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A Tightrope of Tension in Life of Pi by Yann Martel

July 21, 2013 by Isla McKetta, MFA 2 Comments

I’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 Bookshop.org. 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

July 17, 2013 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

I 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.

On Writing and Loneliness with Clarice Lispector

July 7, 2013 by Isla McKetta, MFA 11 Comments

I’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 Bookshop.org. 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.

Red Horses and the Art of the Prequel

July 3, 2013 by Isla McKetta, MFA 5 Comments

Can you ever read a prequel for its own sake? Reading Red Horses by Donna Lynch, I knew it was a prequel for Lynch’s debut novel Isabel Burning and that it elaborates on the history of the Grace family. But having not read the other book, I was interested to see if Red Horses could be successful on its own merits.

Does the Book Stand on its Own?

The first few pages of the book are very compelling. You are introduced to Anastascia Millerovo, a “carrier of souls” days after her father’s death in Victorian London. She visits his attorney to find that she has inherited a large sum of money, her father’s journal, and a husband should she choose to accept the young Mr. Grace. I presume that’s where this book ties to Isabel Burning in that this is the origins of that family. It feels like Lynch chose for this prequel to go straight to the ancestry without mucking about interweaving this story with the last. I’m grateful for that, because it did allow me to read this book on its own, even though the fact that it is a prequel never left my mind.

Is the Writing Good?

Lynch creates some compelling characters in this tortured family saga. Much of the action of the book takes place inside Vladimir Millerovo’s journal as he meets and falls in love with Anastascia’s mother. But it’s not a simple love story and there is as much hate as there is love between the characters. It’s interesting to watch the lovers travel from hardship to hardship across Europe and eventually to the Caribbean. I did wish I got to know Anastacia more throughout the book, because the introduction to her was so compelling.

The description can be a little over the top sometimes with it’s magical moodiness, especially if you’re used to literary fiction, but it doesn’t go too far for my tastes and I enjoyed reading this type of book again for the way that magic opens up a world. Sometimes I even wanted it to be more magical and to really see what Anastascia’s powers could do.

And there were times when I wanted to slap Anastacia’s mother for not taking more control of her life, but it’s never fair to judge a Victorian woman’s circumstances by modern standards.

Will You Want to Read More?

Yes. I’m not quite sure how Isabel fits into this whole scenario. I did want to see if Anastascia’s powers develop more in Isabel Burning and now that I’ve read the backstory, I’m very curious to see where Lynch’s initial inspiration lay.

Red Horses will be released in August, so you have time to read Isabel Burning first if you want to, but it’s not necessary. The book is currently available for pre-order directly from the publisher.

War, Sex & Antonio Lobo Antunes in The Land at the End of the World

June 30, 2013 by Isla McKetta, MFA 10 Comments

There are a very few writers I turn to when I really need something that is guaranteed to blow my writing mind. On one end I turn to Italo Calvino for the prismatic layers beneath his concise language and on the opposite end is the lusciously messy work of Antonio Lobo Antunes, and neither has disappointed me yet. I often hold back from reading these authors, admiring them for months before ever opening them. I’m always slightly worried that this will be the book that lets me down. The Land at the End of the World by Antonio Lobo Antunes rocked my world.

The Experience of Being a Soldier

“Listen. Look at me and listen, I so need you to listen, to listen with the same anxious attention with which we used to listen to the calls on the radio from the company under fire.” – Antunes

I’ve never been to war, but Antunes has. He was a Portuguese medic during the war in Angola, and through his writing, I got a different sense of how war affects a soldier than I had from soldiers turned writers like Tim O’Brien and Joe Haldeman. Both O’Brien and Haldeman convey the arbitrariness and unending quality of war along with a kind of stony acceptance as they write about being inside a war.

By setting this book (which draws on his own experiences) after the war, Antunes shows the lingering after effects of war on a human life. Along with some realities of the field hospital, the narrator shares how the war undid him as a person, stripped him of his family, and left him in this bar night after night telling the same tale.

“That’s what I have become, that’s what they have made of me, Sofia, a cynical, prematurely old creature laughing at himself and at others with the bitter, cruel, envious laughter of the dead, the silent, sadistic laughter of the dead, the repulsive, oily laughter of the dead, and all the while I’m rotting away inside, by the light of the whisky I’ve drunk, just as the photos in albums rot, regretfully, dissolving very slowly into a blur of mustaches.” – Antunes

One passage reminded me directly of the epistrophe in the opening of O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato, which reads in part, “Pederson was dead and Rudy Chassler was dead. Buff was dead. Ready Mix was dead. They were all among the dead.” Antunes writes, “It was late January, it was raining, and we were going to die, we were going to die and it was raining, raining.” Instead of simply repeating words at the end, Antunes twists those repetitions into something even more magical, but the results are still devastating and they linger in my mind.

In the Land of Sex and War

“I’m traveling the gentle geography of your body, the river of your voice the cool shade of your hands.” – Antunes

What surprised me most about this book was how sexy it was. But the more the narrator tries to lose himself in this woman he’s brought home from the bar, the more his memories are drawn back to the war which makes the liaisons in Portugal seem sadder and somehow makes the ones in Angola (as the narrator and his fellow soldiers try to find comfort in the arms of women) sweeter. The language is gorgeous as the inception of life merges with the end of it.

“I like the way breasts perform a kind of flanking maneuver and rise indifferently to the tremulous, eager height of my kisses.” – Antunes

The Voice of Antonio Lobo Antunes

“The novels as yet unwritten accumulated in the attic of my mind like ancient bits of apparatus reduced to a pile of disparate parts that I would never manage to put together again.” – Antunes

Antunes has a way of weaving two (or more) spaces in time together in the same breath that is unequaled, so I wasn’t surprised to see him do that here with scenes from the war in Angola and moments years later in a bar. What I was surprised by was the images he created with words like “cotton syllables that dissolve in the ear just as the remnants of a piece of candy do on the curled shell of the tongue” and drumbeats that are “concertos of panicking, tachycardiac hearts, only restrained by the darkness from galloping wildly off in the direction of their own anxiety.” Of course, some of this has to be due to the marvelous translation of Margaret Jull Costa, but every sentence made me reconsider my own language. I read the book very slowly because of this, but I loved every second of it.

The Aftermath of War

Did you ever have a dessert so delicious you couldn’t bear to eat another bite for fear of spoiling the flavor on your tongue? I tried to open another book after The Land at the End of the World, but I knew nothing would be quite as good. I leafed through a book of poetry but had to put it aside because I knew I was still immersed in Antunes. Even now, a week later, I had to resort to reading a really familiar book just to have something to read that wasn’t going to compete with his writing. Read this book, if you dare, but know that it will change you and likely your writing forever. I’m looking forward to it.

If you want to get lost in this book like I did, pick up a copy of The Land at the End of the World from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.