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

Empathy in Konrad’s The Case Worker

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Cover of The Case Worker by George Konrad showing a pile of file folders with a man's eyes poking throughFrom the day to day routine to the understanding of the masses, George Konrád 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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Cover of Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky showing the top half of a man's faceNotes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky 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.

Still Waiting for the Barbarians with Coetzee

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At times in Waiting for the Barbarians, by J.M. Coetzee, 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 Bookshop.org. 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 Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.