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

Reinventing Language with The God of Small Things

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The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy - CoverOf The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, John Updike wrote, “A novel of real ambition must invent its own language, and this one does.” This quote alone is neither complimentary nor derogatory, but after reading this gorgeous book, I am awestruck at how Roy’s small tweaks to spelling, capitalization, and compound words captured both my attention and the essence of the characters and setting. The language she invents for this book is only the beginning of her ambition and every word on every page is worth the read.

Discovering the True Grammar of a Story

Roy shows from the very beginning of this book that she is doing something different with her language and that to get the most out of the story, the reader will have to trust her. Her wordplay begins subtly as she joins adjectives and nouns into unfamiliar compound words like “dustgreen” and “mossgreen.” It’s a hint of what’s to come, but it’s so gentle that it’s not at all off-putting.

Then Roy begins to emphasize words with unexpected capitalization, as when she writes, “[W]hen life was full of Beginnings and no Ends, and Everything was Forever.” Because much of the story centers around children, these capitalized words bear the weight of a mother’s emphasis—they become words and lessons even when we don’t yet have the context for them. These capital letters also show us how characters see each other. For example, Sophie Mol is often described as “Sophie Mol, hatted bell-bottomed and Loved from the Beginning” in contrast to Rahel whose birth forever marred her mother’s life.

Roy also creates weight around words by intentionally misspelling them. For example, Estha is given “pocket money” at a movie theater to fetch a soda. The Orangedrink Lemondrink Man, who will go on to molest Estha in a few moments, calls this “porketmunny” instead, which denotes both that he comes from a lower caste than Estha and also that he is teasing him. The scene that ensues between them is an important one and this linguistic variation (denoted through the varied spellings) adds a nuance to the moment that could have easily been overwritten if the differences between the two characters had to be described instead.

I’m glad I surrendered my copy editor’s eye to the way Roy was using language. I’m certain this book was a nightmare during the galley correction stage, but the end product is wonderful.

Piecing Together a Fractured Narrative

Kathakali discovered long ago that the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won’t. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again. – Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

True to the above quote, Roy reveals early that the young Sophie Mol will die and that her death changes everything for the family. The author shifts easily backward and forward in time as she describes the aftermath of Sophie’s death (spanning decades) and the events leading up to it. Clues are nestled throughout the novel, and yet when we come to the actual death it is both satisfying to finally know and unsatisfying that one event could have such a devastating effect for generations of a family. In this way, the art of the story imitates the justifications we seek in life for terrible events that occur, even though the answers offer no solace.

Some Books Deserve a Quiet Weekend Alone

A book this carefully constructed demands your full attention. I recommend holing up somewhere without distractions so you can fully surrender to Roy’s language and follow the emotional logic of her narrative.

Are there other books you’ve encountered that use subtle wordplay as artfully as The God of Small Things? Please tell me about them in the comments below.

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

Joan Silber: A World of Voices in The Size of the World

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In The Size of the World, Joan Silber relates six linked stories from the first person point of view of six different narrators. Using word choice, tone, and sentence length, Silber provides insight into the character through the distinct sounds of their voices.

Toby

Toby is an engineer in Arizona who is sent to Viet Nam to explore defects in the guidance systems of fighter planes during the war. He speaks very directly using short sentences like: “I liked getting lost in projects.” His sentences are often six or seven words long and rarely more than two linked clauses. This gives him the clipped sound of someone who works with data but who is a loner. He uses clichés: “Ernst slept like a baby” which makes him seem like an unlikely narrator—like words are unimportant to him. He works with a man named Ernst who is even more removed (someone comments that he may have Asperger’s) and has his own terse phraseology, often speaking in two or three word sentences: “‘Can’s gone’…‘as in dead.’”

Kit

Kit was Toby’s high school girlfriend. He thinks she is vacuous and dim. Her initial voice indicates that she is not a serious person and she uses alliteratively comical phrases like, “sanctimonious sharpie.” After running into Toby, she asks herself many questions: “The world wasn’t all sex, was it?” and “[a]nd what did I want from Toby anyway?” which makes her sound uncertain and lost with a bit of self-loathing peppered in. After being manhandled by the police in Mexico, her voice loses most of its brightness: “I was oozing money, and his country was a hobby to me.” And this tone follows her throughout the rest of her section as she flounders through life never really regaining the lightness she started with.

Corinna

Corinna is older than Kit and Toby, though she is first presented in her youth. Her voice is prim and her phrases like: “the sort of boy” and “quite decently” sound proper like those of someone from her generation. She is actually a very free spirit who moves to Siam after losing her parents and falls for her brother’s Malay guide. But when she speaks, she is very candid about even risqué subject matter such as having premarital sex in the woods, but she is roundabout with her phrasing: “I still bled every month” instead of saying she wasn’t pregnant. She is a woman confined by her generation not by her spirit.

Mike

Mike is a professor who is divorced and meets his high school sweetheart later in life and has a second chance at love. He is full of regrets but resigned to his life as in the following passage: “I suppose I always thought I would have a family, though not so fast” and “[b]ut later I was sorry I hadn’t gone.” He uses “but” and “though” over and over as a sort of “if only…” and the reader understands that his life is not what he wanted to make of it if he had travelled, if he had slowed down, if…

Annunziata

Annunziata is another older woman who was born in Sicily and immigrated to the U.S. after World War II. Her voice loops back on itself as she introduces a topic, e.g. hating America when she was young and then engages in a long digression only to come back to the original point she made. This gives the reader a rich understanding of her background but it also takes on a feeling of her living in the past because she is always delving into the history of what brought about the events. She comes off as richly interesting rather than efficient and interested in moving forward.

Owen

Owen is Kit’s brother. When we first meet him, he is still living in Siam although he is starting to feel used up. His tone is caustic, even when addressing his sister either telling her about his latest adventure: “‘The whole cold-blooded enterprise’” or responding to her attempts to lighten the mood: “‘Don’t be suave and brittle, please’…‘Now is not the time.’” When he comes home he is depressed and it shows in the lack of enthusiasm in his language as he describes, “unspeakably dull dinners.” His life is unsatisfactory: “I was not what I’d once been” and he describes having “humiliated myself” during his Depression-era job search. This is a man who held himself high and above others. When he comes home he is faced with the reality of who he is. He becomes a salesman, and struggles even at that. His self-image of the independent adventurer is dashed if it even was ever true.

By giving each character a unique voice, Silber is saying more about them and in a more palatable way than if she had simply outlined the characteristics of these characters. The characters are fully realized in their narration and when they engage in dialogue. She even portrays the individual voices of more minor characters. Silber has created a very rich world of characters and at the end I felt like I understood a little of the individual natures of each of them.

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

Epistrophe in Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato

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Going After Cacciato - Tim O'Brien“It was a bad time. Billy Boy Watkins was dead, and so was Frenchie Tucker. Billy Boy had died of fright, scared to death on the field of battle, and Frenchie Tucker had been shot through the nose. Bernie Lynn and Lieutenant Sidney Martin had died in tunnels. Pederson was dead and Rudy Chassler was dead. Buff was dead. Ready Mix was dead. They were all among the dead.”

So begins Going After Cacciato by Tim O’Brien. In six sentences he repeats the words “was dead” five times and “death” or “died” three times. With this repetition, he sets a horrible scene—a battlefield in Vietnam where the men expect to die—and it becomes easy to sympathize with Cacciato as he sets off on foot for Paris. France.

What is O’Brien Doing with this Repetition?

What O’Brien is doing, repeating a phrase at the end of clauses, is called epistrophe. This rhetorical device is meant to bring emphasis. But like its sibling, anaphora (same thing but placed at the beginning of clauses), epistrophe adds more than emphasis—it creates an incantatory effect. It creates magic.

Writers are often taught that repetition is a bad thing, but if we look at the world around us, we can see how entrancing this effect is. Think about the verses of the popular song that are stuck in your head right now—nearly any song will do. Even if the phrases do not repeat within the verse, the verse itself is a repetition and the words become nearly impossible to forget.

Epistrophe as Framing Device

Because O’Brien sinks the phrase “was dead” so deep in our psyche as we read this passage, we feel the inevitability of death as much as the soldiers do. It becomes accepted. This may sound callous, but it isn’t. O’Brien is setting the reader in the same psychic landscape as the soldiers. He is also allowing himself a lot of freedom.

What do I mean by that?

By building a grand expectation of death and dying in these first sentences, O’Brien doesn’t have to mention death at all for a very long time. He is free to explore his characters and the odd situation with Cacciato for pages at a time without returning to the topic of death. That’s because the epistrophe has sunk in and the reader is repeating (knowingly or not) “was dead.” There is a limit and if O’Brien never brings the topic up again, the opening would be wrong for this book. But the next time he does bring up death, it builds on and affirms this rich incantation that he’s already created for us.

In fact, O’Brien waits a full page before bringing up death again (I think he could have waited even longer). In another book, that might seem like a short time, but the intervening passage is filled with rot and missing soldiers and lost limbs (things that also contribute to the general atmosphere of the book) in a staccato, Hemingway-esque style that is also uniquely O’Brien.

I am only a few pages into this novel and I don’t have any idea what’s going to happen, but I am excited to see how O’Brien builds on his epistrophe.

I started using anaphora in my own work in an unconscious way. It wasn’t until an advisor pointed it out that I was able to play with the power of this device. And there is power in it. Until picking up Going After Cacciato, I had thought it was a device better suited to meditations and magical stories. O’Brien is showing me how limited my imagination was, and I can’t wait to play with epistrophe next.

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

Quiet Restraint in American Visa by Wang Ping

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American Visa Wang PingAmerican Visa: Short Stories by Wang Ping covers locations as disparate as the Red Chinese countryside and the New York Subway. The life of her character, Seaweed, is never easy, but the author’s telling of the stories using only the sparest detail removes all trace of melodrama and lets the reader experience it for herself. Using short declarative sentences, Wang lays out the bare facts of the Cultural Revolution, spousal abuse, making it in America as an immigrant, and feeling unloved as a child.

Precise Adjectives

In one paragraph in “Lipstick,” Wang summarizes the barest details the reader needs to know about the Cultural Revolution for the effect of the story. “Who still had the guts to keep a lipstick in 1971, the prime time of the Cultural Revolution?  Anything which was related to beauty, whether Western or Oriental, had been banned.” The only adjectives in those two sentences are prime, Western, and Oriental and yet Wang conveys the force of the danger Seaweed was encountering as she explored this forbidden femininity.

Raising the Stakes

“I’d secretly been trading books at school through a well-organized underground network. Everyone obeyed its strict rules: Never betray the person you got the book from; never delay returning books; never re-lend without the owner’s permission.”

Wang identifies the stakes without ever naming the punishment. The reader is dropped into a world of conspiracy and rebellion by school kids and is left to imagine what terrible fate would befall the students if they were caught.

Similarly, she goes from describing Seaweed’s pinching to their mother’s reaction “My mother always punished me with the bamboo stick behind the door.” She fills in the sisterly rivalry, but leads the mother’s punishment up to the imagination.

Always Leave Them Wanting More

Perhaps it is growing up with movies and television, but I am used to having all the blood and guts played out for me. A severed foot is a gross-out tool, but it doesn’t serve a greater purpose. By not telling me what the soldiers would do or what her mother would do with that bamboo stick, Wang has captured my imagination, and the imagination is often much more brutal than what the writer would have described.

Wang doesn’t shy away from bad things, only awful, and that makes my interpretation of the awful even worse. “The Story of Ju” opens “Ju hung herself on the eve of her wedding.” Obviously this is not going to be a happy story, but the simplicity of the sentence shaped my view of the world Seaweed lives in, a world where sadness is quotidian and characters are resigned to their fates, where “the dead are dead.” Even in describing the abuse Ju’s mother, Crazy Hua, suffers, Wang gives us the aftermath rather than the event. “After that, she came to work every day, often starved and badly bruised.” There is no hope that Hua will ever escape her circumstances but Wang is not elaborating on the horrors of their lives with grisly detail, she simply names them.

It isn’t until Wang lets Ju speak for herself that the reader is privy to the events themselves. Even then, as Ju describes her mother kneeling “on the broken pieces of the bowl.” or her stepfather demanding she “replace” her mother as she’s tied to a chair, Wang had so prepared me to imagine my own horrors that the scene came alive in gruesome detail, but only in my imagination. In reflecting on the story, I find it has taken on a new life in my imagination and in fact I remember the details I created as though they were actually written into the story.

Tight Sentences

Although Wang is writing in a second language, there is no accent or accident in her sentences. The entire flavor of Seaweed’s relationship with her sister Sea Cloud is contained in the two sentences that start “American Visa.”

“Sea Cloud asked me to help her get out of China on the night when we were sailing from Shanghai to Dinghai to attend Father’s funeral. I was surprised as well as pleased.”

If this story stood alone, the reader would know from these two sentences that Seaweed is the stronger sister who has managed to escape circumstance and therefore has power in the relationship, but that Seaweed doesn’t know it. Seaweed craves the acceptance of her sister, whom she envies. We also see that it was difficult for Sea Cloud to come down from her perceived pedestal and ask her sister for something, she had to wait for a moment of quiet during a time that would have brought them closer in sharing grief for their father. Two short sentences, almost entirely devoid of adjectives, and Wang manages to convey a lifetime of struggle between two sisters.

In Polska, 1994, I wrestled with how to describe a rape scene and a culture that is foreign to my audience. I wanted the reader to feel the full force of the scene because it causes the transformation in the main character, but I wasn’t sure how graphically I want to lay it out. Wang showed me to use description of horrors carefully. I don’t want to bowl the reader over, I want to provide them the tools to bowl themselves over.

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

Reimagining Imagery with Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

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A writing professor once advised me to keep writing fresh and to examine the words you use—tears don’t ever really roll down someone’s face. But how can you reexamine every word or phrase you use and still have time to write? Sometimes it helps to look at things from a new perspective and this week Haruki Murakami helped me do just that with The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

When I read “network of red lines” as a description of the narrator’s bloodshot eyes, my writing spidey-sense perked up. “Bloodshot” is an easy word. Too easy. You can say “spider web” but that stands out against nearly any paragraph. I loved “network of red lines.” It was concise and vivid and I could picture it and it also didn’t have to interrupt the flow. Except I wanted it to because it made me think about freshening my own descriptions.

A note on translation here: I don’t read Japanese, so I will never know exactly what words Murakami uses, and I am taking for granted that his translator has not run away with the story. Also, “network of red lines” could be the way bloodshot eyes are standardly described in Japanese. Regardless, it was new to me and I loved it.

I read Murakami chiefly for fun, though he is a wonderful and imaginative writer. I am grateful to him for reminding me that language is infinite and even one fresh examination can spawn wonder. I’m off to see if I can spawn some fresh imagery in my own writing. Just as soon as I finish this fantastic book.

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