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

Reconsidering Michael Ondaatje’s Hana in The English Patient and In the Skin of a Lion

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the english patient michael ondaatjeI have a confession to make. I am a bad reader. I chew up books and then cast them aside. I suck the marrow of inspiration from them and then leave them to gather dust. Sometimes I even discard them entirely–selling off boxes at a time at used bookstores. So when I read The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje, I read it wrong. And it wasn’t until years later as I was reading his In the Skin of a Lion that I realized my mistake.

Is There a Wrong Way to Read a Book?

There are one hundred and fifty thousand right ways to read a book. More than that even. And there are very few wrong ways to read one. You can pick up factual errors along the way or misread a line of text. But my sin was greater. I came to The English Patient with an agenda. I had watched the film over and over and loved its golden hues and the story of Katharine and Almásy. I’d been told the book was difficult to read so I ignored it too long. When I finally did read it, I read in search of that love story. I was hungry for Ondaatje’s gorgeous language and how he’d describe a love affair.

Isn’t That What The English Patient is About?

I actually hope you’ll never ask yourself this question. I hope you’ve read this beautiful book and saw in it what I failed to… Almásy, eponymous though he may be, is not the protagonist. Hana is.

“Words, Caravaggio. They have a power.” – Michael Ondaatje

It’s been years since I read The English Patient and I might never have discovered my mistake if I hadn’t been rushing through In the Skin of a Lion this week. I was feeling fitful and hoping once again that Ondaatje could quell my inner fuss. I read a few pages a night and then fell asleep and forgot what I read. I wasn’t considering the book. I looked for Hana and Caravaggio because the jacket copy said they had first appeared in this book, but when I didn’t find them, I convinced myself I’d misread that.

And then I had lunch with a writer friend and we talked about In the Skin of a Lion and how it was her husband’s favorite book and that she enjoyed it as well. I started to think about how much I enjoy Ondaatje and why I was so impatient with him just then. I thought back to a gorgeous scene on a bridge as Nicholas saves a nun. I decided to slow down. I read the book when I had time for it instead of trying to make it bend to my sleep schedule. And like a flower in the desert, I met Hana.

Hana isn’t a main character in In the Skin of a Lion. In fact, I’d wager Caravaggio gets more pages. But it didn’t matter. All of a sudden I realized that Hana and Caravaggio came first. When Ondaatje wrote The English Patient, it wasn’t Almásy and Katharine at the front of his brain. It was Hana and Caravaggio.

How Did this Change the Book for Me?

“Do you understand the sadness of geography?” – Michael Ondaatje

With Hana at the front of my mind, I was compelled to pick up The English Patient again. You can ask my husband, it was one of those things where I picked up the book and was reading snippets of it between conversations or when he went outside. I even read a couple of passages aloud. What I realized is that the book starts with Hana. Almásy is there and there are allusions to Katharine, but that love story I’d rushed to find doesn’t actually start until page 142. A page on which I’d had the audacity to write “Now it starts.” That’s more than one third of the way through the book.

As I started reading for Hana, I saw the tenderness between her and Caravaggio and their history. I saw the connection to a life she could no longer relate to–to parents who had died and to a continent and a life far away. I could see her struggle against the pains of her very short adulthood. I realized the big role that Kip plays in her life and the smaller one that Almásy does. I watched Hana open herself up, even against all the pain in the world. I saw her become.

“She had grown older. And he loved her more now than he loved her when he had understood her better, when she was the product of her parents. What she was now was what she herself had decided to become.” – Michael Ondaatje

And of course the book is about the other characters as well and what’s most beautiful is how they interact and form in relation to one another. But I was so grateful I had this opportunity to reconsider Hana. To find the girl who became a woman and who chose, in the face of war and loss, to blossom instead of wilt.

I can’t promise that I will always read books well. I think I failed Danilo Kiš last week. But I hope I will always be lucky enough to re-encounter those beautiful books when I am ready to read them for what they have to offer.

If this review made you want to read more about Hana, pick up a copy of The English Patient or In the Skin of a Lionfrom Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Dunya Mikhail Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea

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Dunya Mikhail Diary of a Wave Outside the SeaOn the tenth anniversary of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, I listened on NPR as Renee Montagne interviewed an Iraqi poet who fled her homeland and I knew immediately it was Dunya Mikhail and that I had read her book, Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea and I needed to read it again.

Plausible Deniability

In many ways, I’ve been avoiding reading about the Middle East since we invaded that sovereign nation under false pretenses. I protested the war then, weakly, and as I realized how little power I had to change our policies, I turned away and pretended that I couldn’t see that my taxes weren’t paying for the destruction of someone else’s infrastructure and the murder of other people’s children. I’m opposed to both dictatorship and terrorism, but what we did in Iraq was uncomfortably close to a Crusade.

Somehow now, 10 years later, I’m ready to begin to really look at the Middle East again—to let my political scientist side again start to question—and to confront what makes me so uncomfortable about Iraq just as I have started to question my reading tastes. Truthfully, I stumbled into Iraq a few weeks ago when we finally started watching Homeland. I didn’t actually know the show started in Iraq, but watching Claire Danes piecing together international intrigue and speaking in foreign tongues reminded me of who I used to want to be. So here I sit, holding a book filled with Arabic script, trying to reconcile these pieces of myself.

Facing the Truth

The hardest thing to see in an “enemy” is his or her humanity. Mikhail’s book starts just there, with the simple observations of a child:

In my childhood, I envied myself for being a child.
I thought everyone was created the way they were:
created as a child or an old man or a mother.

She goes on to write:

I used to count dreams on my fingers
and cry, because my fingers were insufficient!
I also cried when I saw myself in photos
and I would shout:
“Take me out of the picture!”

The book slips quickly into scenes during the first Iraq War, Operation Desert Storm, but Mikhail doesn’t show the images I’m used to seeing—Humvees lumbering across a desert or oil wells on fire. Instead she writes about how life continued:

I was not waiting by myself;
the river was there, too,
and the smoke that rose from the explosions
and from the cigarette of a lover
who contemplated his loneliness
like a pawn in the corner of a chessboard.

And I remember what it was like then for me, my friends and I—not yet teenagers—gathered around a table in a kitchen discussing whether our brothers would be drafted. Our language wasn’t as beautiful as Mikhail’s. Our bodies were so much farther from danger. But we, too, existed with this war as it shaped our lives in ways we couldn’t understand or control. Still, Mikhail’s experience was much more immediate and soon the words devoted to war outweigh those devoted to other aspects of life:

Sometimes I imagine the war has ended
and life creeps into the foreheads of the corpses
for an instant.
One instant is enough,
a moment
the size of a bullet.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Has the war stopped?
What will we do now
without enemies?

“Pens and Rifles Have One End”

The second part of Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea was written after Mikhail fled Iraq. No longer subjected to Iraqi censors, the poetry begins to use real names rather than references to Zeus. Instead of oblique references to chess and electrons that split and reunite only to destruct, she tells stories of her “war generation.” I remember that the Gulf War was not the first to touch her lifetime and her city.

The way I fled the country was like everything in Iraq:
too hard, too easy, and exactly as they liked.

The way the book is laid out feels like a metaphor. Because Arabic is read right to left, the English translation of Mikhail’s words and the Arabic original meet in the middle with only to separate them. Somewhere between these two languages, amidst the family photos and images of other important papers, is a poet and her story.

It’s time to begin digging into my own story—to stop turning away when I encounter resistance—to delve deeper when life and writing are the most difficult. It’s time to find who this person who is part political scientist, part writer, part woman, part wife, and so much more—who this person is.

Read Mikhail’s poetry for the beauty of her language, but as you are reading, listen to the conversation that happens with all great books—the one where an artist provides you the keys to help you learn about yourself.

If this review made you want to have your own conversation with Mikhail’s work, pick up a copy of Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Exploring the Aftermath of War in The Shadow of Xeno’s Eye

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When does war become your new normal, your life? What happens when the men in power then decide that war is over? These questions face us today in Afghanistan and Iraq just as they faced the Greeks after the fall of Troy. The Shadow in Xeno’s Eye by Jerry Soffer tells the story of one Ithacan soldier from the moment he bursts out of the Trojan Horse to the months after the Greek kings returned to their city states leaving a few men behind to guard the gates.

Inside the Trojan Horse

The beginning of the novel is chaotic. The Greeks are still mid-battle with Troy and a mess of men are waiting inside the horse for the moment when they will change the direction of this decade-long war. It’s a confusing scene and took me more than one read to understand where I was in time and what was going on, but once I got it, I was delighted to read this new perspective on a classic tale. I got a first-hand look inside the gates of Troy alongside the Greek soldiers after they emerged from the horse to see men “Gathered around a statue of a horned bird with jeweled eyes on a nest of vine leaves inlaid with gold.”

It’s been a very long time since I read The Iliad or The Aeneid, but from what I can recall, Soffer’s focus on the experience of lowly soldiers is a very different take than Homer or Virgil’s. Xeno, a simple Ithacan fisherman, encounters legends like Menelaus and Agamemnon, but his first-person narrative centers on the soldiers who bore the daily cost of war. If you don’t have any recollection of the basics of the Trojan War, you might feel like one of the soldiers on the field—taking orders without any real understanding of what’s happening—but even a quick Wikipedia skim will give you what you need to know.

“The men from Rhodes were quiet, even for a small contingent, but the feeling was more of weariness than brewing anger; voices were friendly, not raucous the way guys sometimes get. Their little brigade had a lot of seamen turned soldiers, like me, and they were glad it was over.” – Jerry Soffer

The Politics of Kings and Generals

One of the strongest scenes in the book is when Xeno overhears Agamemnon, Menelaus, and others discussing the real reasons they went to war and how they will resolve the problem of Helen. I remember the first time I heard George Bush utter about Saddam Hussein, “This is the guy that tried to kill my dad,” so it was easy to place myself inside Xeno’s mind as he realized how many lies had been told. What surprised me was how calmly Xeno reacted to the political intrigue. But as an ordinary soldier, Xeno’s good opinion was not going to be a deciding factor in the war… perhaps he realized that and escaped with what was most important to him—his life.

Boots on the Ground in an Unending War

Once Troy is sacked, it should be time for the Greeks to pack up Helen and sail back across the Aegean. But the kings want to preserve their right to settle Troy so a small group of men is left behind to guard the city. Xeno is among them and he takes for the first time a leadership role. It was very interesting to watch the men from different city states as their loyalties started to fracture. Soffer uses language rather than physical descriptions to delineate between different types of Greeks and also the tribesmen surrounding Troy. The pidgin in which they spoke to one another obviously affected relationships and trust between groups.

Perhaps I watched too much G.I. Joe as a child, but I kept waiting for Xeno to become a hero. He tried to work with the leaders each group listened to, but his leadership style was passive and I feared for all the men when the King of Phrygia showed up to take Troy for his own.

The Crone

Regular readers of this blog will know I have an obsession with crones. By far the most entrancing character for me was Beach Hag, an old woman living among the soldiers. Because of the way Soffer blended mythological characters with historical ones in dialogue (which is so spot on for this type of book), I kept waiting for her to transform into some goddess. I won’t spoil the book for you, but I will say that her presence was strong enough that when she disappeared, I waited anxiously for her to come back.

If you are a fan of history or are looking for an allegory to understand how unending wars affect the everyman who has to fight them, you’ll enjoy The Shadow of Xeno’s Eye.

Turning History into Herstory with Hazleton’s Jezebel

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Jezebel - lesley hazletonI have deep respect for Lesley Hazleton. In some ways I want to be her—internationally-savvy, fantastic voice and accent, able to read the Bible in Hebrew. When I heard that she was investigating the story of the Bible’s harlot queen with Jezebel, I was excited to get a better picture of both the Bible and of the way women’s sexuality has been used against us throughout history.

A New Midrash—Interweaving History and Narrative

Jezebel is written from a variety of angles. Hazleton mixes a direct retelling of the story based her own translations from the Hebrew Bible with stories of her travels to the historical places (two especially telling anecdotes involve Christian fundamentalists at the site of Armageddon gleefully calculating how much blood it will take to fill the valley and Hazleton’s attempts to find a holy site that has nearly been erased by history). Hazleton also includes imagined looks at the events of Jezebel’s lifetime from the point of view of the queen herself.

“It is easy to forget that [the Bible] was written by specific men in specific times and places, for specific reasons.” – Lesley Hazleton

This unexpected mix of approaches gave me a more complex view of the stories and the players. Shifting through time allowed Hazleton to make comparisons to modern day politics in the Middle East. I like to think Jezebel was like reading a new Midrash (most everything I know about the Old Testament, I know from reading Davita’s Harp).

Reading the Bible through the Eyes of Others

I am no Biblical scholar—I wasn’t raised with any more religion than I could glean from the (Christian) cultures I grew up in and from books. When I tried to read the King James translation for myself, I never got past the begats. That is to say, my experience of the Bible has always been filtered through the experiences of others. So I loved hearing stories of ancient gods, kings, and queens and their struggles for power. It is clear that Hazleton brought to this book an admiration of Ahab and Jezebel. And the comparisons to modern politics were apt and informative. I appreciated that Hazleton was trying to remove the mask of Orientalism and I could see ways in which a religion is shaped by its believers.

What did not work for me were the moments when Hazleton imbued the scenes with what Jezebel must have been thinking. She did a solid job of outlining the character and I liked the fierce strength and nobility that Hazleton attributed to her, but it was more of a leap into story than I was willing to take.

Overall, it was refreshing to get a contemporary, female view of the Bible. But in the end, I realized that the only way to satisfy my need to get my own full understanding will be to learn Hebrew and read the Bible for myself.

Women Aren’t Sexual Beings—We Are Whole Beings

I was intrigued by the idea of a “harlot queen.” The word “harlot” and its brethren “bitch, slut, whore” and so many others are still used against women today and usually in instances that have everything to do with power and nothing to do with sex.

What I found interesting about Jezebel is that Hazleton removes sex from the equation entirely. A book I thought might be about how female sexuality is positive (rather than negative) turned out to be about the power of a woman as a person. Perhaps this is the more important leap because a person is entitled to power and sexuality and entirety.

I realized that my own investigations into sexuality and feminism with my new novel might be limited. I have been fighting to understand female sexuality and have it seen as equal to that of men. Perhaps instead I should be looking at women as whole people. Maybe I have allowed the very people who seek to minimize my sex to set the terms of this battle.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of Jezebel: The Untold Story Of The Bible’s Harlot Queen 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.