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 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 Bookshop.org. 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 Bookshop.org. 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.

Family Secrets in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!

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absalom absalom william faulkner

hit on a truth about Southern families in Absalom, Absalom! Through both the story and the way he tells the story, he demonstrates the ways sensitive information is withheld and talked around but never fully concealed. As Mr. Compson said, “’It just does not explain. Or perhaps that’s it: they dont explain and we are not supposed to know. We have a few old mouth-to-mouth tales; we exhume from old trunks and boxes and drawers letters without salutation or signature.’”

Controlling Information

It takes a lot of control for a family to create secrets and there is often tension with the human desire to reach out and share one’s experience. Because of this there is often double-talk around the secrets and moments of slippage where you can’t maintain the secrecy anymore. Faulkner shows this beautifully when he has Judith give her letter to Quentin’s grandmother. She speaks of it like sharing the letter makes it like something happened, “something that might make a mark on something that was once for the reason that it can die someday.” Judith is reaching out and trying to communicate. She is trying to “make a mark” of her own and write her own history outside the history that is prescribed by her family.

After rambling about herself and her relationship with the family, Rosa slips in the vital piece of information that something is living in the Sutpen house only when Quentin’s attention has slipped away from the conversation. It is as though she was trying to get at telling him that all along but he wasn’t getting what she was saying. She then calls his attention directly to it. This is similar to what Faulkner is doing with the structure of the novel as the reader is immersed in oceans of details and familial relationships that are difficult to pin down. Eventually at the end he turns the story over to Shreve and Quentin and their conjecture to sort out the details and tell the reader the “truths” that have been obscured by the many layers of detail that drip from the story like Spanish moss.

Calculated Slips

Faulkner reveals only small dribbles of information at a time. For example, he has Mr. Compson tell Quentin, “’Henry had to kill Bon to keep them from marrying,’” but gives no hint as to why Henry would want to kill Bon. It’s enticing but maddening to read and puts the reader in the position of Quentin who has enough information to be fascinated with this family but not enough information to really understand what happened to them.

We see Henry acting like Bon’s younger brother well before the reader is told this truth. Mr. Compson says, “’Bon who for a year and a half now had been watching Henry ape his clothing and speech, who for a year and a half now had seen himself as the object of that complete and abnegant devotion which only a youth, never a woman, gives to another youth or man.’” Everything has two meanings because while Faulkner is telling the reader that Henry looks up to and adores Bon, he is also telling the reader that Henry looks to Bon like an older brother. He is simultaneously building the character of Henry and conveying hints about the truth of their relationship.

I come from a Southern family and am astounded at how well Faulkner captured the “I’m not going to tell you but the information will slip in anyway” way difficult information is conveyed in the South.

Polska, 1994 revolves around one central family secret: why Magda’s mother left the family. Magda has one answer that she believes to be true, but her instincts are leading her to dig deeper into the story. I found writing around important information to be difficult in terms of knowing how much to withhold and when and am working on my own relationship with doling out information to maintain suspense.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of Absalom, Absalom! from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Unreliable Notes from Underground

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Notes from Underground by is strangely constructed. The narrator, who seems to have logorrhea, goes on about the laws of math and nature and why he could never be an insect and really every other thing for the first half of the novel. It isn’t until the second half of the story that a more conventional narrative develops, by which point the narrator has so discredited himself as a reliable narrator that I didn’t know whether to believe what he said or not. Except that he portrayed himself in such an unflattering light as he insults everyone from schoolmates to a prostitute; it seems unlikely he would have been lying. He often contradicts himself and sometimes out and out says he was just lying. As a reader I felt afloat with nothing to grab onto because I didn’t know what to believe in except my own judgment of this man’s character.

Sound of the Text

The initial sentences of the novel are made of such short clauses that they take on a staccato sound and it is somewhat jarring to read. Dostoyevsky writes, “I’m a sick man…a mean man. There’s nothing attractive about me. I think there is something wrong with my liver.” It isn’t just that the sentences are so short, it is also that the subject matter seems to wander. I wondered at times whether the narrator was mentally ill. This wandering subject matter contributed to my afloat feeling. I was exhausted just trying to follow his train of thought.

Drafting a Manifesto

The first section reads like a manifesto or a confession. The narrator keeps addressing an audience (who later turns out to be imaginary) as in, “Do you think I’m trying to make you laugh?” or sometimes as ladies and gentlemen. This second person plural address gave the effect of him being in an institution, whether mental or correctional. I loved the way Dostoyevsky implied questions and comments from this audience within the narrator’s ramblings. He took the words right out of my mouth when he said, “if you’re irritated by all my babble (and I feel you must be by now).” In that way Dostoyevsky turned this monologue into a dialogue. At times he goes so far as to provide a counterargument for what the implied audience would have said, as in, “’Ha-ha-ha!  Strictly speaking there is no such thing as will!’ You may interrupt me.” I’m still trying to decide whether to use the second person address in my second novel, but I found the use of implied dialogue much more engaging than when the narrator was talking to himself and I would borrow that for certain.

Allegorical Insertions

There is one point in this first section where Dostoyevsky seemed to be making a point about free will through his narrator that could be taken as a larger commentary on Russian society, “Now you scream that no one intends to deprive me of my free will, that they are only trying to arrange things so that my will coincides with what is in my own interest.” It seems harmless enough because at this point I was convinced the narrator was quite mad and a few sentences later he retracts it saying, “Of course I’m joking, my friends, and I realize my jokes are weak.” But the point is made. I liked the way Dostoyevsky slipped in information that could ostensibly be recanted but couldn’t really.

The transition between the first section and the second was lovely. A few sentences before the actual shift from manifesto to story, the narrator says, “Today for instance I am particularly oppressed by an old memory.” He then intersperses ramblings with lead up to the story until the changeover. It made for a very nice transition because he alerted the reader that the subject was changing but also interspersed the logorrhea with the more narrative quality of the next section which tied the two together. I used a lot of white space between my sections for Polska, 1994, though I thought for a long while about looking for ways to better transition between them like tempering eggs before adding them to a batter.

The second person address and the blurts continue into the second section but what is really interesting is the note at the end of the novel, “Actually the notes of this lover of paradoxes do not end here. He couldn’t resist and went on writing. But we are of the opinion that one might just as well stop here.” This note simultaneously validates the second person address and brings into question the whole meaning of the story. I’m still thinking about this. I like that the story has given me something open and unfinished to ruminate on.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of Notes from Underground from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.