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

Bernard Malamud Sums Up a Life in The Assistant

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Bernard Malamud recounts a few years in the life of a shopkeeper and his family in The Assistant. Morris Bober is a poor immigrant who runs a grocery in New York that was once successful. Morris’s money troubles are the ground condition of the novel and Malamud concisely and completely uses the details of the first few pages to set up the hardship Morris under he is running his store.

Working Against the Elements

The novel opens with a wind that “already clawed” as Morris pulls in heavy cases of milk before dawn. The action is simple, he is opening his store, but already the reader sees how early he is at work and the reader feels the unpleasantness with Morris as the wind “flung his apron into his face.” His first customer of the day offers complaints and three pennies before he can even turn on the heat in the store.

Hungry and Bored

Morris continues to set up the store “chewing on a roll, not tasting what he was eating” as he waits for his next anticipated customer to come in and spend his customary twenty-seven cents. The reader sees Morris in stasis. He is subsisting (on the roll) but he has no sentient pleasure (the taste). Most of all, this second mention of a dollar (or rather a cents) figure sets up the expectation for the reader that each of these meager pennies counts for Morris. He is hungry for the cash, not the roll.

A Sympathetic Character

Then a little girl comes in asking for credit. The reader already feels with Morris what a hardship this is. At first he refuses her, but she cries and he give in. Morris is not an unkind man. When he records the debt, he has to fudge the figures for his wife. This is the first mention of Morris’s family and why he might be working so hard. It also sets up a constraint in that despite how valuable each penny is, it is more valuable to him to not upset his wife than it is to collect the correct amount. Malamud writes, “His peace—the little he lived with—was worth forty-two cents.”

No Escape

Sitting at the counter, Morris observes how “the store looked like a long dark tunnel.” There is no escape from this store or from his life except the final escape. In fact throughout the book, Morris looks at many possible ways to escape the store, but because of his honor and his obligations (along with some bad luck) the only way he eventually escapes the store is through the long dark tunnel into the light.

Swimming with Sharks

Morris continues to wait for his twenty-seven cent customer who is also his tenant, but the tenant has gone to another store for his groceries. Competition recurs throughout the book as the perceived success of the competition shapes Morris’s relationship with his assistant and constrains Morris’s lifestyle. The threat of other stores holds Morris’s livelihood in by a thread and it likewise holds the store by a thread.

Morris considers selling in these first few pages as he does again and again throughout the book, but he always comes to the same conclusion, “[B]ut who would buy?” The reader can feel the dreariness of this world closing in. There is no escape from the misery of this store or this life.

The Smallest of Rewards

The section ends as two customers come in and buy sixty-three cents and then forty-one cents of goods from Morris. “He had earned his first cash dollar for the day.” Because Malamud has detailed the long list of activities Morris has done before this moment and gone over the many threats to the sparse living he makes, the smack of the sum total of one dollar in receipts for the day is stunning. I felt how hard and long Morris had to work for that one dollar, and the drudgery leading up to that revelation said more about Morris and his life than I imagined it could. Although inflation has changed the value of a dollar since the fifties when this book was written, the figure of one dollar remains iconic.

Because Malamud made Morris a good man and a hard-working man, I wanted to sympathize with him. I felt wrapped up in his plight. I worried that there was no escape. And because he set it all up in these first few pages, I was able to carry all of these concerns throughout the book. I have heard it said many times that the seeds of the novel are in the first few pages or in the first chapter, but I haven’t noticed it so acutely before. The beauty of how Malamud sets up the book is that it is very simple and straight forward. It doesn’t feel set up; it feels like a story unfolding. It feels like the start of a day and it doesn’t feel explained, but everything the reader needs to know is there. The story is shaped in those first few pages.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of The Assistant from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

The Quiet Menace of Inner China by Eva Sjödin

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inner-china-eva-sjodin-coverFrequent readers of this blog will know how much I appreciate spare language. Inner China by Eva Sjödin and translated from the Swedish by Jennifer Hayashida shows brilliantly just how much horror can be wrought with the sparest of language. The story of two small children who hide in the woods to escape sexual abuse is remarkably restrained. And therein lies the power of this poetry.

The Sound of Poetry

The narrator, the protector whispers to her mute sister:

Dark hard. — And quiet, I say. Not a word to Mother, not to anyone.
Get it.
Otherwise you are dead dead.

Those sentences take on the feeling of a heartbeat when you are so scared and small that the biggest sound in the world is your heart is pounding in your chest and your ears. The staccato two beats of “Dark hard,” “Get it,” and “dead dead” are so simple and so strong.

Words Rushing Together

Throughout the book, Sjödin takes what would normally be a list of items and removes the punctuation as in, “Nettles brushwood thistles grow down towards the river.” The cumulative effect of these run-on lists is the feeling of rushing and running away. There’s an immediacy and she uses it judiciously.

The Power of an Image

Sjödin also uses simple yet unusual images in Inner China. The narrator describes how she and her sister are “empty inside like carbonation.” A soda is usually a happy thing for a child and many delight in the fizzing and sparkle, but here she sees the other side of that and I wondered, worried, that something as simple as a soda pop was part of their torment. Though why I should cling to the idea of a soda among all the other pleasures of life these girls have foregone…

Quiet Menace and Denial

As much as I read about suffering and sadness, sexual abuse and rape are topics I usually avoid. It’s easy for the writer to slip into what I feel is description for the sake of titillation, and I just can’t bear it. Sjödin does none of that. She provides very little description of the acts. Instead, she builds a feeling of menace. Early in the book she writes, “There is someone who eats children eats children” and combines it euphemistically with “He sticks it to me on the sly.” It’s clear what is happening to these girls, but the language is pulled back just enough that I found myself denying what was happening for much of the book. This adds another layer I felt like I could have been the mother of those girls, refusing to see what was in front of me.

Know Your Recommender

I adore recommending books, it’s like sharing an intimate part of your soul, but I’m only just now learning to reach out to friends to create reading lists for me. Inner China was recommended by Gwendolyn Jerris, a gentle and poetic soul who is likely to hide the things that really hurt but will tell you the real truth if you ask her. Invaluable qualities in an artist and a friend. I asked Gwendolyn because I knew I needed something quiet that spoke loudly and boy did she deliver. Don’t wait as long as I did to start asking for what you need. Your fellow readers are wonderful resources and sometimes what scares you most is just the right thing.

The Importance of Difficult Books

I will not deny that this is a difficult book to read. In fact I wouldn’t recommend it to most people just for the sheer emotional impact of it. I’ve kept it nearby in my office in the days since reading the book I think because I knew it wasn’t done with me. And I wasn’t going to write about it for this blog, but it is a beautifully written book. And it’s important sometimes to read outside your comfort zone in order to stretch and grow as a writer. I am grateful that Gwendolyn trusted me enough as a reader to recommend this book. Writers like Grace Paley can show you how to unpack an image in a few spare words, but even she got shelved relatively quickly. I think I’ll be living with Sjödin on my coffee table for a good long while yet.

What books linger on your coffee table or next to your computer? What are they teaching you?

Heidi Julavits Rounds Out Peripheral Characters in The Vanishers

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Round, well-described characters are more interesting to readers. Knowing a character’s motivations and background helps a reader empathize with them and therefore engage with the story. But it’s easy to overdo detail, so many writers choose to focus detail on their central characters and write their peripheral characters as flat. They serve to move the story forward but don’t have too many needs of their own. In The Vanishers, Heidi Julavits achieves that perfect balance of characters who you can believe have off-page lives while not allowing those lives to distract from the narrative.

The book is about a motherless psychic, Julia, who may or not be under psychic attack from her mentor. The story is complicated and fascinating and involves a French feminist filmmaker who filmed women’s deaths (or not), a twisted mentor relationship, and Julia’s quest to find the truth about her mother’s death. I couldn’t say more without revealing some of the intricacies of the book, but I can tell you about Blanche, Julia’s stepmother who doesn’t feature prominently and is still essential to the feeling of the book.

Characterizing Blanche

Blanche is easily recognized as peripheral to Julia’s quest for information about her mother because she didn’t enter the family until much later. There isn’t even a hint in the book that Blanche might have been involved, which is nice, because that would have been distracting. While Julia is explicit about her stepmother’s role in her life, Julavits implies a lot through the brief description of this character. Blanche exists firmly in the post-crisis world. But instead of having Julia’s father pine for his dead wife, the presence of Blanche says as much about his decision to move on with his life as Blanche’s character does.

When Blanche arrived, our years preceding her arrival appeared, by contrast, a weary slog, a tiptoe, a blueness. And yet, with Blanche, there were boundaries. Blanche had never had children because she’d never wanted children. As much as she loved me, she did not desire to be my mother, in deference to my real one, yes, but also in deference to her own inclination to provide, for the needy, the occasional break from their lonely routine. She was the hired help, a hospice worker by trade, beloved by her patients and their families. She existed for me, too, as a temporary caretaker whose generosity was limitless because the job was not.

In one paragraph, Julavits sums up the entirety of this character, which is brilliant. But she also provides a negative of Julia’s mother. It’s a lot of work to do with one character who barely features in the rest of the book, but, as they say, every detail should be significant, and Julavits made the most of this character as she does with others like Miranda, Professor Yuen, and Patricia Ward.

Other Characterization Resources

There are many ways to build life into sideline characters. Dickens used names to shape his characters as with the benevolent Cheeryble Brothers in Nicholas Nickleby. Flaubert used class symbols to indicate a character’s place in the social strata. One of my favorite examples of characterization is how rumors of Jay Gatsby shape our impressions of that illusive figure.

While revising (and sometimes while writing this blog), I enjoy revisiting Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose who helped me understand Flaubert’s somewhat outdated class symbols. If you’re looking for a boost while revising work for characterization, dialogue, significant detail, and so much more, check it out.

What issues do you wrestle with in your writing? Drop a note in the comments and I’ll try to find a book that speaks to it so we can all learn to be better and better writers.

If this review made you want to stock up on books, pick up a copy of The Vanishers, Nicholas Nickleby, The Great Gatsby, or Reading Like a Writer from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Waiting for God with Simone Weil

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There is something enticing about the idea of a young girl who sees through religion and philosophy and straight to God. Perhaps I think so, anyway, because I always wanted to be such a girl—to understand this infinite universe. Enter Simone Weil. Though of Jewish heritage, she grew up in an agnostic home. Still, her writings on God in Waiting for God touched me much more deeply than those of St. Augustine.

Questioning

Weil so clearly believes in God and yet she cannot bring herself to join with the Catholic Church. She has great love and respect for the priest with whom she is corresponding in the book, but she cannot bring herself to give him what he most wants, which is to baptize her. I too grew up in an agnostic home. Answers are hard for me to trust and I don’t have a future as a philosopher, but questions help me find my own truths.

Weil was very keen on intellectual honesty and I wonder if that kept her apart from the faith she seemed to crave. At times she seems to thrive on that separation, and I wonder if her way of thinking would have changed had she not died so very young.

Inspiration is Everywhere

Waiting for God is a different sort of book than what I usually review here. Although Weil meant for the essays in the book to be published, the letters have a raw, searching emotion that feels less polished (even though the language is beautiful). I wonder if she would have edited down the letters if they had been published in her lifetime.

As much as I emphasize craft in the essays on this site, sometimes the first thing you have to do as an artist is follow your passions. There is ample time for craft, but without inspiration, you risk polishing the proverbial turd. Weil was a perfect read for me because the questions I ask myself offline are spiritual ones. There were times I agreed with her and times I didn’t, but the best moments are when she touched tangentially on something I’ve been grappling with subconsciously. Some of those are questions I haven’t even formed yet, but reading Weil and seeing how she wrestles with the same subjects opened me up to some of my own truths.

Books are amazing and I love them. But when you feel flat, sometimes you have to put down your book and either read something entirely different or do something different. You are an amazing vessel of creativity. Honor and fill that with a myriad of approaches to the subjects you love. I sat through a lecture on machine learning this week where I also saw glimmers of God.

The Language of Faith

Weil has a knack for little sentences with big meanings. In reading this book, I kept underlining and underlining her aphorisms, but even that wasn’t enough to feel like I was pulling her thoughts through my brain and soul in the way I wanted. I started writing sentences from the book and grouping like with like—repentance, distance, acceptance, center, and love—until I had a poem, what turns out is a cento. Here’s an excerpt of the rough draft:

(acceptance)
You do not refuse
to accept me
just as I am.
The capacity to give
one’s attention to a sufferer
is very rare thing, a miracle.

Never is a genuine effort
of attention
wasted.
I am tempted
to put myself entirely in your hands
and ask you
to decide for me. I was prevented
by a sort of shame.

Your charity.
You bore with me
for so long
with such gentleness.

And now that I’ve subjected you to my exercise in learning how to use line breaks, go read or do something that inspires you. I’m off to write that machine learning poem (which I will not make you read).

What are your go-to topics for inspiration? Do you prefer materials that help you question or ones that provide answers?

If you want Simone Weil to blow your mind, pick up a copy of Waiting for God from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Re-encountering Foreign Tongues with Ryszard Krynicki

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kamien szron - ryszard krynickiAlthough it’s been over a decade since I held a coherent conversation in Polish, I am still drawn to the language. Sometimes I watch dark movies filmed during Communism and sometimes I pick up books in Polish at used bookstores, thinking that I will someday read one. A few months ago, I saw Kamień, szron by Ryszard Krynicki at just such a bookstore and the shortness of the poems made me think this would be the Polish book I would finally read. And I did. Kind of.

Muddling Through

I enjoy reading poetry in languages I only somewhat remember even when the full meaning of the poems is lost on me. But it seemed natural because of National Poetry Month that today would be the day I’d test my Polish skills, so I sat down with the book and two dictionaries and began underlining and looking up words I didn’t understand. I read each poem aloud. I learned the language by ear and although the spelling is phonetic, Polish words contain a lot of consonants. Only by reading some of the words aloud do I realize how many of them I have at least heard. As I gained confidence (and got wrapped up in the book) I stopped looking words up and just enjoyed what I could read and infer.

What is Polish Poetry Like?

I’ve actually read a bit of Polish poetry in translation, including works by Zbigniew Herbert, Czesław Miłosz, Wisława Szymborska, and Adam Zagajewski. What Krynicki has in common with these poets (besides the fact that he owns a press that has published nearly all of them) is that many of his poems are about travel. Perhaps that’s one of the luxuries of living in Europe where the countries are so close together, but even US poets that I’ve read don’t remark nearly as often about visiting a new city. There is a sense of otherness in these poems as though Krynicki is rediscovering himself in relation to each new geographical location.

Like English-language poetry, however, Krynicki’s work refers often to the work of other poets. In particular, he calls out Paul Celan.

I don’t have enough background in Polish literature to remark on the forms Krynicki uses, but I loved the sound of his poetry. Despite what the plethora of consonants might make you think, Polish is actually a soft and musical language. It’s kind of ornate in its own way and because nouns have cases (as in Latin), there is no need for articles and the arrangement of words is more fluid. I can’t remark on whether Krynicki takes special advantage of these aspects of his language, but the poems flowed naturally.

Different Vantage Points

One of the things I enjoyed most about this book was the chance to see the world through the eyes of a different culture without the filter of a translator. In fact, one of my favorite lines in “Fragmenty z roku 1989” (Fragments from 1989), is radically different in the English translation I found online. The line is, “świta okaleczony świat” and my rough translation is “dawning of a crippled world” which has all kinds of fascinating implications when we think of the jubilation in the West when the Berlin Wall fell and the Iron Curtain was finally pulled back. I don’t think Krynicki was lamenting the downfall of Communism, but he was offering a more nuanced view of what this new world meant. The translation I found online, reads instead “Dawn, the color of the Seine, / color of wormwood and gall” which has a very different meaning.

If you’d like to read some of Krynicki’s poetry in English, I particularly recommend “A stone from the new world.”

I loved this exercise of stretching and remembering by challenging myself to read something I didn’t think I could. How do you stretch your language? Are you ever tempted to try out that high school French or Spanish by reading poems in their native languages?

The full text of Kamień, szron isn’t available in English that I know of, but you can purchase Ryszard Krynicki’s selected poems from Bookshop.org. Your purchase helps support indie bookstores and I receive a commission.