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

Love in The Winter Vault with Anne Michaels

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I’ve been thinking about what I could say about The Winter Vault by that would express how much I loved it. The only way to start is with my own story. Five months ago I married the man I have loved for sixteen years and I thought marriage would be a capstone on our relationship. I didn’t realize our marriage would be the beginning of a new phase of love. Reading about Jean and Avery falling in love, I saw a closeness and intimacy that mirrored ours. I remembered what it was like to fall in love with my husband so long ago and that helped me understand the beauty and fullness of what was happening in this new phase of our relationship. I’ve heard it said that no marriage in literature can be a happy one, and Avery and Jean are confronted with a loss that divides them, but it does not divide the book and the ways they continue to relate and to love are an equally important part of the story.

Building on recurring themes of creation and simulacra in the wake of destruction, this novel created for me a sensation of deepening understanding as I encountered loud thematic echoes and subtler inferences throughout. Even tiny technical details of the transplantation of Abu Simbel, though woven into a beautiful story, reinforce these themes.

Michaels is first a poet and she re-imagines each sentence so that it is at once unique and seemingly effortless. It is a joy to read about new and familiar subjects and to follow her curious mind as she describes the genesis of wheat and the varieties of palms.

Portions of this book and the general structure recall Fugitive Pieces, which I also loved, but The Winter Vault is in most ways a very different story and perhaps one with a wider audience. This is a good book for the curious mind and for anyone who has ever loved deeply and lost. I’m not ready to part with it yet. Perhaps as I read it again I will fall even more deeply in love. If so, I’ll spare you the details.

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

Giorgio Pressburger Arrests the Reader

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In The Law of White Spaces by , one of the chapters starts with a second person address to the reader. It reads, “Don’t be shocked, dear brother, by the case I’m about to lay before you; don’t be ashamed or disgusted or scandalized, I beg you, by what you are about to learn.” The use of the second person immediately drew me in and made me feel like a part of the story.

Reader as Witness

In this chapter in White Spaces, the reader plays the character of a witness or judge rather than being an active participant in the story. The narrator refers to research the reader has done and the belief system that has created. He then goes on to juxtapose this belief system saying, “my own experience…stands in absolute contradiction to your conception of existence.” Pressburger uses this supposed contradiction as a way to justify fully explaining the narrator’s ideas and how he came by them. Because I, as the reader, am told that the beliefs assigned to me are wrong, Pressburger is bringing me into the story as I try to weigh the evidence.

Pressburger uses an interesting segue between the second person introduction of the story and the first person telling of the action of the story. He writes, “Of course I want to take a little time before telling you about me, but I also want to try and make you understand how much I was influenced by your research.” This statement is the equivalent of the hug and roll where the narrator compliments “my” ideas which endears me to him but then releases me to watch him elucidate how he has expanded on them and found his own way.

The narrator then does not refer to the reader again except in two passing references to the reader’s research and once to ask if I remembered Mrs. Polak and a conspiratorial reference, “We know, dear brother, what really lies behind feeling shy, feeling ashamed, blushing, do we not?” Each of these references keeps the reader in the position of engaged observer and reinforced the supposed relationship. The reader and narrator are supposed to share at least thirty-five years of memories.

Addressing the Reader

It is strange at the end of this chapter when the narrator again addresses the reader. He says, “You can meet me in the market where you’ll find me sweeping up the dirt, moving boxes and wooden cases around.” This made me wonder where the reader was to have encountered the narrator in the first place.

Pressburger has assumed that his reader is willing to give up their own point of view to get this second person narration to work. He also has to create a persona that is compelling enough for the reader to want to assume. When he addresses the reader as “you,” he has a specific character in mind and he is asking the reader to take on the role of that character. In my novel I haven’t yet figured out exactly who the “you” is. By setting up a fuller character for the reader to inhabit, I can assign the reader a more complex role that he or she can then choose to inhabit or not.

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

The Thorn Birds and the Vast Outback

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Colleen McCullough - The Thorn BirdsI’ve been wracking my brains for a book that I might have read or might have on my to-read to start to fill out this South Pacific category. It turns out I rarely read books from the region, which means I could leave it off, but I would be ignoring an entire continent let alone all the countries in the vicinity (if you know of a fantastic book from E. Timor, please tell me). I thought about linking Australia and New Zealand into a larger British Empire category, but I didn’t want to put India there (let alone the US and Canada). So I had to figure out what I’ve read or am interested to read from the South Pacific.

I thought first of Ngaio Marsh. My grandmother was fond of her mysteries and I “borrowed” many, many books over the years. She became one of my favorite mystery writers and I loved her New Zealand stories most of all. But, as with most mystery writers, I often cannot remember the books well enough to differentiate between them, and that makes them a bad candidate for this form.

I decided to discuss The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough, and I’m going to break one of my own rules and focus on the miniseries more than the book.

I was very young the first time I watched this miniseries with my mom and I was captivated. I thought Meggie Cleary was so beautiful (she looked a little like my mom) and Ralph de Bricassart was aloof and handsome (and may have screwed up my view of men forever). I became so obsessed with Meggie that when asked to nominate a Time Woman (or Man) of the Year for a class assignment, you can guess who I picked.

In some ways the most amazing part of the miniseries was getting to see Australia and the outback life of sheep ranchers. One of the things I love most about books is being introduced to unfamiliar worlds, but the one limitation (if you can call it that) is that any world created by the conversation between my mind and a book is limited by things I’ve seen before and what I can imagine. For example, when I was a little girl and we were moving to Chile, something about the way my father described it made me imagine we would be living someplace exactly like our house and street except upside down. When I read Islandia (the book from which I am named), the images I created of the landscapes of that imagined world all drew heavily from places I have seen in my travels. What I’m saying is, as a child in northern Idaho, I had never seen anything like the Australian Outback and The Thorn Birds introduced me to the vast flatness of the land and a sense of isolation that was entirely new. It may be the first foreign land I “travelled” to.

I did later read the book and I enjoyed it very much, but I have to admit that it is Rachel Ward and all that dusty country that I remember best.

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

Orhan Pamuk, Citizen of Letters

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I took a long time to finally pull Other Colors by  from my to-read pile. I was afraid Pamuk’s essays would be too scholarly or didactic or that they weren’t quite what I needed at the time. I was afraid of their sheer number and that I would be reading something disjointed and trying. I was afraid they wouldn’t live up to his fiction.

What I found was an uncommonly generous spirit who brought his own thoughts to the table and opened up room for mine. Each of the short essays wove together into the larger themes that obsess Pamuk and filled out my understanding and love of his novels. And the Nobel speech inspired me with his faith in the world and in community. This week Pamuk became my friend in letters. I invited him into my home for deep conversation about things that matter and afterward I felt inspired and opened. Though he will never sit in the brown leather chair in my office, his writing somehow makes me feel like the appreciation is reciprocal. And that is a gift from a gifted man.

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

Empathy in Konrad’s The Case Worker

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From the day to day routine to the understanding of the masses, evokes what it must be like to be a social worker in The Case Worker. From the very first words of the book, “Go on, I say to my client. Out of habit, because I can guess what he’s going to say, and doubt its truthfulness,” Konrád is showing how routine the case worker’s job is and how it has inured him from caring about his clients. Konrád divided the first chapter into a series of short sections describing an interaction with a client, the makeup of the office, another client, more description of the building. By interspersing the narrator’s client relationships with information about floorplans and the objects stored in filing cabinets, Konrád makes the individual clients seem like tasks the narrator has to deal with during his workday and illustrates the narrator’s lack of engagement with his clients. The sections about objects are longer than the sections about clients, too, as though the whip with three lashes stored in the file cabinet is more interesting than the clients themselves. This feeling continues at the beginning of the chapter entitled “Suicide Cases” as the narrator summarizes case study after case study in short paragraphs that run into one another. The sentences about these clients are short, declarative, and devoid of emotion, for example: “In 1951 thirteen-year-old Klara G’s father was denounced as a war criminal and hanged.”

The Bandula Family

In the same chapter Konrád devotes nearly fourteen pages to the story of the Bandula family. This longest section of the book so far (with comparatively long paragraphs that go on for a page or more) both conveys a much deeper understanding of these clients and also brings the reader’s attention to the importance of this case. These are individuals not just suicide cases. I could be more aware of where I direct the reader’s attention in my own writing.

When the case worker takes on responsibility for the orphaned child of Bandula, he begins to take on the characteristics of his clients, but Konrád shows this “metamorphosis” rather than telling the reader about it. He begins with one of the more benign conditions, a compulsion for order. In the chaos of the Bandula apartment, the case worker devotes enormous amounts of time to putting and keeping the place in order. Konrád writes, “there’s no limit to my passion for tidiness….One of my clients went mad because his wife was absent-minded and things were always changing place in the apartment….I can well understand his distaste for the wanderings of salt cellars…” This is the beginning of empathy. A few pages before the case worker was describing the child as “this abstract object.” First he empathizes with the other client, then with Bandula, and eventually with the child. What’s interesting is how Konrád blends the official mind of the case worker with this newly empathetic creature when he begins to see the similarities between his position and Bandulas: “All in all, I am forced to conclude that there is not much difference between this kind of training and what I did before….In my official capacity I made decisions in writing, now I administer beatings.”

Playing with Form

But this is no ordinary case worker. Sometimes Konrád deviates from the standard form of paragraphing. For example, when the case worker is first taken to the mental hospital, Konrád renders a two page chapter that is all one sentence but a series of paragraphs that look as though they mated with stanzas. It’s not whimsical, but it is lyrical and given that these types of sections occur at various times throughout the book, the reader can see that the case worker’s mind (because the book is told in first person) is not as rigid and conventional as he would like to believe. The pattern is to have long descriptive stanzas and then a series of one-line stanzas. This punctuates the one-line stanzas and makes them stand out as though they were very short sentences among very long ones, except that these are all a part of one whole. So lines like: “reserved for male mental cases/of this security ward” come off as emphatic. Near the beginning of the novel is a similar section where instead of stanza-like paragraphs, Konrád joins a series of paragraphs with ellipses to make one sentence and it is dreamlike although the facts themselves are mundane. I like to play with sentence length for emphasis but I had never even considered breaking outside of standard paragraph form.

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