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

Paul Verlaine en Français

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poesies - verlaineThough neither my French nor my understanding of poetry are good enough to honestly rate Poésies by , this book, the rhythm of Verlaine’s stanzas and lines, is fantastic and he has created some truly beautiful images. I have a decent enough comprehension of French that I was able to read the book aloud to myself and to capture Verlaine’s incredible cadences. I used his rhyme scheme to learn to pronounce some words I hadn’t encountered before.

Reading Like a Novice

I’m afraid of poetry. I don’t know the structures and the rules and I’m always certain it’s supposed to mean something that I’m missing. But reading poetry in French was freeing. Once I relaxed into the idea that I was not going to understand every word (I refuse to take a dictionary to bed), I was able to also relax into the idea that I would not understand every nuance and reference in the poems. There would be no essay at the end about the Panzer-man signifies.

Inventing a Language

What was most interesting for me is how carefully reading in French made me pay attention to language. Sometimes I made up my own interpretations based on cognates. “Quand le soleil…dorait la vie” does mean “When the sun…gilded life,” but it also made me think of the verb dormir (to sleep) and so I added layers of meaning to the sentence for myself. This made me think harder about the words I am using and their etymologies and homonyms and how all of that enriches the words and the sentences they inhabit.

I picked out the words I knew and fell in love with the sounds of others. I found myself responding to the simplest phrases like “Je fais souvent ce rêve étrange et penetrant” (I have often this strange and penetrating dream) that I would be embarrassed to underline in English because they aren’t deep or new enough. Actually that sentence may be a bad example, because whether or not my translation is accurate, it is kind of beautiful. Sometimes I underlined things simply because of their sound as in “Des violons / De l’automne / Blessent mon coeur / D’une langueur / Monotone.”

I made it all the way through the book, reading each page aloud, and I haven’t picked up the dictionary yet, but I am happy with the meanings I brought to Verlaine and the meanings Verlaine brought to me. I am happy with the way looking at a language from the outside will help me look at my language from the inside.

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

Love in The Winter Vault with Anne Michaels

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Cover of The Winter Vault by Anne Michaels showing men on camels in a flooding EgyptI’ve been thinking about what I could say about The Winter Vault by Anne Michaels 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 Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Giorgio Pressburger Arrests the Reader

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Cover of The Law of White Spaces by Giorgio Pressburger showing a vertical white space interrupting a black fieldIn The Law of White Spaces by Giorgio Pressburger, 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 Bookshop.org. 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 Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Orhan Pamuk, Citizen of Letters

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Cover of Other Colors by Orhan Pamuk showing a black and white street scene in Istanbul with the back of a man walking alone away from usI took a long time to finally pull Other Colors by Orhan Pamuk 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.