Books Archives - Page 35 of 53 - A Geography of Reading

Grace Paley: Choked with Meaning

January 27, 2013 by Isla McKetta, MFA 8 Comments

Grace Paley has a way of packing a lifetime into a sentence. In Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, her visceral metaphors drive home enough meaning to describe her characters fully using very few words.

Enormous Changes at the Last Minute

Two of the most powerful sentences Paley wrote in the title story of Enormous Changes at the Last Minute follow one another back to back: “He had had a habit throughout the twenty-seven years of making a narrow remark which, like a plumber’s snake, could work its way through the ear and down the throat, halfway to my heart. He would then disappear, leaving me choking with equipment.”

If Paley had not used the plumber’s snake analogy, the path of words “through the ear and down the throat, halfway to my heart” could be sweet or seductive or slippery, but the image of the plumber’s snake gives at once a wheedling and an invasive implication. I can see a man casually unrolling the long metal snake, maybe he’s smoking a cigarette. The snake goes farther and farther in, working toward her heart against her wishes and scraping the sides of the canal, and if it is one of the snakes with a claw at the end, doing further damage along the way.

If the next image were him reeling it back in, then I would think of all the filth along the length of the snake, but no, he leaves it in, clogging the canal and leaving his job memorably half-finished. Then there is the sexual connotation of the words “snake” and “equipment,” where the narrator is figuratively left full of the unwanted genitalia he unraveled inside her. Paley is showing how he got to the narrator, past her better judgment and then left her “choking” on the fact that he let him get to her again.

Faith in the Afternoon

In “Faith in the Afternoon,” Paley presents another sentence packed with meaning: “Faith really is an American and she was raised up like everyone else to the true assumption of happiness.” The “assumption of happiness” explains the uniquely American viewpoint Faith holds that we are entitled to a good life and that good things happen to good people. But assumption also has the connotation of rising to heaven in living form.

Paley is equating living in America with living in heaven which offers a stark contrast to Faith’s grandparents’ lives in Eastern Europe and the hell of the holocaust from which they fled. In a few simple words, Paley embodies the ideological differences that separate the generations.

Again in “Faith in the Afternoon,” we meet Bugsy. About her dereliction after meeting Ricardo and becoming a whore, Paley writes: “[s]he soon gave up spreading for the usual rewards, which are an evening’s companionship and a weekend of late breakfasts.” Bugsy would simply be a tragic figure if it weren’t for her place in the relationship as the former lover of Faith’s first husband.

Because of what happened to Bugsy, we see the potential ruin of Faith by her relationship with Ricardo. But in Faith’s attitude toward sex, we also see that she is getting paid though not with money and we start to wonder whether Faith escaped from her relationship with Ricardo as unscathed as we would like to think.

I love that Paley can say so much with so few words. The language she uses is always appropriate to the characters, but the words’ rich connotations imply worldliness. I love to use a good image when I can find one, and I hope I can imbue one with as many luscious possibilities as Paley does.

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

Reinventing Language with The God of Small Things

January 20, 2013 by Isla McKetta, MFA 2 Comments

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy - Cover

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

Discovering the True Grammar of a Story

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

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

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

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

Piecing Together a Fractured Narrative

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

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

Some Books Deserve a Quiet Weekend Alone

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

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

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

Living Under The Shadow of the Sun with Ryszard Kapuscinski

January 18, 2013 by Ann Hedreen 2 Comments

“More than anything, one is struck by the light,” is how Ryszard Kapuscinski begins The Shadow of the Sun: My African Life. “Light everywhere. Brightness everywhere. Everywhere, the sun.” By the end of this unclassifiable book—part journalism, part personal memoir, part travel epic—I felt as if the bright African sun was lodged in my head, turning its truth-telling beams on all my murky, dim, previously held assumptions about Africa.

Despite all the horror and sorrow of much of what Kapuscinski describes, something about the way he describes it all makes me want to go to Africa immediately. Other continents sound so gray, so predictable, after the riotous brightness of Kapuscinski’s Africa. Where else does the day begin with a sunrise “like a starter’s pistol: the town instantly springs into motion. It’s as if all night long everyone was crouching on his starter blocks and now, at the signal, at that shot of sunlight, they all take off full speed ahead.” Or with “the bell of the coffee seller, who each day at dawn walks up and down the streets of his district… The morning’s first cup is an occasion of greetings and salutations, of mutual assurances that the night passed happily, and of expressions of faith that this promises to be—Allah willing—a good day.”

Who Was Ryszard Kapuscinski?

Kapuscinski was the first correspondent ever sent to Africa by the Polish News Agency. His meager pay meant he could not sequester himself in elegant, post-colonial hotels and neighborhoods and this forced frugality became the secret to his success. He reported on Africa from the street, the bus, the thumbed ride in a creaky truck. He socialized with other correspondents but he used every opportunity that came his way, including spending time in a hospital being treated for malaria, to get to know Africans: not just heads of state but nurses and teachers and bayayes, the underemployed villagers who come from regions ravaged by drought or disease or war and live from one to day to the next on the streets of the cities.

His Polish identity freed him from the biases of his many European colleagues whose national histories included African colonization, or his American and Russian colleagues with their Cold War obsessions. But, he soon learned, his nationality was of little interest to most Africans, to whom he was simply white and therefore privileged.

Kapuscinski Immerses Himself in Africa

What did interest the Africans he met was his willingness to exist in African time, “a much looser concept, more open, elastic, subjective… Time appears as a result of our actions, and vanishes when we neglect or ignore it.” Kapuscinski’s bare bones modus operandi—one man, one notebook—and his lack of an expense account and the deadline pressure to go with it meant he could spend days hitchhiking across the Sahara or into the forests of Cameroon. It meant he could take the time to travel to the Ugandan village of a city friend: only 50 miles from Kampala but deep in the “lush, riotously overgrown, endlessly germinating, multiplying and seething” jungle. He sleeps on a mat on the floor and helps the children of the household fetch water in the morning “from a small, barely moving stream, overgrown with burdock and bulrushes.” He eats boiled green bananas for breakfast: a luxury reserved for guests in a village where one meal a day is the norm; one every two days during the dry season. It is from these vividly painted details that we begin to see the Africa not visible from the balconies of ex-pat hotels and compounds; the Africa of a closely observant writer.

But Kapuscinski was also there for nearly every declaration of independence and the decades of coups that followed. He does not flinch from violence; he looks for the street-level viewpoint: “A puddle of blood has congealed on the marble floor at the entrance. A bloodied djellabah is still lying next to it.” He writes about war in Eritrea, the massacres in Rwanda, the endless, violent coups in Liberia and the rise to power in Uganda of Idi Amin, a barely literate bayaye recruited off the streets by an army officer who was impressed by his “Herculean physique.”

The book’s final essay, “In the Shade of a Tree, in Africa,” is written as a kind of fable, a distillation of visits to hundreds of villages, as if what Kapuscinski most wants us to remember are not the dates and names that go with all the wars and coups but the transcendent essence of Africa: where a lone mango tree is a village gathering place, a symbol of constancy—and yet also a reminder of just how precarious life is, every day, for nearly everybody, as they search for, above all else, “shade and water, two fluid, inconstant things which appear and then vanish, who knows where.”

And then, the daily search over, comes the dark nightly wait for “Africa’s most dazzling moment… the break of day.” Which is where Kapuscinski leaves us: with the promise of another dawn.

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

Reading Locally with Lidia Yuknavitch and Jamie Ford

January 13, 2013 by Isla McKetta, MFA 2 Comments

Jessica Prentice created the word “locavore” to mean one who eats locally, but I propose a broader meaning—one who consumes locally. The Latin roots support this (“loca” is related to “locus” or “place” and “vore” means “eat” but also “devour”). Because I devour mostly books, I wanted to look at the benefits of reading locally using Dora: A Headcase by Lidia Yuknavitch and Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford as examples. Both books are set in Seattle where I make my home.

First of all, let me say that I’m unusually blessed living in Seattle. Other cities star more frequently in novels (New York and Paris come to mind), but something about Seattle—maybe because it’s smaller or because I feel like part of the amazingly rich and diverse literary community here—is more intimate. Or maybe it’s because you have to go out of your way to get here, so (unless you’re writing Twilight) authors usually visit the area to get to know the place before writing about it.

I could have written this post about any number of Seattle authors like Sherman Alexie or GM Ford (both of whom I’ve loved), but these two novels by Northwest authors crossed my path this week and they speak to such different geographies that I want to look at each of them here. So we’re on the same page, when I say geography, I mean the location and also the people who affect (and are affected by) the place.

Dora: A Headcase by Lidia Yuknavitch

Nearly every review you read about Dora: A Headcase begins with some version of the following phrase, “contemporary coming-of-age story based on Freud’s famous case study.” If I had known this, my reading of the book might have been more nuanced. But I didn’t. I went to the store in search of Yuknavitch’s memoir, The Chronology of Water, which I was unable to find. What they did have were several copies of Dora. I like the serendipity of discovering a book, so I bought and read this one without considering the back cover or the introduction. I may have missed a dimension of the book in doing so, but it didn’t dampen my enjoyment.

Yuknavitch’s characters capture the spirit of Seattle. Smart and angsty teen Dora showed me just how active a protagonist can be as she teams up with the wild gang of Obsidian, Ave Maria, and Little Teena to rage against convention and authority. I’ve seen people just like each of them on Capitol Hill. Dora has that well-to-do hipster with an angry edge vibe that is uniquely Seattle and the others are equally authentic. Dora’s uptight parents and more-rigid-than-he-ever-thought-he’d-be Dr. Siggy were also familiar and well-drawn, and it was easy to imagine them pushing carts through Trader Joe’s on Queen Anne.

Although the specifics of some locations in the city were treated with creative license, the essence of the neighborhoods is well portrayed. And when the action of the book moves to suburban Renton, the characters stand in even starker contrast to the landscape. I won’t spoil the story, but the shift in setting adds a whole new, very important, dimension to the book—a peek at what all us crazy city folk look like mere miles beyond our border.

The book is a very wild ride and I’d recommend it for those occasions when you are looking for a (legal) way to indulge in revenge.

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford

Jamie Ford’s Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet showcases a very different but equally real Seattle. Set primarily in the International District during World War II, the book tells the story of Chinese-American Henry and Japanese-American Keiko and a love that could not be.

The layered complexities of racial relations that Ford presents rival Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer, though this is a very different book. The detailed scenes revealed an aspect of Seattle history I’ve managed to mostly ignore until now. I’ve known about the Japanese internment for a long time, but only in an abstract way. Ford made the events and their impact real for me, even if the love story was a bit pat.

I have always been interested in World War II, but I usually read about the Holocaust and the European campaign. This book helped me put names and faces with experiences—wondering about the Moriguchi family (owners of Uwajimaya, which was in Tacoma until after the war) and what their life must have been like during the war.

I came away from this book with a deeper appreciation of Pioneer Square where I work and the International District where I sometimes shop. In any city, we are surrounded by more strangers than friends and books can help us understand a place even if we can never meet all of its characters. This is a great book to pick up if you want to find out more about events that rocked Seattle during an era that many people are still not talking about. It will make your next visit to the Wing Luke Museum (or even through the bus tunnel) all the richer.

My Writing

Geography was very important to me in writing my first book, Polska, 1994, as I tried to understand the people of Poland. My characters are shaped by their location in the smaller city of Toruń just as Dora would have been a very different book if it was set in Ballard rather than Capitol Hill, and Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet needed to be set in the International District.

Perhaps that’s why my next book (a work in progress) feels unmoored at the moment—it currently has no setting and is instead entirely about the characters in relation to each other. I like the amorphous nature this gives the characters, but it is also far outside my comfort zone for them to not have a place that shapes them and which they play against.

I am grateful to both Lidia Yuknavitch and Jamie Ford for reminding me that good stories happen at home, too, and that by devouring local books, I might get that extra layer of enjoyment of learning about my city. Do you read locally? What books would you recommend about your city?

If this review made you want to read either book, pick up a copy of Dora: A Headcase or Hotel at the Corner of Bitter and Sweet from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Anderson Cooper Dispatches from the Edge

January 6, 2013 by Isla McKetta, MFA 4 Comments

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about living abroad and why I don’t. I have plenty of international experience—from living in Chile and Poland to extensive travels on four continents. Despite my wanderlust, something keeps me on home soil, and a week spent with Magic, Science and Religion by Bronisław Malinowski, Travels with Myself and Another by Martha Gellhorn, and Dispatches from the Edge by Anderson Cooper taught me something about the kind of writer I want to be and helped me understand why I choose to live in the US these days.

Magic, Science, and Religion

A random reference in another book led me to finally pull this tattered paperback from my to-read shelf. I have a cultural bias toward Poles and though I had no real idea what this book was about, I was in.

I wish I had known what the book was about. I have a degree in sociology, so observing cultures should be my thing, but Malinowski’s book made me profoundly uncomfortable. I appreciated how he started out by validating more primitive uses of science (even though I hated the use of the word “primitive”). I did not like anything thereafter. Magic, science, and religion should be fascinating topics, but when a culture’s most precious myths are told with complete scientific detachment, I’m out.

They tell how a malicious being of human shape, but not of human nature, went into a piece of bamboo somewhere on the northern shore of Normanby Island. The piece of bamboo drifted northwards till it was washed ashore near the promontory of Yayvau or Vakuta. A man from the neighboring village of Kwadagila heard a voice in the bamboo and opened it. The demon came out and taught him sorcery. This, according to the informants in the south, is the real starting point of black magic. – Bronisław Malinowski

It wasn’t Malinowski’s fault that I hated this book—he wrote a very classic anthropological study. He taught me that I am not interested in detached observers in life or in writing. I like narrative. I want my readers to engage with characters and details and story.

Travels with Myself and Another

Ann Hedreen turned me on to Martha Gellhorn in a recent post about curiosity and one of my favorite travel companions bought the book for me for Christmas. I really enjoyed Gellhorn’s independent spirit. She is famous for being one of Hemingway’s wives. She should be famous for picking up and doing whatever she wanted all over the world. The book covers trips she took to China (while it was under attack from Japan), the Caribbean (while it was under attack from Nazis), Africa (during regime change), and the Soviet Union (where she visited a literary dissident). Need I add that she took these trips mostly for fun?

My favorite chapter was about her time in China. She visited many of the same places I have and I enjoyed thinking about how in such a large country we all end up in the same places. She was there before the communists were in power and it was interesting to see how much has changed and how much has not.

Though I hate to admit it, I am not a resolute traveler, and this is something Gellhorn and I have in common. But whereas I blame myself for a miserable few days spent in the wrong part of Bangkok (there’s a reason western tourists stick to Khao San Road), Gellhorn seems to expect all of the world to live up to her standards. Perhaps Gellhorn and I are too much alike for me to love her. We have perfectionistic expectations and are disappointed when they are not met. Except that I would never have the balls to take off across Africa essentially by myself.

[Hemingway] considered me thoughtfully. “The trouble with you, M., is that you think everybody is exactly like you. – Martha Gellhorn

Reading Gellhorn’s interpretations of the world made me crave the chance to form my own opinions in the way that you get to when you are seeing a new way of life for the first time. I think if Gellhorn had described some of her cultural interactions (especially in Africa) for me instead of sharing her reactions to them, I might have spent less time questioning her opinion and more time focusing on her story. I realized that this engagement is essential for me as a reader though I am sometimes guilty of trying to shape a reader’s experience rather than trusting them to make their own.

Dispatches from the Edge

The highlight of this nonfiction binge was definitely Anderson Cooper’s Dispatches from the Edge. Cooper found a way to marry a straightforward reportage of some pretty horrific war and devastation with a frank look at the trauma of his own life. For the majority of the book, he keeps his own emotion out of the narrative. He paints the scenes in enough detail that the reader can easily interpret and react to the facts on their own. This book hit exactly the right tone.

On the plane, a flight attendant asks a Sri Lankan passenger if she’s comfortable.

“I just lost three people in my family,” the passenger says.

“Oh, that’s terrible,” the flight attendant says, pausing for a moment. “No duty-free then?” – Anderson Cooper

This pulling back on reporting emotion during the most poignant and trying moments is something I learned in grad school, but it still strikes me how powerful omission can be. Cooper trusts his reader to experience regional events like the tsunami in the Indian Ocean and the genocide in Rwanda as well as personal events like his brother’s suicide. By not telling us how to feel, he allows for a much more complex array of emotions.

Even as Cooper seems to come into his own emotions during his outrage at the handling of Hurricane Katrina, he carefully balances journalistic distance with the story of his family’s relationship to the area. This is a deeply personal book and I found a deep respect for Cooper as a reporter, writer, and human being.

Why I Still Live in the US

I envy those living abroad, but I shouldn’t. Living in the US has been my choice. All the things I love about living abroad—the fresh way of seeing, the deepened cultural understanding, and the special feeling of otherness—are transitory. The heightened awareness that comes with living in a foreign country helped make me a writer, but when new countries become home, my observation curve plateaus until I pick up roots and move again. Settling in one place has helped me internalize those skills and turn them toward subtler contrasts.

In my life, and not always by my choice, the idea of moving to another continent was often tied to the idea of running away. As a result, my enduring feeling of living abroad is restless homelessness and transience—you cannot stop lest the adrenaline fade and all the feelings you are fleeing catch up with you. I don’t want to live on that expat edge anymore.

I wanted emotion but couldn’t find it here, so I settled for motion. – Anderson Cooper

Of course, escape is far from the only reason to live abroad. Opportunity and adventure have shaped migration patterns since the beginning of time. I am lucky to have had the chance to learn that home can be anywhere you make it, and I have friends who are happily making homes on other continents on a more permanent basis who I can live vicariously through. But for me right now, the greatest challenge is learning to stand in place and face myself where I am. That happens to be in the US. I may move again someday (my husband and I still cherish that artistic dream of Paris), but when I do, it will not be because I am running away. It will be because I am on steady footing with myself—because I have learned all I can from home and am ready for the next adventure.

If this review made you want to read one of these books, pick up a copy of Magic, Science and Religion,Travels with Myself and Another, or Dispatches from the Edge from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.