the herb garden” (10).

The reader is given all sorts of extraneous details, but because the details are so interesting and unusual and because the narration always loops back to the topic at hand (in this case, Oedipa thinking about whether anything unusual had happened), I was interested in learning more and was not lost in the narration. I was however carried away by it. The voice of the narrator was like someone telling a story who has so much detail they want to pack in but they are trying to keep in mind the forward thrust of the story. Because the novel becomes a sort of mystery, I wanted to re-read portions of the novel and see if this extraneous information was in fact pertinent or led somewhere. The voice of the narrator was interesting enough to make me think everything he said had meaning and import.

I have read breathless narrators before, the type who are trying to keep up with the pace of the story and the effect is “and then, and then, and then…”, but this narrator was in control of the story and was going to let it unfold at his pace. The effect was intoxicating. Despite the odd character names and the implausibility of the events, I was willing to follow this story through orgiastic sex scenes and nights spent following a bum just to see where on Earth he was going with the story.

It’s an interesting effect to have a narrator who is so in control of what’s happening. Control may be the wrong word, because it doesn’t seem as though he is orchestrating it. Rather it seems as though he alone knows what is going on. This novel would have been a mess with a less omniscient narrator because Oedipa has no idea what is going on. The reader would be immersed in her confusion and would have difficulty following the threads of the mystery. In fact, it is the juxtaposition of this compelling, competent narrator with Oedipa’s confusion that gives the reader the freedom to follow the narrative. It could and does go anywhere, but the coolness of the narrator gives the novel a semblance of order and perhaps even predestination. I wouldn’t go so far as to say the narrator in this novel is God, although narrators can take on a certain deific quality, but the narrator does provide order to the universe of this novel.

I did not use an omniscient narrator in Polska, 1994, but I can see from this novel how important it is for the voice that is doing the storytelling to be compelling. I considered using a cooler retrospective voice for the part of my novel where Magda is leading up to her regrets and then transitioning to in-the-moment narration for the remainder of the book. By starting with the cooler voice, I would like to keep a reader’s confusion to a minimum as she comes to understand the world the way Magda sees it. The retrospective voice would have allowed Magda to draw some conclusions about her life and her experience and to let the reader understand her life through those conclusions. I ended up going with something that was more raw and immediate—something that spoke to her post-rape turmoil.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of The Crying of Lot 49 from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Mystery in Su Tong’s Garden

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Raise the Red Lantern - Su TongSu Tong creates a world of magic and mystery in the title novella of Raise the Red Lantern. Though we are never certain if the magic is real or imagined by Lotus, it feels authentic. Su blends the real with the ethereal so gently that even the harshest skeptic can enjoy the mystical elements of the story.

Our first view of Lotus is as she is being carried into the garden of her new home. She seems plain, with her “face covered with dust and looking unbearably exhausted.” We are told that Lotus is very practical, still washing her hair in the sink where her father had committed suicide. This plainness and unflappability lead us to see her as having a cool head and so when she starts to unravel, we naturally think there is great cause. If Lotus had been hysterical from the onset, we wouldn’t trust her ability to separate reason from emotion.

The first inkling of anything remotely spiritual is Joy chanting sutras over her Buddhist rosary, but her sincerity is dismissed by Chen. Then, during the first night Lotus spends with Chen, we get the swirling of her consciousness: “Lotus seemed to fall from a high place into a dark valley where pain and dizziness were accompanied by a feeling of lightness.” Whether this is an effect brought on by the house or by Lotus’s mental state, it feels eerie and gently portends a death in a well.

The concealment of the “Well of Death” in overgrown weeds lends it an air of magic, and the butterflies and the song of the cicadas make it more so. Su increases the mystical quality of the place by linking it in Lotus’s mind with a prior experience under wisteria which “seemed like suddenly waking from a dream.” When “[s]lowly she pulled back a few branches of wisteria,” it is as though she pulls back a curtain separating the real world from a magical one. Lotus hears “the sound of her breathing being sucked down into the well and amplified” and then “[a] gust of wind rushed up,” and the well seems to have taken on life. Lotus is unnerved by the falling of flowers as she leaves it and I was also set on edge.

“Crystalline specks of brightness” on Coral’s face and her hair being covered with dew after a hard frost would otherwise seem unlikely, but Su has established that the rules of the Well of Death are unlike the rules elsewhere in the Chen family compound and by the time Coral is singing The Hanged Woman under the wisteria in a black cloak, I am prepared for anything to happen there. Descriptions like rain “splashing off the aspen and pomegranate leaves with a sound like shattering jade” should also seem improbable, but they are so lovely and we are so wound up in the text that they contribute to the mysterious ambience.

Chen provides a foil for Lotus’s suspicions about the garden. She tells him: “[t]his garden is a little spooky” and he resists her flatly: “A couple of people died in that well, that’s all; jumped in and committed suicide.” But his dismissive response only heightens the reader’s belief in the mystery. Now there is a reason that the well feels haunted and when Chen becomes serious after Lotus guesses the suicides were concubines, she has convinced him a little of the spookiness and convinced me a lot. He may think she’s imagining things, but he also doesn’t want her near the well. This is the part in the story where we realize that it doesn’t matter whether he believes in the magic or whether he mistrusts Lotus’s mental stability, and it doesn’t matter which the reader believes. Both explanations point to the same disastrous consequences for Lotus.

Lotus starts to go mad and causes Swallow’s death, and then witnesses the murder of Coral, but by then she has lost her credibility in the Chen household. If the story were told in the first person, it would be crucial for the reader to decide whether Lotus is credible or not, but the narrator is credible and the narrator leaves us with the feeling that although Lotus has gone mad, there is something bad about that place.

I have a soft spot for magical realism. I like to read about intersections between the logical world and the spiritual world and I have tried to write about them, but I find I often doubt my own worlds. Su Tong taught me from this story to set the scene well. The reader (especially an American reader) will likely have doubts about the authenticity of the magic. Any fictional world needs to set up its ground rules. Su set up his by providing me with a lot of everyday activity but then seducing me with magical images. Su used the natural resistances of the characters to mirror and then overcome the doubts of the reader. As Lotus comes to believe in the magic of the place, I wasn’t yet convinced, but when Su showed me how Lotus overcame Chen’s doubts, he also overcame some of mine. But even then he left me an out. The story worked just as well if I believed Lotus was mad.

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

Mercè Rodoreda’s Breathless Narrator in The Time of the Doves

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Merce Rodoreda The Time of the DovesThe narrative voice in Mercè Rodoreda’s novel, The Time of the Doves, wraps the reader in the dizzying world of a young woman. Through first person narration and the use of stream of consciousness, Rodoreda places the reader inside the head of Natalia as life happens to her.

Rodoreda starts sentence after sentence with “And,” even she using it as a conjunction between sentences: “[a]nd I stuck up for Quimet’s mother and said yes, she had put salt in the food. And the neighbor said if she ate food that was too salty it took her appetite away and Quimet said…”  This and the lack of commas gives Natalia’s narration a breathless feeling like she is so wrapped up in the story that she couldn’t stop talking if she tried. This hurriedness also gave me the impression that she wasn’t stopping to think about what she was saying, there was no after the fact analysis. It was an interesting effect for something narrated in the past tense. Most often writers add layers of reflection and reinterpretation to stories narrated in the past tense. The character has had years to mull over events and interject meaning. By combining the breathlessness with the past tense, Rodoreda gave me the impression that Natalia was reliving these events and there was a lot of unprocessed anxiety wrapped up in them.

Natalia is aware of the actions going on around her: “Quimet started complaining furiously about his leg;” and to a certain extent she feels how those actions impact her: “I felt like they’d emptied me out of myself and filled me with something very strange. Someone I couldn’t see kept blowing into my mouth and played at inflating me;” but she doesn’t even contemplate escaping it. Natalia needs a sympathetic audience and the reader is closer than a girlfriend to whom Natalia complains about her life, but she has no concept that she has any control over her own fate. This intimate quality means the reader is involved in Natalia’s confusion.

Natalia was so caught up in the whirlwind of her life that the war crept up on her. Her life existed outside of history or political context for most of the first half of the novel. Rodoreda drops in a reference to the king on page 71 and Natalia mentions “the rich were mad at the Republic.” It isn’t until “Cintet and Quimet never stopped talking about the street patrols and how they’d have to be soldiers again” that the war comes home for Natalia. This was a very interesting effect. Usually when I read books about wars, they are about wars, the war is heavily foreshadowed through the rest of the book and often there are battle scenes. What Rodoreda accomplished was showing how ignorant people can be about impending political strife when they are wrapped up in their lives. Natalia couldn’t meditate on ridding her house of doves, let alone how the political situation was shaping up around her.

Although I interjected my own thoughts and feelings into the novel, e.g. wondering why she didn’t know what a jerk Quimet was, so strong was the narrative voice that Rodoreda changed the way I read the book. Natalia is living without much premeditation, evidenced by sentences like: “[u]p to the moment he got undressed, you could say I’d never really taken a good look at him.” I am used to reading for clues to a character’s ultimate fate, to having some idea where the character is going. This sentence was like a smack in the face. It forced me to experience Natalia’s life as she was experiencing it because she was so unpredictable. I could worry for her, but I couldn’t anticipate her. We are so controlled by Natalia’s worldview that when “a militiaman knocked on the door and told me Quimet and Cintet had died” and she goes up to the roof “to breathe,” we don’t know if she is relieved or in shock or devastated.

I find myself slipping into the “and, and, and” mode sometimes when I am writing, but I usually go back and edit it out. This novel conveyed that sense of rawness, where the character is experiencing everything simultaneously, that I would like to experiment with, but I sometimes found it exhausting to read. I felt like I was being whipped around like Natalia was allowing herself to be and the only control I had was to put the book down. I think it is something I could use as an effect, but I wonder if I would be able to give up the control of having my characters act on their own behalves. Rodoreda’s treatment of Natalia and the war was spot on. To worry and anticipate political strife would have implied some sort of forethought and would have been completely out of character. I was truly placed inside Natalia’s world and at the mercy of her interpretation of it.

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

Jonathan Lethem and the Space of Time in The Fortress of Solitude

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In The Fortress of Solitude, Jonathan Lethem explores the world of Gowanus (aka Boerum Hill) in Brooklyn through the eyes of Dylan Ebdus as he grows from a small boy to a middle-aged man. Throughout Dylan’s life, he has a relationship with Mingus, Arthur, and Robert, kids and then men from his neighborhood. Lethem crafts Dylan as both a neighborhood insider and an outsider and uses this dual status as a means to examine his friends from up close and from afar.

In the beginning of the novel, Dylan is a young white boy in a predominantly ethnic and not yet gentrified neighborhood. He plays with all of the kids from the street and is a part of the neighborhood. This allows Dylan to remark on the way the neighborhood works from the inside. The reader learns about the declining economic fortunes of the neighborhood while Dylan and the kids on the street bounce “spaldeens” off of the abandoned house—about racial tension as Dylan is repeatedly “yoked” of his pocket change by black kids, one of whom is Robert.

When a new kid, Mingus, moves onto the block and befriends Dylan, Dylan is initiated into a new world. Mingus is black and more street smart than Dylan and this friendship helps Dylan see deeper into a world he doesn’t fully understand. He begins to understand the nature of being yoked, although he is never able to avoid it fully throughout his life. Lethem has positioned Dylan so as to have access to Mingus’s world, and by making Mingus’s father a cokehead, Lethem creates Dylan’s first conscious interaction with the world of drugs. Lethem is initiating the reader into this world at the same time.

The structure and interactions Lethem has created for Dylan’s life continue to strike this balance between insider and outsider as Dylan is the only white kid in his school and then ends up helping the new white kid, Arthur, meet Mingus which leads to Arthur becoming more a part of the neighborhood fabric than Dylan.

Then Lethem removes Dylan from the neighborhood by first making him a Fresh Air Fund kid who spends the summer in Vermont and then having him attend Stuyvesant in Manhattan. Suddenly Dylan is no longer teetering on the verge of being a part of the neighborhood; he is removed and is in the position of observer. This allows Lethem to look through Dylan at the kids from Gowanus from the outside even though he still lives there. When Dylan’s new and old worlds cross in a drug buy where Robert appears with a gun, Dylan gains a new perspective on his associates. Although his relationship with Robert was always difficult, the sight of Dylan’s date running in fear after having wet her pants forces him to see how truly scary Robert and Robert’s lifestyle are from the outside. At this point the reader is also forced to reassess the normalcy of Dylan’s life. Structurally, Lethem has been indoctrinating the reader and Dylan into the norms of Gowanus, but at this point he is splashing the reader and Dylan with cold water and forcing them to reassess all of their assumptions.

Dylan continues to separate from his friends and is accepted at a college in Vermont. While working his summer job to pay for school, he runs into Arthur again. Because the story had shifted to Dylan’s school life in Manhattan, the reader is able to view Arthur from a new distance as Dylan does: “Arthur Lomb had gained his height at last….His eyes were red and small and wrinkled like those of some fetal animal, a blind mole rate or cauled calf.” The formerly bookish Arthur who encouraged Dylan to try for Stuyvesant had become a drug fiend who could barely graduate high school and is now collecting the funds to purchase a kilo of cocaine for resale. Not only are Dylan and the reader looking at a shift that happened while Dylan was busy in Manhattan, but we are also looking at a cautionary tale and Dylan’s alter ego. The danger seems more evident and I was relieved Dylan was off to college.

Of course, Dylan is not able to brush off his past as easily as that and when he encounters Mingus, Robert, and Arthur later in life, Mingus and Robert are in prison and Arthur owns several businesses in Boerum Hill, but rather than being a successful entrepreneur, it seems like Arthur is a boy who couldn’t get away from the neighborhood, even when the neighborhood got away from him.

I like the way Jonathan Lethem started these boys out at a young age and brought them together in a time and place when they couldn’t question their fate—they were just living. As I was reading Dylan’s encounters and re-encounters with his cohort, I was thinking about my character Magda and the skaters in Polska, 1994. Magda meets up with the skaters and becomes a part of their group before she even knows what she is doing, but she has a natural in into the group—Olek. I wanted her to sort of fall into the group the way that Dylan fell in with his, although the age is different. Then she pulls away and starts dating Jacek and this is when she can gain perspective on the skaters. After Jacek, she falls into the group again but less because of Olek this time and more because she is forgetting herself. As she steps away from the group and finds herself, I she sees them in a different light as she seeks her truth and her strength. Lethem’s structure of pulling these people apart across time and space and then putting them back together allows for the reinterpretation that is so interesting.

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