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

Writing Around the Holocaust with Garden, Ashes by Danilo Kiš

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Danilo Kiš Garden AshesI have read a lot of books about the Holocaust. Memoir and fiction, books set in World War II Europe and in the US before and after. But until reading Garden, Ashes by Danilo Kiš, it had never even occurred to me that a book could be written about Yugoslavia during the 1940s without writing directly about the war. This story of a young Catholic boy, Eduard Scham, who loses his Jewish father, Eduard, attempts to focus so directly on the personal that the historical context is nearly absent.

Are All Holocaust Books the Same?

When I said I’ve read a lot of books about the Holocaust, I mean I’ve read so many that I’ve lost count. In my early teens I was so interested to understand the depths of human depravity that I read every Holocaust memoir and novel I could get my hands on. Kids in school called me a Nazi because I carried around a copy of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich for weeks trying to understand the history as well as the personal stories.

But aside from a few snippets of Anya by Susan Fromberg Schaeffer and images of a Jewish girl dying her hair in a barn from a book whose title I can’t even remember, the stories ran together in my mind. Each ghetto was individual. Each child who was saved or died was an individual with a full life of potential. But I could not then (and cannot now process) that many individual horrors. The events are too big. The lives lost too many. The closest I’ve come in recent years was reading Tadeusz Borowski’s This Way for the Gas Ladies and Gentlemen back to back with Fatelessness by Imre Kertesz and letting myself be jarred by the juxtaposition between Borowski’s story of unloading prisoners at Auschwitz and Kertesz’s description of being unloaded.

So no, all Holocaust books are not the same, but I can understand Kiš’s desire to try and tell a different kind of story.

How do You Write Around the Holocaust?

“You can’t play the victim all your life without in the end becoming one.” – Danilo Kiš

My absolute favorite part of Garden, Ashes is the first chapter. Kiš begins his book with a description of summer days and Andi’s mother carrying in a tray of honey and cod-liver oil which he describes as the “amber hues of sunny days, thick concentrates full of intoxicating aromas.” This first passage ends with how the children would on rainy days, “sad and disappointed, hating to get up, we would back under the covers to sleep through a day that had started badly.”

This contrast between sunny and rainy days continues throughout the first chapter and I realized (too late perhaps) that Kiš was building a metaphor. He’s telling a story that ever so subtly illustrates the differences between life before the war and life during the war. When he writes about how Fraulein Weiss could not be killed–not by the Titanic, her suicide attempt, or the numerous carts that had run over her–he is writing about surviving through the worst whether you want it or not.

Then the chapter, yes, this is all in one short chapter, turns toward the last days of summer when the leaves are changing color and Andi’s mother “had a peculiar presentiment about the advent of autumn” that leads them to jump on the last train and then “the dark cloud was upon us and rain began to patter down.” When they return to town, Kiš begins to use military language like the “signs of autumn’s offensive” that surround them. And then his mother announces the death of an unknown uncle and it seems as though the rest is inevitable.

By continuing to use metaphors, Kiš manages to write an entire book about this family and their experiences in the war that hardly ever mentions the war directly. I began to notice moments when he mentioned his mother but not his father. I felt fear and dread every time a train journey was mentioned. When Andi describes how his relatives are leaving, I wonder if they are going into exile or being deported to camps.

Is Kiš Successful?

“The eternity of the world and the worthlessnes of my own life within this enormous passage of time had become obvious, almost palpable.” – Danilo Kiš

I found this book maddening. The metaphors were amazing and the writing was gorgeous. But there were moments I simply wanted to know what was happening. The historical context is there, imprinted in our minds. But still, I wanted the personal details. I looked for direct mentions of the war, of which there are very few, and clung to them like a buoy. I wanted to know how Andi who clearly had a Jewish father avoided being picked up by the Gestapo. I had trouble distinguishing between his father’s emotional absences and his physical ones.

If you are a more careful reader than I am, one who absorbs information over time, Kiš will knock your socks off with Garden, Ashes. I have a feeling the book is rife with metaphors I’ll never uncover. But even with all the context I have on the Holocaust, I needed this book not to tiptoe as much around the topic. I needed to not wonder whether Eduard Scham had survived or not.

I think Kiš really wanted to create a new kind of narrative about the Holocaust, one that was about life and not death. I admire that. I really do. But some things are too big. We do not have to allow ourselves to be crushed by them, but we do have to look at them head on.

If you want to see how to write around traumatic events, pick up a copy of Garden, Ashes from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Blowing Apart Language in Joie de Vivre by Lisa Jarnot

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What I wanted to do this evening is hide out in my basement and continue to ignore my writing. I had a really wonderful burst of creativity in Port Townsend two weeks ago, but it’s easier to keep that notebook closed than to actually look at the poems this evening (writers, this is not how you finish a project). Anyway, I made myself flip through the stack of book I’m planning to review and in it I found Joie de Vivre: Selected Poems 1992-2012 by Lisa Jarnot, and I’m so glad I did. From the very first page her poems shocked me and engaged me and made me want to read on. Now I know why I keep finding this book on the floor of my office–the fates have been throwing it at me for weeks, but I wasn’t ready to catch it. Here’s how this book shook me right out of my funk.

Step One: Read a Book Aloud

“I am ebbing in and out, I am dreaming dreams I hardly know and have tattoos, I am dreaming dreams outside of dreams and fish tanks and the spanishest of music.” – Lisa Jarnot, from “Sea Lyrics”

Reading a book aloud is a luxury. It’s slower and can be taxing on the vocal cords. It also requires solitude (or patience from your housemates). But reading aloud, especially a certain kind of poetry, is worth the effort. I found myself slipping into a southern drawl as I pronounced each of Jarnot’s words. I learned things about the way her poems worked when I spoke more or different words than are on the page. While I wouldn’t recommend reading War and Peace aloud anytime soon, reading a really good poem (or book of poetry) is a great way to (re)awaken your love of language.

Step Two: Throw Your Sentences in a Blender

“Blood in my eyes followed by truck in motel. either severely or proper. followed by police activity. followed by truck in. followed by followed by. followed by truck in motel. at the library. at the truck in motel. at the of.” – Lisa Jarnot, from “blood in my eyes”

This is not the right book for a lot of people, but the poems in this book, especially the selections from Some Other Kind of Mission accosted me with language. And I was grateful. They are filled with jarring compositions and staccato, unfinished sentences that leave room for me to leak into their interstices and complete the stories. I felt challenged by these poems and I wanted to hate them for their rawness and simplicity, but I kept falling in love with the richness of their repetition and the way the sentences evolved. They rocked my world and made me consider each word and each phrase and each mark of punctuation in a way that will help me write and edit both more carefully and more creatively in the future.

The repetition isn’t always as artful, and “molecules, selling crawfish” went too far toward the comical for me.

“Molecules, selling crawfish. selling selling crawfish. selling crawfish selling. wrecked in crawfish selling highway.” – Lisa Jarnot, from “molecules, selling crawfish”

But when the repetition works (which is more often than not) the anaphora and epistrophe and straight up repetition is pure magic. And in poems like “Greyhound Ode” the whimsy works better for me.

Step Three: Leave Your Work Open for Interpretation

Something else I loved about this book was the way the selected poems, again, especially those from Some Other Kind of Mission, bled into one another. There were no titles on the pages of that section and Jarnot uses unusual words like “meticules” and “tern” and “firs” over and over so that the poems can be read as one continuous narrative. But they are also individually constructed and each can stand on its own. I loved how that engaged me as a reader and I could feel myself making choices about how I wanted to read the book.

I didn’t love the poems later in the book as much as I loved the early ones, but I can see how Jarnot has been evolving over the years and playing with new ideas and forms. I appreciate a writer’s willingness to change and grow even while maintaining a few signatures. For Jarnot I’d say those signatures are that gorgeously evolving repetition of phrase and her ability to create images like “upon the moon in silver deep.”

What writers shake you out of your writing funk or challenge you to rethink everything? I’m going to build a list for nights like these.

If you need to shake up the way you see language, pick up a copy of Joie de Vivre from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

A Tightrope of Tension in Life of Pi by Yann Martel

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life of pi - yann martelI’m pretty sure I’m the last person on the planet to read Life of Pi by Yann Martel, but if I’m wrong and you haven’t yet read it, skip this review until you have. It will be full of spoilers and I hate to ruin good books. What impressed me most about this book was Martel’s ability to maintain tension in a novel that is literally lost at sea.

Introduction

I stayed away from this book for a long time because I like to read books on my own terms without any hype or intervention. And when people would tell me, “It’s this amazing book about a boy on a lifeboat with a tiger, but it’s really about God,” I thought it sounded weird but kept the name for future reference. When the Ang Lee film came out, I could see that it was going to be beautiful and knew I had to see it on the big screen (which meant being subject to Hollywood’s schedule). The movie was stunning and I’m not sorry I saw it, but I also think seeing it before reading the book robbed me of some of the book’s brilliance. I picked up the book this week because I wanted a story, something I could rely on.

Let’s talk about that paragraph I just wrote. It’s long, ambling. It covers a lot of time but doesn’t really have a center. The ideas are there, but it’s not tight and it could definitely be edited down. I bet you even skimmed part of it. I would have. In contrast, Martel’s intro to Life of Pi is tight. The first 50 pages of the book cover all the backstory of an Indian family with a zoo who is moving the zoo animals and themselves to the Western Hemisphere. It covers the story of a boy’s life and his experience as a religious omnivore. It even has an essay on the relationship between animals and humans. But it’s not messy, it’s enthralling.

So how does Martel do it? How does he keep the reader’s interest as he lays all this groundwork. I think it’s precisely the messiness that is so fascinating. But he does have an organizing principle–he uses the author’s introduction to frame for us that this is a story that will make us believe in God (a pretty encompassing idea anyway) and then he lets Pi Patel speak. And it’s no accident that the authorial interjections are more frequent at the beginning, he’s still framing the story for us and interpreting what these divergent threads might someday form, but once we’re hooked, he lets us hear directly from Pi.

Promising a Happy Ending

Would you read a book about a boy who has lost his entire family adrift on the ocean and in mortal danger every minute of every day? I wouldn’t. And I love depressing books. Page after page you’d have no idea if he’s going to get saved or not and eventually your hope would wear thin. You might abandon it before the boy gets saved or eaten.

So why do we read and love this book? Why do we recommend it to friends? Martel very smartly controlled the emotional stakes of the story. We know from the beginning that Pi survives. We don’t know how and we’re still curious as hell about this tiger thing, but we are free to hope. The most ingenious part of this emotional buoying for me was how just before we actually see Pi get lost at sea, Martel describes his family today, and then he writes, “This story has a happy ending.” Wow.

Would I suggest you do this with any other book? Absolutely not. But in a story where despair could be truly overwhelming, it was a genius move.

Keeping the Tension at Sea

Pi is adrift for a very long time. That’s another tricky proposition for a writer. How on earth do you keep readers engaged in what must be the most mind-numbing of days? Here Martel divides up the experience into little sections and each is tightly wound around one idea. There is the quest to get fish and observations of birds. He includes descriptions of distilling and collecting water and other essential knowledge for survival at sea. Oh, and there’s the tiger, Richard Parker.

Richard Parker is essential to maintaining tension out at sea, but even that could get dull for a reader over time. What was interesting for me was how Martel shifted the relationship between Pi and the animals. We get to experience with him the initial uncertainty, the pervasive fear, and the eventual reigning and caretaking. But even when Richard Parker is “tamed,” he’s still a wild animal capable of anything, and Martel doesn’t let us forget that either. All it takes is one swipe of that large claw to refocus our innate survival instincts.

But it’s About God?

What I did lose on the ocean in the book that I did not lose in the movie was the sense of God. At the end I do prefer the allegory to the events retold with human players. But I missed the direct connection with religions that Pi had been experiencing early in the book. And maybe the point is that God is everything and we can’t filter God through a religion. Maybe I need to think about it some more.

I’ve heard told that you know you are done editing a book when you run through one draft and add in commas and on the next draft you’re taking them back out. Life of Pi is that tightly edited and I loved that about it. In some ways the organization of a book that can have exactly 100, naturally segmented chapters with nothing missing and nothing superfluous makes me believe in perfection, order, and destiny. And maybe that’s the part of God I’m looking for right now.

If you still haven’t read Life of Pi, pick up a copy from Powell’s Books. Then read it when you are ready for it. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Building a Hybrid Memoir in Mother Departs by Tadeusz Różewicz

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Tadeusz Różewicz Mother DepartsI was offered Barbara Bogoczek’s translation of Mother Departs by Tadeusz Różewicz for review I think because of my interest in Poland and, of late, Polish poetry. But what made me read the book this week was flipping through and seeing that mix of shapes of text on the page that belongs uniquely to hybrid forms. Since reading W.G. Sebald, I’ve been interested in the way writers transcend the boundaries of their genres using hybrid forms and I thought this book might help me experiment with that a bit myself.

What I didn’t realize until reading the introduction is that the book is actually a compilation of Różewicz’s poetry, essays by his mother and brother, and selected family pictures. The result is a wonderfully polyphonic memoir as the voices harmonize to tell a greater story. And although the emphasis is on the family, the narrative is deeply influenced by the fascinating period in Polish history starting before World War I and ending just after the fall of communism.

On Polish Peasantry

At first reading the childhood recollections of Różewicz’s mother, Stefania Różewicz, was somewhat jarring. Her sentences are much shorter than his and her observations more quotidian. But I soon ceased to care about the writing itself because the stories were so interesting and, to me, personal. She was a Polish peasant at the same time that my grandfather’s parents were peasants in nearby Ukraine. As she describes how desperately poor the families were – taking babies to the fields and sending young children abroad to work – I started to imagine for the first time the circumstances my family had lived in and why they likely fled to work in Pennsylvania coal mines. I also thought back to stories my adoptive Polish grandmother (from when I was on foreign exchange in Poland) had told me about her childhood. This book made all of those stories come alive for me.

Stefania Różewicz does a lovely job of immersing the reader in her mode of life. And later in the book when she finally owns a purely decorative vase, the exquisite luxury of that one simple object is enthralling. It made me think about my relationship with material objects and consumption for its own sake.

Selected Poems

The language in Różewicz’s poetry is relatively simple and his imagery isn’t especially evocative. I think without the context of his mother’s narrative, I wouldn’t have found it at all remarkable. But within the context of her story, his poems come alive. Because I was seeing the Różewicz’s story from a myriad of angles, I began to feel like I was a member of Różewicz family.

mother in the photograph
is still young beautiful
smiles slightly

but on the back
I read written
in her hand the words
‘year 1944 cruel to me’

in the year 1944
the Gestapo murdered
my older brother

we concealed his death
from mother
but she saw through us
and concealed it
from us
– Tadeusz Różewicz from “The Photograph”

By focusing on the emotional push-pull of sharing and concealing information surrounding the death of Różewicz’s beloved brother, I saw both the importance of tacit understanding in the family and the depth of love in that silence.

A Mourning Diary

The heart of the book is Różewicz’s “Gliwice Diary” a record of the time he was attending to his dying mother. This section spans just a few months of her decline and yet it conveys the depths of both love and despair he’s experiencing as his mother passes slowly away. Some of the most beautiful moments are watching him try to cope with her impending death by making his art ever better.

“I am at rock bottom. That’s almost funny. There are no rocks here, it would be hard to explain even to somebody close what I mean. I am at rock bottom. Used up rhetorical phrase, says nothing. And still… I know there’s no sense or value to what I’m writing. But I must not scream.” – Tadeusz Różewicz

But there is sense to what he’s writing and this section struck me as a more emotive and poignant version of A Mourning Diary by Roland Barthes. The death of a loved one is something we all hope never to experience, but most likely will. I was glad to see another example of how a writer can turn even the worst of times into art.

Hybrid Forms

“You ought to be writing one single novel or play or one volume of poems all through your life” – Tadeusz Różewicz

The various viewpoints coalesce beautifully in this book. I think if Różewicz hadn’t focused so tightly around his mother, the book would have felt more sprawling. Instead that focus reminded me of Colette’s My Mother’s House. Mother Departs is certainly less whimsical, but it’s no less personal and poignant. And whereas Colette speaks from one viewpoint and completely in prose, Różewicz allows the reader to form his or her own relationship with the entire family. And readers of prose and poetry will find an entry point into this narrative.

If you want to learn more about Różewicz’s family, pick up a copy of Mother Departs from Powell’s. Your purchase supports a wonderful independent bookstore and your faithful reviewer.

On Writing and Loneliness with Clarice Lispector

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Clarice Lispector The Hour of the StarI’ve been fussy lately. Nothing I’ve read since Antunes has really pleased me. I spent most of the long weekend making must-do lists and then wandering from room to room to avoid them. I haven’t been out, but I haven’t rested either. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me.

Then last night I started writing a letter to a beloved friend and writer – someone with whom I am honest about my process – more honest than I am with myself – and who is also constantly seeking her center. And I realized how much I have let the outside world get in the way of my writing. So today I’m going back to the basics and re-reading Clarice Lispector, a writer to whom I can return again and again and always find something new and who also reminds me of how I fell in love with her the first time. In the process, I learned something about the balance of living outside and inside myself.

How I Came to Lispector

“I am forced to seek a truth that transcends me.” – Clarice Lispector

My advisor, Micheline Aharonian Marcom, first introduced me to Lispector. We read snippets of her breathtaking short fictions in class. I remember feeling deliciously lost in those stories that were not what I expected stories to be – in a writer who was at once writing a narrative about a character and writing about writing. She was breaking all the rules and yet here she was introduced to me as a model. Micheline freed me with that recommendation (and so many others, she also introduced me to Antunes).

So although I was surprised this morning to find a recording of Micheline reading Lispector aloud, I wasn’t surprised that it would be an echo of Micheline that would gently lead me back to where I needed to be.

The Hour of the Star

I wasn’t at all particular which book by Lispector I would choose for my hermitage this morning, so it’s interesting that my hand settled on The Hour of the Star, a novella, rather than one of the stories that Micheline read from. I was surprised when I opened the book that I hadn’t marked it up at all the first time I read it. Normally my books are wildly annotated with different colors of ink and my own system of symbols. I think I didn’t appreciate this book the first time I read it.

How could I have missed the allegory of artist and muse? Much of the first part of the book is taken up with the narrator trying to tell us about this innocent creature (Macabea) who has imprisoned his thoughts. The juxtaposition between his overly self-aware state and her blissful ignorance is instructive and compelling. The writing has so much in common with Fernando Pessoa’s insightful fragments that I began to wonder why the Portuguese are calling to me right now in their language that is at once familiar and foreign.

“The question ‘Who am I?’ creates a need. And how does one satisfy that need? To probe oneself is to recognize that one is incomplete.” – Clarice Lispector

The Hour of the Star is a story of beginning to want and how desires make us human. I could identify Macabea’s first forays into wanting something for herself – they were akin to how I felt when I first saw words that described my inner being on the page. And like Macabea, I was willing to identify myself in those others for awhile. The trouble and the wonder began when I started to realize that I could create those words for myself – when the world opened up to me and I had to start making my own choices.

It’s a tiny and yet wild little book. There is none of the restraint I love so much in writers like Ishiguro. But I love this book for its chaos. And it’s as much about letting go of our characters as it is about embracing ourselves. Watching the lonely artist narrator live through solitary Macabea as she grew into a creature with wants and needs, I saw some of my own trials and faults as a writer and a person.

On Loneliness and Writing

“I need the pain of loneliness to make my imagination work. And then I’m happy.” – Orhan Pamuk

I try not to think about loneliness too much in my daily life. Instead I fill my days with anything that could possibly keep it at bay. But I read Stephen Fry’s essay on loneliness recently and I saw in his restlessness my own. Growing up I learned that if I felt lonely, I was failing to appreciate the wealth of people around me. But I think it’s really the opposite. When I am most lonely is when I am failing to appreciate the wealth inside of me. And the more alone I feel, the more I reach outside of myself hoping that my beloved friends can console me – when really only I can console myself. Like Pamuk, the loneliness actually feeds me as a writer. But only when I let it.

“My strength undoubtedly resides in solitude. I am not afraid of tempestuous storms or violent gales for I am also the night’s darkness.” – Clarice Lispector

So I am learning from Pamuk, Lispector, and Fry to embrace the solitude and to cherish the people who respect it. When I do emerge from my office and my fog, I’m a far more interesting and kind person. After taking that time to invest in myself I have more to offer as an artist and a friend.

The Life of a Working Writer

“So long as I have questions to which there are no answers, I shall go on writing.” – Clarice Lispector

I can’t devote all my time to reading and to writing, I have to work and this, like so many, is a big week. In some ways I resent the time spent away from my passions, but I also know that the framework of constraints (combined with a reliable income) are things that can fuel my work, when I let them. So in a way I feel like I wasted these four days, but I also feel like by allowing myself the space to do nothing I managed to clean my office and my mind and get myself back on the track of writing.

And next weekend, if I have the energy, I will seek out the place where I began as a human and as a writer. I’ll go back to Port Townsend where I was conceived and visit Goddard, the school where I started to accept myself as an artist. I might pop into some student readings, but I know the space where I existed was as much a time and a confluence of people as it was a place. Still, that peninsula holds magic for me. And I might seek out Micheline or I might simply enjoy escaping to the hill and immersing myself in her newest book. I might run into friends new and old, but for the first time I won’t be planning around them.

I am learning to look inside myself for the things I have asked for from others. I still cherish my friends and need their companionship and gentle reminders when I’m off track. I watch them and learn from them as I think they do me, but I am learning to sustain myself as an artist and as a person.

I don’t know what the balance is between immersion and letting go, between me and you, but I am learning. Better yet, I am writing.

If this review made you want to read Lispector, pick up a copy of The Hour of the Star from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission. Consider also picking up a copy of Micheline’s latest book A Brief History of Yes. My copy arrives on Wednesday and I can’t wait to discuss it with you.