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

Still Waiting for the Barbarians with Coetzee

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At times in Waiting for the Barbarians, by , I found myself wondering if the barbarians were ever actually coming and maybe that was the point. The more often the barbarians were rumored to have done evil things and threatened the outpost, the less I believed they were the real culprits. Crops get ruined and the reader knows the barbarians exist because the protagonist meets them and the crops are ruined but it is spurious to say that because the barbarians exist and the crops are ruined then therefore the barbarians must have ruined the crops (and every other little thing). By the time the narrator says, “The barbarians come out at night,” I was fully convinced that the barbarians were being used as a diversion of some sort. Of course it is difficult to separate myself from a post-Bush reading of this novel although when Coetzee writes, “I was the lie that Empire tells itself when times are easy,” I think he was getting at something else.

Stretching Time

Coetzee does a beautiful job of stretching time in the scene when the narrator is hunting the ram. He writes, “His hooves touch ice with a click, his jaw stops in mid-motion, we gaze at each other.”  Second by second I was with the magistrate as he met eyes with this ram. It was one of the moments when I was most engaged in the novel. He goes on to write, “He chews again, a single scythe of the jaws, and stops.”  Word by slow word and phrase by comma-separated phrase I was completely trapped in this moment and waiting to see what happened next. By ending the sentence with the word “stops” Coetzee both emphasizes the stop and cuts the paragraph. The sentences that follow are about the magistrate’s train of thought as he himself is “suspended in immobility” but these sentences are longer and less focused and my own train of thought started to wander. I found myself longing for that heartbeat by heartbeat pace of his description of the ram.

Practicing Concision

There are other times in this novel where Coetzee conveys a lot of information with very little language. When speaking of the barbarian girl before he decides to return her to her people he says, “I have not entered her.” The sentences that follow are more graphic but somehow they say less than this one sentence. The magistrate could “enter” her—he apparently has the power and freedom to do as he wishes. The mere fact that this sentence mentions nothing about her willingness or interest or anything really besides her existence shows the character’s complete disregard for any of that. Entering her or not is one more decision he will make in his day. At this point in the novel it is no more and no less. Except that she is the only one he seems to have not “entered.”  He is saying that she is different in that she is around and available to him and he has touched her intimately, for some unknown reason she is different.

Later Coetzee writes that the magistrate (who is now merely a prisoner) “cannot be sure that the roar (of the mob) is not simply in my eardrums.” This uncertainty on the part of the magistrate as to his own senses conveys a very different man from who he was at the beginning of the book. Coetzee goes on to write about the torment he is enduring and how he has to “keep myself from screaming, tearing my clothes, clawing my flesh” but somehow although this language is more descriptive and I would expect the first person experience of pain to be more compelling, this says less about the character than his inability to accurately gauge the world around him.

In Polska, 1994, I worked on how to convey to the reader both the nature of the teenaged character in all of her angst and also the nature of her experiences without overdoing it. I was interested in how to convey Magda’s experience and her emotions in a way that the reader can engage with and not just witness and in a way that gives some insight into her as a character perhaps beyond the insight she has in herself. With a first person narrator, it is difficult, but Coetzee did it and did it well.

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

Anne Moore’s Life on a Shelf: Roberto Bolaño’s Oddity of Tragedy

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Last Evenings on Earth - Roberto Bolano

The story “Anne Moore’s Life” by Roberto Bolaño from the collection Last Evenings on Earth, reads as unfulfillingly as I imagine Anne Moore’s life to have been. Bolaño accomplished this by rarely venturing into scene as the narrator recounts Anne Moore’s recounting of her life. Nearly the entire story is told in summary and even the scenes are rarely more than a paragraph or two. Despite what could have been adventures that ranged from Montana to Mexico, California, Washington, Spain, and back again, Anne’s life reads flat.

Storytelling from Afar

The first scene in the story is the most shocking but it remains distant. Bolaño hinted at menace behind Fred’s motives as he drove the girls around town and to his parents’ house and we see later that there was in fact danger, his parents were dead and not likely from natural causes. By throwing in phrases such as “According to what Anne told me,” the author separates the reader from the material just enough that it was difficult for me to engage with the characters. There is ample tragedy in this story as Anne flounders through relationships, prostitutes herself and disappears and her sister becomes a suicidal alcoholic, but Bolaño left me with the sense of resignation rather than desperation on the part of the characters, especially Anne. Because Anne wasn’t fighting for her own life and I didn’t know her, I wasn’t interested in fighting for her.

Bolaño writes about a similar sense of remove on Anne’s part as she overhears a conversation between Susan and Paul. “Anne remembers that there was something oddly artificial about this conversation between her lover and her sister, as if they were assessing the plot of a film, not something that had happened in real life.” As a reader, I also felt like I was watching someone assess a plot and part of it was how Bolaño’s narrator kept interrupting the story with “Anne remembers” and “says Anne.” Over and over again he pulled me out of the story and presented it to me as a tableau instead of letting me experience it.

Specific and Sexual Detail

Bolaño gives only the sparsest detail when he does go into scene, and those details are often carnal or hint at carnality. They start out as sexual: “a very bright red nightgown,” hotel walls “made of meat,” the red dress and shoes of Anne the prostitute, pornographic films where “men always ejaculated onto, rather than in, their partners,” and gradually become more medical but less descriptive: “doctors diagnosed a serious illness” and then her relapse. Bolaño wet my appetite for anything to happen with the rawness of some of the earlier descriptions and by playing down the seriousness of the illness, he left me wide open for Anne’s response to Bill’s suggestion that they have a child: “inside she could feel herself starting to scream, or rather, she could feel, and see, the dividing line between not screaming and screaming. It was like opening your eyes in a cave bigger than the Earth” the very next phrase is again the distancing “Anne remembers.”

The distance is clearly intentional on Bolaño’s part. In “Mauricio (‘The Eye’) Silva,” Bolaño again summarizes nearly the entire story. However, as a reader, I felt engaged with The Eye. I wanted to know more about him, and I cared what happened to him. Perhaps it is because The Eye is introduced more sympathetically: he “always tried to avoid violence” or because the author states “The case of The Eye is paradigmatic and exemplary.” In either case, Bolaño allowed me to relate to The Eye in a way I could not with Anne.

Is it because Anne is North American and The Eye Chilean?  I don’t know why Bolaño put Anne at such a distance from the reader, but she does come off as an oddity, someone belonging in a jar on a shelf.

Writing in Summary

Summary is a tricky business. Beginning writers are often advised to dramatize, dramatize, dramatize, but there is a place for summary in writing. It is the place of transitions, of time passing, of the narrator. Bolaño’s lack of scene makes his stories feel more like a story told in a bar or beside a fire and it makes the reader more intimate with the narrator that with the protagonists. I love to write in summary, but this collection of stories made me more cautious because my own writing isn’t as “let me tell you a story” as Bolaño’s and in comparison I could come off as didactic. However, that chum in a bar style did open my eyes to a new way of writing summary where the interaction between reader and narrator is almost as intimate as the reader interpreting a scene. I would like to cultivate some of that intimacy.

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

Imre Kertesz and the Lesson of Nonconformity in Fiasco

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fiasco - imre kertesz

I’ve been reading Fiasco by Imre Kertesz since March 20. That’s a long time considering I usually read a book in a day or less, but it may be because, in this case, reading means that the book has been sitting on my nightstand and sometimes traveling in my purse to work and back. Despite the fact that I cannot seem to get past page forty, I am thinking about this book and I am talking about it more than any other.

Delaying the Beginning

Story. Perhaps the key lies in that word. I was offended by the beginning of this book as the writer gathers himself together to not write and throat-clears his way through lengthy descriptions of furniture. We’ve all sat through the exercise where you write about not writing. I’d even considered starting my next book with something similar. But in this case, Chapter 0 goes on for over 100 pages. I checked. I will at some point endure Chapter 0 because I genuinely like Kertesz and am interested in the story I think he will eventually tell, but I am rankled by the presumption that I will wade through this opening, even as I am trying to listen to why he started where he did. I am bothered because it goes against the writing rules.

Secret Message?

I will stick with Kertesz because I think he is is pointedly refusing to conform to my expectations. Images of Soviet soldiers in lockstep make it easy to see how any work about the world behind the Iron Curtain should deal with conformity in some way. Conformity is something that’s sat in the back of our collective conscience since the Holocaust. In this book, Kertesz will ostensibly be writing about coming home from that holocaust to a totalitarian government. Maybe he is teaching me as a reader that my expectations make me as rigid and artificial as the Soviet regime.

In the US, we haven’t been fighting conformity as much as taking solace in it. My image of the Fifties (admittedly created from the movies) is one of uniformity. There was the wonderful breaking out of the Sixties but then all those rebellious youths settled down into the Eighties when it was  important to be “In” and there were even acceptable ways to be “In” the “Out” group. I live in Seattle where cultural norms are so deeply embedded that the populace considers it a right to be (silently, passively) angry at transgressors.

Fighting Conformity

What if those norms that we cling to are wrong? I fell loudly and hard in Westlake Park yesterday. The collective crowd did nothing but gawk. It was a homeless man—the type of person we push outside of our culture—who stopped to help me pick myself up. He was the only transgressor of the norms and conformity and I am grateful to him.

I understand most of the rules I have learned over the years about writing and life are arbitrary, but I think I needed Mr. Kertesz and the anonymous man in the plaid shirt to remind me just how hard they are to break out of. I hope someday to finish Fiasco and get to the story I was so craving, but I am glad I picked it up and the first forty pages have taught me more than I ever dreamed and I can’t wait to break some rules with my own writing—even if my own Chapter 0 won’t exceed six pages.

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

How I (Almost) Fell in Love with Hemingway

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I’ve always hated Hemingway—as controversial as that sounds to my generation of writers. I thought his women were insipid—I’m afraid of the rain because sometimes I see me dead in it—and he so often wrote of hunting and fishing where I usually read about war and oppression. Most of all, Hemingway is my father’s favorite author.

A Father’s Influence

I was read to as a child by both of my parents and then I learned to read by reading aloud to myself, but it is my father’s voice I hear when I read. Over the years as I’ve impugned Hemingway, my father often responded by quoting Papa’s short, declarative sentences. I hear my father give weight to the proper word. I feel the emotion behind his voice as he imbues the masculine writing with all the feelings boys are taught not to openly express. Perhaps that’s what is really meant by clean prose—a holding back of what is just beneath the surface. I love my father’s voice, but even he could not make me hear the beauty in Catherine’s fear of the rain.

As I learned to become a writer, I was surrounded by Papa—starting with the Nick Adams stories and their brilliant setting. Someone wrote an imitation of “The Hills Like White Elephants” and I pretended to get it. My father continued to quote Hemingway. I read and fell for authors like Calvino who themselves loved Hemingway. I loved them for their clean prose—the very thing they were imitating from Hemingway—and I started to see I would have to face Papa someday, but I wanted to do it on my own terms. I worried my father would have to die before I could do that.

Midnight in Paris

When I watched Midnight in Paris, I fell in love with Woody Allen’s Hemingway and with his manner of speech. I wanted to listen all night to his trailing tangents. My father argued that he was merely a caricature, but there was a glimmer of self-awareness in the actor or the portrayal that made me love what I had considered to be cheese.

A Farewell to Arms

I’ve been feeling Papa draw closer as I exhausted my supply of Calvino and Pavese. My husband and I planned a trip to Croatia and Slovenia—places that from the American travel blogs you would think had never existed before Hemingway—even if his presence there was greatly exaggerated. So I picked up A Farewell to Arms and I danced around it for weeks. But then I read McMurtry’s treatment of ’s letters in Harper’s and I saw the human. I wanted to be near Papa.

How can I describe those opening paragraphs without using the words “there were.” The cadence was there—my father’s and Woody Allen’s and Hemingway’s. The reportage of scenery in simple language. I felt its weight. I brought meaning to his simple, clean sentences. I came to love that style and by page three I was crying at their beauty. I was afraid to turn each page because I didn’t want to lose my awe. I wanted to call my father and read to him, but I also wanted Papa all to myself.

And then came Catherine. And the rain. I know from his letters that Hemingway truly loved the real-life Catherine and maybe he respected her more than I am giving him credit for. I dreaded every mention of the rain. The simple sentences that had carried so much import became cloying with their symbolism. The war sections were still beautiful and strong, and I know from friends that I’m not the only one who loves the war and hates the romance, but I am left deeply divided. He was capable of so much and then it feels like he simply phoned it in.

I know now that I have a lot to learn from Hemingway. I also know that he is not a god. I am not ready to read the complete works and who knows what I will find when I do. I respect my father’s love for Papa. I wish I could devote myself as fully.

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

Livability in Literature: From Jane Austen to Jon Raymond

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“Livability” has been an urban buzzword since at least the 1980’s. Hundreds and maybe thousands of studies have been published on what makes a city more livable. But did you know the word “livable” originated in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park?

Livability in Context

I work at a membership organization for architects, and when architects use the word “livability,” they are referring to the built environment and how the structures and systems we build affect our quality of life at a societal level. Livability by is a collection of stories that look at quality of life from an individual point of view. Just as Austen uses the eyes of poor Fanny Price to describe the life of the landed gentry in 19th Century England, Raymond’s characters show us what it is like to live on the fringes around Portland, Oregon.

Train Choir

In “Train Choir,” Verna awakes in the vast parking lot of a shopping center to the tap of a security guard on her car window. Raymond is making a statement on how unlivable Verna’s newly homeless life is. As she loses her dog, Lucy, to a series of bureaucratic snafus stemming from Verna’s transience, the reader is relieved to find Lucy fostered in a neighborhood of small bungalows with yards. In a sense the reader too has found a home, and though it is not a multi-family residence with easy transit access and a corner store, for Lucy, it is a big step toward a more livable life—a life Verna cannot yet achieve.

The Wind

Place is character in these stories and Raymond covers a range of environments (built and unbuilt) from strip mall suburbias to dense urban cores and even the deep woods. “The Wind” tells the story of “the creek,” a place where groups of teens meet. The daily lives of these teens are separated by geography: the rich kids over the hill, the girls on Stowe Lane, and Joe in a house with tire tracks in the grass. This interstitial space could not exist in Mansfield Park; it belongs only to the teens—unchaperoned—and the story becomes one of how people activate space.

Changing Notions of Livability

Our notion of livable communities has changed over time. Certainly Austen’s heroines longed for the excitement of London, but after finding husbands, they retired to places like Pemberley, Highbury, and Mansfield Park. A more modern dream is to live in a Spartan apartment in a glass tower merely feet from the nearest train, market, and collective living room. Yet urbanism remains a distant dream for Verna, Joe and many like them—it is these Americans whose stories Raymond tells.

Though not yet as frequently filmed as Mansfield Park, stories from this collection serve as the basis for the films Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy.

I originally wrote this post when I thought I would be doing book reviews for the architects, but I think it is important for all of us to think about how livable our environments are and what we are doing to shape that feeling. Livability also provides an interesting angle through which to view setting—something Austen and Raymond already know.

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