Books Archives - Page 21 of 53 - A Geography of Reading

Finding Nouf and Peeking Inside the Walls of a Closed Society

October 5, 2014 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

If it wasn’t for the semi-annual book swap I attend, I never would have read Finding Nouf by Zoë Ferraris. But someone in that group of fabulously well-traveled and intelligent ladies had read this book and wanted to share it. She’d wrapped it up like a gift and put it in with the other books for selection that night, and my luck was to pick this book from the pile and to keep it despite several rounds of white elephant style takebacksies. Finding Nouf sat on my to-read shelf for only a month or so and even then I picked it up a couple of times every week to see if I was ready to read it. Soon I was and I’m so glad I did.

A Saudi Detective Novel

Finding Nouf is the story of Nouf, a young girl from a wealthy family in Saudi Arabia who has run away from her family compound in Jeddah in the days leading up to her wedding. It is also the story of Nayir, a Palestinian man who is so in tune with the desert that everyone assumes he’s Bedouin. He is hired to find Nouf. And it is the story of Katya, a Saudi woman who is engaged to Nouf’s cousin and who also, surprisingly, works with the coroner.

It might sound like this is just a detective novel, and there is a certain amount (though not too much) of a CSI fix in the book. But what makes the book great is the myriad perspectives into a country I would otherwise never know.

Nouf, who is quickly found dead, is firmly entrenched in the female coterie of her household, but that comes with its fair share of silent rebellions. Nayir is an outsider but he is so devoutly Muslim that in many ways he fits better with Nouf’s family, at least the male side, than Nouf does. And Katya is both respectful of the traditions around her and also, because of circumstance and personal preference, reaching to reinvent traditions to suit her life. Together, these voices form a picture in the round of life in Saudi Arabia. The characters are round and human and interesting and even side characters from other classes and cultures help flesh those perspectives more fully.

The Missing Perspective

Because the lifestyle in Saudi Arabia is so very foreign to me, I was very sensitive to getting an unbiased view, which is, of course, impossible from just one source. So while I absolutely loved the cultural details Ferraris wove in (details so fine they could only have been written by someone who had been there) and the fact that the plot was just the right amount of plotted, I was always sensitive to the fact that the book is written by an American. An American who lived in Saudi with her then husband for a time, but an American nonetheless. (And yes, as an American author whose first novel is about Poland, I understand the irony of even making this argument).

Where this becomes really important is that when Nouf or Katya pushed against the limitations put on them because of their gender by driving, going to work, or even flipping up a burqa, I kept wondering why the whole group of women doesn’t overthrow those conventions. So what was missing for me was a deeper insight into the women who want to live their lives that way and whether they are a part of reenforcing the norms westerners consider limiting.

I fully acknowledge that there might be a feeling of powerlessness that would make women who want to rebel unable to do so, but I believe there is also a contingent of women who want to live the way they do. It’s a balance that was better struck in A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea, likely because that author came from within Iran. I really cannot say either way, but the time I spent wondering about the power dynamics in Saudi Arabia did distract me from the book.

I was also grateful for that distraction because it made me look more closely at the world around me. I live near a mosque in Seattle and I’d say that the number of women I see on the bus who either cover their hair or wear a full abaya has increased dramatically in the last decade. I’d often considered that those women were forced by tradition or family to dress that way. But reading this book and wondering so much about Saudi culture (and Muslim culture overall) I realized I was being an idiot and that some women choose to cover themselves in the way that I choose not to wear anything shorter than mid thigh. I knew that, kind of, from the debate about French laws against the hijab, but Finding Nouf opened me up to better understand my own world, too.

My Own Circle of Women

I’m off to book swap again tonight for more book inspiration and to get advice on my trip to India. I have no idea what book I’ll come home with, but I’m certain the books and the company will stretch my thinking and open me up to books and ways of thinking I hadn’t yet considered. It’s an evening full of literature and female wisdom and I can’t wait.

If you want to use literature to catch a glimpse of life inside Saudi Arabia, pick up a copy of Finding Nouf from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Opening up Language with Aureole by Carole Maso

September 29, 2014 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

I started reading Aureole by Carole Maso because Goodreads told me that Gwendolyn Jerris wanted to read it and I needed the kind of book that Gwen loves—lyrical literature like Inner China that falls somewhere between poetry and prose. It’s a type of writing that echoes that of our shared advisor, Micheline Marcom, and one I think we both aspire to in our own way. I started reading this book because I needed to get lost in language—to see again what some of its outer limits are.

What I didn’t realize until I opened the book and started reading the introduction was how very perfect this book would be for stretching my language and my thinking. To start with, it turns out that Maso is, like I, a prose writer writing poetry. Longtime readers of this blog will have seen me fall in love with all kinds of writers who dance along that line (most notably Anne Michaels and Michael Ondaatje). But when Maso started describing her process for writing this book—for the way she was deliberately reinventing her language—I was hooked. She writes “If I felt I was doing something I already knew how to do well, the rule was to start again.”

Part of my struggle is that I’ve been doing a lot of blogging lately. And I don’t mean for this blog. At work, I’m writing about content marketing and other forms of digital marketing where the very best thing I can do for the audience is write simply and clearly as I try to demystify aspects of the topic. What that’s left for this writer, though, is a large hole in my creativity where I want to be mysterious. I want to be oblique. I want to stretch pull tease and twist language until it does my bidding and my readers can learn about how to reinvent their worlds along with their words rather than following expected paths to get measurable results.

Finding Sense in Nonsense

“When they are French, which they often are, especially in bed they say dérangement. When they are French, and this is Paris, which it often is—so beautiful, so light-dappled, such light—the window opening up onto everything, everything: the tree-lined boulevard, the stars, the Tour Eiffel, she says, it’s like a cliché, only beautiful: croissant, vin rouge, fromage, French poodles, polka dots. When they are French.” – Carole Maso

Actually, the passage above is hardly nonsense, at least not in a Steinian sort of way (though I know Maso was reading Stein when she wrote this). But there is a certain amount of arbitrariness and randomness to the connection of the thoughts. When they are French? Usually Frenchness is more of a permanent state than that. This allowance that it’s an identity the two characters can put on or take off is playful and perhaps something they put on when they are in France. As this story evolves, “When they are French” also starts to mean when they are lovers or in bed. I absolutely adore the openness of this and the fact that some of the meaning I’ve just imparted comes from my head and that if you read this story, you might have an entirely different (and equally valid) meaning.

That openness of meaning is so much what I crave reading and also writing. A work that only achieves its full meaning through interaction with a reader just seems like magic to me. And although I bring my own feelings and experiences into a reading of Madame Bovary, you and I are much less likely to be able to build castles of our own interpretations of it because the narrative and language are much more conventional.

Sound

“A dream of sucking, akimbo.” – Maso

Now would probably be a good time to mention that this book is mostly comprised of erotic adventures both hetero- and homosexual. In case erotica isn’t your thing. In many places Maso exploits the softer vowel sounds so well as the crescendo of each act builds that I didn’t even see what she was doing until she interposed a different, harder sound. At some point I’d really like to re-read this book aloud just to feel her mastery of sound.

Rhythm of Language

“And she opens her hand, her life to him: a blur of wings.

And desperately.

And desperately then.” – Maso

Another thing that really makes me want to read this book aloud is the way that Maso uses the rhythm of the words. Imagine after reading an entire chapter of foreplay and play and allusions to the act of sex, reaching this peak…

You Can’t Push All the Time

All of this fabulous word play and invention of syntax and crazy sensuous juxtaposition so pushed my thinking of what words can do that when I reached a line that read “threshold of all possibility,” the mundanity of those words only highlighted how wonderful the rest of the book is. What this means for me and my writing is that if I’m going to push the limits, I’m going to have to really go for it, because the moments that I flinch or get lazy will be obvious to the careful reader. And worse, they will disappoint me if I catch myself doing it.

The Next Journey

A completely unexpected moment in this book is when Maso references India. I’m actually leaving for India in just over a week and suddenly it’s everywhere, including in A Mapmaker’s Dream, another book I read this weekend.

That sounds like a complete and total non sequitur, but I had to find some way to drop in the fact that my blogging might be a bit sporadic in October. I’ve bought all of these books:

(Two of which I’ve since read) and I plan to pack as many of them in my luggage as I can and to write when I can. Maso described a character’s “ink-stained hands (the measure of her day)” and I plan to get some of that in as well. Maybe I can find my own language in the interstices of poetry and prose. I’m sure as hell going to try.

If you want to open up the boundaries of the way you use language, pick up a copy of Aureole from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Rereading Brave New World for Banned Books Week

September 21, 2014 by Isla McKetta, MFA 6 Comments

It had been a very long time since I read Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. I own (and proudly wear) the t-shirt from Out of Print Tees, but I was starting to get embarrassed when people made soma references when they saw me in it and I had no idea what they were talking about. So this week, in honor of Banned Books Week, I reread this classic novel and what I found shocked, impressed, amazed, and disappointed me. But I’m not sorry I read it.

Fighting Utopia

I’ve gotten so far inside dystopias that I’ve forgotten what it’s like to read about a utopian society. In 1984 (as best as I can recall), it’s pretty clear that Big Brother is a bad thing and that society is squeezing the very humanity out of people. Whereas in Brave New World, there are large groups of people who never become dissatisfied throughout the book. And as a reader I was left questioning how bad is the bad, really?

“All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny.” – Aldous Huxley

Do I agree with genetically engineering some people to be lesser? No. Breeding a populace of slaves is bad. Not too much grey area there. But when it comes to a populace zoned out on pleasure, I have fewer qualms. I hate that the creative thinkers are exiled, but I kind of wanted to go away to the Falkland Islands with Helmholtz.

Maybe I think we are already in this brave new world and maybe that’s Huxley’s point. But I do not believe that we can force people to engage in the world and care about change. I don’t believe we’re as socially mobile as we pretend. And that’s probably the biggest difference between the younger me who first read this and the me now. I’m now content with my own desire to change the world and I’ve lost the feeling that I can rally others. I’ve lost the drive to make people live up to their own ideals. I feel somewhat disappointed writing those words and yet also pragmatic. Something to think about there…

“Imagine the folly of allowing people to play games which do nothing whatever to increase consumption.” – Aldous Huxley

Introducing a World

The way that Huxley lead the reader straight into this world and gave us a tour (literally) of the London Hatchery is one of the best introductions to a new society that I’ve ever seen in a book. I think, honestly, that it’s part of the reason I had trouble fighting the worldview. Instead of reacting in immediate disgust, because I have a pretty open (suggestible) mind, I was thinking, “Oh, that’s an interesting way of…” and trying to understand what they were doing.

But there were moments that made my blood run cold. And that’s what’s truly effective–like someone pouring a bucket of cold water over you in a hot tub. This starts with the description of the Bokanovsky Process. It was fascinating to see how they grey 96 humans from one egg. But it was also terrifying. The idea of stunting a growth process to get something to “bud” makes sense to me with tomatoes, but when it comes to humans… *shudder*

As a writer, even if you have no interest in this book overall, you must go and read this first chapter carefully. It will change your world building forever. Oh, and read Chapter Three, too. It is the best inter-splicing of narrative I’ve seen since The Land at the End of the World. And the way Huxley builds a crescendo by shortening the passages the farther in you get is mind-bogglingly well done.

The Ideological Tangent

I thought I was done with ideological rants after Ayn Rand. I still haven’t read all 70 or so pages of John Galt’s rant in Atlas Shrugged. So when I got to the conversation between Mustapha Mond and the Savage in Brave New World, I was surprised to see that this was the only section younger me had highlighted. Some of the things I highlighted, like, “You can’t play Electro-magnetic Golf according to the rules of Centrifugal Bumble-puppy” were clearly in-jokes that I thought would make me sound smarter if I ever had the chance to quote them.

Others, like “You can’t have a lasting civilization without plenty of pleasant vices” and “truth’s a menace” were things that still spark something in my brain. In some ways they ring true, and in others they do not, and it’s that bridge between the two spaces that I find really fascinating.

The Savage Past

What I found most disappointing about this book was the shock and awe of the savage past. Bernard and Lenina’s reaction to it didn’t impress anything upon me and I simply didn’t care. The book waned overall for me from then on because I was not invested in that dichotomy.

Banning Books

I’m flat out against censorship and the banning of books so I was very curious as I read this book why it would be banned or challenged. Turns out the reasons are myriad: sexuality, anti-religious views, depictions of indigenous peoples. I was bothered by parts of the book, sure, but they made me think and I always appreciate that. I suppose people challenge and ban books from fear. Fear that people aren’t smart/civilized enough to make their own decisions, fear of new or different ideas, fear for the children.

In my utopia we can hold a multitude of contrasting ideas. We can be open to new worldviews and inputs because we trust in our ability to think and reason. We can learn new ways of doing things and hold fast to some old ones that work. We are not afraid of what the world will become once we taste that forbidden fruit because we believe that our humanity will keep pushing us to be better as individuals even when we cannot affect the whole. And by that token, the whole gets stronger, smarter, kinder, more human. In that way, I have not given up on my optimism or on the world around me at all.

If you want to test out your own version of utopia, pick up a copy of Brave New World from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

A Hollow Life For Kings and Planets

September 7, 2014 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

Who will we become? Is the longing for something greater in life something we should chase or should we be happy with what we have? When farm boy Orno Tarcher meets the worldly Marshall Emerson on Orno’s first day at Columbia in For Kings and Planets by Ethan Canin, these are the questions that are set in motion. And if the book had lived up to that struggle, I would have been thrilled.

I keep wondering why I was so critical of this book as I was reading it. It spoke to a struggle I face every day. The language was pleasant and the central metaphor was mercifully subtle. It featured characters who felt deeply familiar to me. But there’s another, much deeper reason I could not love this book…

My Struggle

I wrote last week about my desire for an unwritten life. But I also want to feel grounded in myself. Throughout their college experience, Marshall pushes Orno to do something more, something greater. And Orno pushes himself to accept his own limitations. Hell, not even limitations. Orno pushes himself to enjoy the more grounded life he’s drawn to. He experiments with Marshall’s kind of life and he loves his friend dearly, but he knows it isn’t right for him.

I don’t know yet what’s right for me. I know I need to create, but in the past month I couldn’t point even to a poem that I’ve started, at least nothing for myself. The dreams and projects are building up inside me but something is holding me back. And while I’d been reading a spate of poetry and hybrid books by women who were experimenting with voice, the last couple of books I’ve been drawn to (after a couple of weeks of barely reading) have been relatively conventional narratives, both by men, that haven’t rung bells in my soul.

So I know I want one aspect of Marshall’s life—the element of seeking something greater and more fulfilling (or more accurately, I can’t escape it)—but I want Orno’s sense of fulfillment. Can I have both? I think so, but some days it’s really slow going.

Language and Metaphor

Remember when the most stressful question on your English test was, “What is the meaning of the title?” The origins of the title of For Kings and Planets aren’t revealed until about halfway through and then it seems like a casual aside. Orno is writing to Marshall that something or other is named much more conventionally, that it’s not named “for kings and planets.” Actually as I’m typing this, I’m realizing that with Marshall’s love for quoting poetry, it must be a quote, likely from Auden, but I’ll let you seek that on your own (poetry is better in context anyway). What I like about the title, though, is that a whole other dimension of it emerges just in the final pages of the book and in a very subtle way and I started to understand who is orbiting whom.

When this book was published, Canin was teaching at The Iowa Writer’s Workshop and the language is suitably beautiful without being at all show-offy. Still, this is a book where I underlined lines more because I recognized something in the characterization than because of a turn of phrase I loved. Speaking of characterization…

Familiar Characters

If I told you that both Marshall and his professor father—men who are hungry for a greater life which sometimes makes casualties of the people around them—seemed familiar, you might think I was talking about you. Because the truth is that most of the people who read this blog are my friends or family. The other truth is that I’m surrounded by seekers and dreamers. Or rather that I surround myself with seekers and dreamers.

The scary truth is I recognized that “making casualties of the people around you” part as something I’m prone to. It’s something I fight against, when I’m aware of it, but sometimes that hunger to become something greater is all-consuming. All. Consuming.

Why I Can’t Love this Book

And this book isn’t consuming at all. It’s distant, not angst-ridden. It’s psychological when I want it to be emotive. And it never acknowledges the place between dreamer and grounded that most of us make our lives in. Which means the characters ultimately lack nuance.

So many times as I was reading this book as Marshall quits school and runs off to Hollywood to read screenplays all the while showering admiration on his more grounded friend, I wanted Marshall to find some element of satisfaction. I wanted Orno to feel some control over his own destiny. But never the twain shall meet. And the book ends up feeling flat in that way that so much contemporary fiction is criticized for.

I hope I haven’t completely spoiled the book for you. But maybe I’ve saved you a little time, too. Because whether you’re a seeker who longs to be grounded or a salt-of-the-earth type who longs to dream, I think you can push yourself harder than Canin will push you with this book. And I’d love to hear about your struggles and triumphs in the comments.

As for me, I’m off to harvest some plums from our back yard. Maybe somewhere in the manual, mindless tasks of picking, washing, peeling, boiling, and preserving, I’ll find the space to dig into my creative self and wrench out whatever’s standing in my way. Because the grounded self and the seeker self are not mutually exclusive. And my destiny is to try to be both at once, or at least in turns.

Wish me luck…

If you want to decide for yourself, pick up a copy of For Kings and Planets from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Exploring the Extraordinary with The Calcutta Chromosome

August 31, 2014 by Isla McKetta, MFA 2 Comments

I started reading The Calcutta Chromosome: A Novel of Fevers, Delirium & Discovery by Amitav Ghosh because I’ll be traveling to India in just over a month. The book had been in my to-read pile for ages and I’d heard good things about it, I just wasn’t ready to read it… until now. And what I found in those pages made me glad I waited to read it, because if I had read this book at any other time, I would have missed what became the central lesson of the book for me: thinking beyond the expected.

Blowing Apart Genre

I have to admit, this book was really slow going for the first half. The first chapter feels like it describes a semi-dystopian future where Antar is scanning relics of the past. He soon recognizes an ID card of someone he once knew in India. Then we are plopped down in 1995 where a man named Murugan is on the trail of a British scientist from 100 years before (which felt like a nonfiction account of curing malaria). Then the story flashes to that scientist. Then we hear of another scientist at the same period (whose subplot feels like a mystery novel). And a writer (ghost story).

There are some connective threads between these stories–it’s not like I had no idea where we were going–but I soon found myself wondering why Ghosh strung these stories together. Each was interesting on its own, but I found the disconnection exhausting and couldn’t read more than one (short) chapter a night.

“You also have to remember that she wasn’t hampered by the sort of stuff that might slow down someone who was conventionally trained: she wasn’t carrying a shit-load of theory in her head, she didn’t have to write papers or construct proofs… She didn’t care about formal classifications… She was working toward something altogether different.” – Amitav Ghosh

Somewhere in the middle I saw those threads start to form a whole and I realized it was my expectation of this book that was standing in my way. I didn’t understand the genre because it was unlike any genre I’d read before. It was many genres woven together to form this one new way of telling a story that was perfect for this book. The mishmash was intentional and had I been more open to the novelty of experience, I might have seen what Ghosh was doing earlier. Either way, I’m glad I didn’t quit reading.

I absolutely will not tell you more about this book because I feel like the discovery is part of the joy. Just know that to best enjoy this book, I hope you will surrender to it earlier and with less fight than I did. Love it for what it is.

The Extraordinary in My Own Life

Bloom: I can’t wake up next to another stranger, who thinks they know me, or even wants to know me, cause I don’t know – who – I’m thirty five years old, and I, I’m useless, I’m crippled, I don’t, I’ve only ever lived life through these roles that aren’t me, that are written for me by you.
Stephen: Tell me what you want.
Bloom: Why? So you can write me a role in a story where I get it? You’re not listening to me. I want a real… thing, I wanna do things how I don’t know are gonna work out, a-I, want, a…
Stephen: You want an unwritten life.

In The Brothers Bloom (which happens to be one of my favorite movies), Bloom tells Stephen (his older brother who had been scripting cons for them throughout their lives) that what he wants most is an “unwritten life.” That phrase has stuck with me ever since 2008 when I first saw the movie, because it captured something I longed for so desperately but could never name.

My parents would tell you that I was always going to live life on my terms. Whether it was going to preschool in my grandmother’s pumps or the clown costume I frequently wore for years after that. My decision to become a teen rebel at 12 (something I turned right around to become conservative at 17, just when one group of friends was only starting to rebel). They wouldn’t know about the day I stood on an unremarkable street corner in Poland fingering the passport in my pocket and dreaming of running away to create a new, anonymous life in Paris. But they shook their heads and supported me when at 19 I decided I wanted to buy a house. So when I started my MFA in creative writing, I’m sure the only thing that would have surprised them is if I wasn’t surprising them.

But inside, where it counts, and in clutch moments where I feel like I have the choice to follow an extraordinary life, I feel like I panic and then fail. Part of my problem is that always being on the outside of expectations is exhausting. Part of it is that at times I find myself living in opposition to expectation rather than figuring out what I really want to do. And part of it is that deep in my heart I long to be normal, too. I want a husband and a house and a dog. I want to have kids and a beach house and to be able to afford all of it. But I still want that sense that I am following my own path.

This struggle has come into sharp relief lately when I’ve come to a place where, after a few years of just trying to make it day to day, I actually have some choices. I have a job that I can in many ways make whatever I want. I have a literary career that could possibly flourish if I don’t let it languish. I am married to an artist who understands how important it is to nourish that crazy burst of inspiration in my soul. And still I feel like I am failing myself.

I cannot tell you how many times recently someone has suggested that I could make a go of it as purely a novelist–kind people who would be thrilled to see me follow my dreams. And my answer is always that I can’t. Not because I don’t want to but because I don’t want the pressure. I want to write without having to worry about sales or what people think. And so I limit that dream because I know how much I need to be me, even if it’s in a private way that only I see.

But the pressure to be extraordinary on the outside–to make my own rules and just move–is building inside me.

What Happens Next

I don’t know what happens next. I leave for India–a country I’ve dreamed of but never thought I’d get to–in October. I will continue working to pay the mortgage on my house. I might even take a few risks and see how far I can actually stretch the definitions of that job. And I will go back to writing–the thing that nourishes me and I’ve neglected for far too long.

Perhaps at Sarnath I’ll have some Buddhist revelation. Or I’ll have a Lovecraftian moment that will change the entire future of the world. Whatever happens, I hope I have the strength to start to do things in my own way again and to love myself the way I am. Because I don’t know what an extraordinary life means to me yet, but I do know I’ll gladly settle for an unwritten one.

If you want to dig into this world, pick up a copy of The Calcutta Chromosome from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.