Books Archives - Page 40 of 51 - A Geography of Reading

Peter Høeg Invents the Keyser Söze of Danish Dreams

July 28, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

As the title implies, The History of Danish Dreams is dreamlike. Even more so for readers like me who have a poor knowledge of Danish history. Peter Høeg does a masterful job of hovering in the space between fable and fact where story and truth lie and though I am curious about whether there is an underlying structure of verifiable events, I will not look them up because I don’t want the spell to be broken.

Part of the spell Høeg casts is that he is able to dance between what happened and what might have happened. This is especially evident as he deals with the young girl Maria and whether she is a model child or the leader of a gang of truants.

The Model Child

The reader already knows much about the strangeness of Maria’s parents by the time she is born. Høeg weaves information about her upbringing into her parents’ narrative and I got to know her before I realized that she too would become an important character.

Over a series of twenty pages I watched Maria grow into an unusually observant child with a stammer. I saw the conditions of her mother’s declining health and the contemporaneous decline of her neighborhood. I learned that she was close with her father. And then there is a brutality that Høeg mentions more than once without delving into. She is different, but still he calls her “the model child.”

Stepping Out of the Narrative

“From this point onward certain problems arise in writing Maria’s story: I would like to depict her as a coherent individual…but this proves to be impossible…History is always an invention; it is a fairytale built upon certain clues…These clues are pretty well established; most of them can literally be laid on the desktop…But these, unfortunately, do not constitute history. History consists of the links between them, and it is this that presents the problem…In the case of Maria Jensen…it is not possible…to cover all the gaps, not even roughly.” – Peter Høeg, The History of Danish Dreams

Høeg interrupts the fictional dream and begins telling two stories—the story of Maria as her parents know her and the story of a second child called “The Stutterer” who could well be Maria. The only link between the two stories is a series of what must be truancy letters from her school. Truly compelling are the strong yet unprovable parallels between Maria and the Stutterer.

As Høeg tells more and more stories of the gang Maria is ostensibly the head of, he continues to use phrases like “It has not been possible for me to have a word with any of the individuals who then belonged in this group” and “we have no witnesses.” Had Høeg laid out evidence that Maria was the Stutterer, the story would have been about a girl who went bad and her parents never even knew. Because Høeg focuses on the gaps, though, and allows for the ambiguity, the story becomes a legend.

By the time Høeg finishes young Maria’s tale, the seven- or nine-year-old (we don’t even know her actual age) Maria has become the Keyser Söze of Denmark. Høeg seems in awe of her. The extent of her exploits could only be understood in the kind of exaggerated rumor that conveys the fullest truth possible but could never be understood in something as rigid as a court of law.

I am interested in exploring the ambiguous experience of a character in the novel I am working on now. I have been looking for a way to convey contradictory yet complementary information. I’m not sure yet if I want to pull the metafictional card by interjecting as a narrator, but I have a lot to learn from Høeg in terms of opening up the story to create a richer experience.

As with any book I read in translation and love, I know some of the credit is due to the translator. My thanks to Barbara Haveland for allowing me access to this book.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of The History of Danish Dreams from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Ondaatje Illustrates the Life of Billy the Kid, or Does He?

July 24, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

Reading The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, I was struck by Michael Ondaatje’s inclusion of photographs with the text. The text itself was an interesting patchwork of poetry and prose and I can see that Ondaatje was using visual matter as another layer of that patchwork.

In works of nonfiction, I’m used to seeing batches of photographs grouped in one section or two (likely for ease of collation of the glossy pages) with captions and arranged in more or less chronological order. In fiction, I am unused to pictures at all.

I was distracted but intrigued while reading Ondaatje by having the pictures strewn throughout the text without captions. The placement of the images seemed to be related to the text rather than in chronological or any other order.

What is Authentic?

I found myself wondering if the pictures were actual representations of the real people and the real places. For example, on page 91 there is a picture of a bed with a gun leaning against it. It looks like a period photograph and on the previous page is a description from the point of view of Pat Garrett in a room with a straw mattress. On the page following the picture Ondaatje writes, “This is a diagram then of Maxwell’s” which combined with the photo of the bedroom put me in a visual place and made me want to believe the picture was actually of that room where Garrett shot at Billy.

I got hung up in some of the details and started thinking that the blanket looked authentic and if the picture had been faked then they had done it well. So in some ways the incorporation of visual matter into the text enhanced my experience and in some ways it distracted from it.

Using Images in My Book

In my novel, Polska, 1994, I considered incorporating some memorabilia as souvenirs in the most French sense, but I was concerned it would become too scrapbook‑y. I also worried about the mixing authentic mementos with a fictional narrative.

How Max Frisch Incorporated Images

It is important that extraneous material incorporated into a text become an organic and necessary part of the whole. Man in the Holocene by Max Frisch uses scraps of encyclopedia entries as part of the narrative. These scraps are seamlessly integrated into the narrative because Geiser is clipping things that matter to him from his books and pasting them to his walls as he is slowly losing his memory. For example, one of the scraps is a definition, “Weakness of memory is the deterioration of the faculty of recalling earlier experiences.”

It isn’t until much later in the book that Frisch has Geiser recognize that he is in fact losing his memory. The visual pieces serve to tell part of the story. It was easier for me to enter the fictional dream because the visual elements are mostly text and Geiser was a fully fictional character.

When I studied visual arts, it was always stressed to me that the piece should speak for itself. I was discouraged from including words in painting or sculpture. I am carrying that baggage but I am also starting to see that like most hard and fast rules, it is merely cautionary. Anything done well is worth doing.

Are pictures the new adverbs—verboten because they are seen as easy shorthand? Or are Ondaatje and Frisch telling me to loosen up and work with whatever material tells the best story?

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of The Collected Works of Billy the Kid from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting: Variations on a Form

July 11, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

Milan Kundera discusses variations in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting: “Variation form is the form in which concentration is brought to its maximum; it enables the composer to speak only of essentials, to go straight to the core of the matter.” He goes on to write, “This book is a novel in the form of variations. The various parts follow each other like the various stages of a voyage leading into the interior of a theme, the interior of a thought.” The form he chooses to use for this book, the form of variations, provides the majority of the structure for the novel.

Without acknowledging this structure, the sections of the book are only loosely related through theme or geography. Mirek is a Czech writer who in visiting a former lover leaves his political writings and letters at home exposed and vulnerable to seizure by the secret police. Marketa and Karel are being visited by their lover, Eva, and Karel’s forgetful mother, Mama. Mama helps Karel remember a childhood attraction to his mother’s friend, a woman who reminds him of Eva, and this one clear memory reconciles him with his mother. Two American girls discover the power of laughter in a small French town. The narrator recounts a story of clandestinely writing a column and his musings on circles (having stepped outside and being unable to rejoin). Then there is Tamina, who is by Kundera’s admission, the focus of the novel. She fled Prague with her husband who died tragically soon after. She longs to have the letters and journals she left behind to relive their life together. She allows Hugo to have sex with her, but he never retrieves the letters. Kristyna is an older woman from a small town who has an unconsummated affair with a student poet. Tamina is spirited away by a man who asks her to “forget your forgetting” and then she travels over water to a place where children molest her and she cannot swim home. Jan goes to a beach house where everyone has sex with everyone.

Themes emerge, laughter and forgetting of course, but also litost, dangerous papers, meaningless sex. The characters sometimes show up again, but never outside of their original context. Their lives never physically overlap with anyone from other sections. What do recur are variations on themes. Papers are lost and it turns out the value wasn’t contained in the papers themselves, but in the writer’s memory. Characters grow close through their connections and shared experiences, not through sex. Sex is itself meaningless or sometimes a violation. Some steps, whether leaving your country or giving up on life, cannot be retraced (the circle cannot be re-entered).

To be honest, the book was a bit over my head, and I struggled to see the connections between the sections. I did enjoy, though, the way it made me look at the themes more closely. Because the characters were not related to each other and did not recur outside of their own contexts, my attention was directed to the elements that recurred and I started to make meaning from those connections. I don’t think I would go this far in my own work, I am still married to a more traditional narrative, but I can see how Kundera allowed me as a reader to use the natural human tendency to seek meaning to engage me in this work. I am interested in seeing whether themes can take on the same importance without removing as much of the connection between the characters and the reader as Kundera has.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

The Intimate Lives of Munro’s Girls and Women

July 9, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

In Lives of Girls and Women, Alice Munro exposes the reader to the inner world of her first-person narrator, Della Jordan. The psychic distance throughout the book is always close, as I would expect in a first person narrative. However, Munro makes use of a full range of narrative distance from distant: “[t]he snowbanks along the main street got to be so high that an archway was cut in one of them” to close: “the thought of him stayed in my mind like a circus net spread underneath whatever I had to think about at the moment.” When Munro presents scenes of Della’s burgeoning sexuality, she uses the combination of the close psychic distance and a close narrative distance to explore the fullness of Della’s contradictory feelings.

As Della begins to fantasize about Mr. Chamberlain, we are treated to thoughts like: “Mr. Chamberlain’s voice in my mind…acted on me like the touch of rayon silk on my skin, surrounded me, made me feel endangered and desired.” The reader falls in with Della and is treated to her most intimate thoughts as she first begins to see herself as a sexual creature. I felt her naïveté as she mulls over the implications of the conversation she has just heard: “[t]hey mature earlier in those hot climates…A man paid you to let him do it. What did he say? Did he take your clothes off or did he expect you to do that yourself?” The questions she is asking herself reveal the shallowness of her experience, but her observations about Mr. Chamberlain imply how willing she is to explore this new, forbidden realm farther.

“His face contained for me all possibilities of fierceness and sweetness, pride and submissiveness, violence, self-containment. I never saw more in it than I had when I saw it first, because I saw everything then. The whole thing in him that I was going to love, and never catch or explain.” -Alice Munro, The Lives of Girls and Women

Della begins to fantasize about being seduced by Mr. Chamberlain, but “[t]he moment of being seen naked could not be solidified, it was a stab of light….in the corner of my daydream he was featureless but powerful, humming away electrically like a blue fluorescent light.” Because I am deep inside Della’s thoughts, I am privy to the innocence of her inability to fully imagine the scene and also to the lustiness and force of her emotions. Although Della’s hormones are coursing through her like mad, she has no concrete experience on which to base her fantasies. If Munro did not place the reader so deep in Della’s mind, it would be difficult to convey the same complexity of Della’s childlike lasciviousness. She could be a Lolita through Humbert’s eyes or a victim, but not as fully both.

I was involved with Della as she read through Fern’s papers and finds the bawdy poetry. I understand Della’s relationship with the word “fuck, which I had never been able to look at….I had never been able to contemplate before its thrust of brutality, hypnotic swagger.” Della is taking a word that she has seen and for the first time is really starting to understand. Mr. Chamberlain has already groped her and she has willingly gotten in the car with him and the word sits out there as a possibility rather than a profanity. Della is on the cusp of asserting her sexuality.

I enjoyed being so intimate with Della. I think more so because this came so late in the book. She was already a friend and I understood her to a certain extent. I felt like I was willing to grow with her through her contradictory emotions. At some points I felt like Munro was pulling thoughts out of my own adolescent head and I think that is due to the tortured duality of the thoughts. As people, especially as adolescents, we experience uncertainty. When Mr. Chamberlain finally exposes himself to Della, her observation that his penis is “[n]ot at all like marble David’s” says everything. The parts of the fantasy she couldn’t quite imagine are right there in front of her and she could (would) never have imagined them in that way.

My narrator in Polska, 1994, Magda, is of a similar age and sexual experience level as Della. As I think back on this book, I realize how much I learned from the realism of the contradictions in Della’s thoughts. And the stark contrast between the fantasy of sexuality and the reality made the reality of Mr. Chamberlain even more grotesque than a grown man molesting a teenager would stereotypically be. At the same time, the naturalness with which Della faces her sexual desires portends the healthy sexual relationship she will have with Garnet. She is not victimized by Mr. Chamberlain, he is simply one step on her path toward sexual awakening.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of Lives of Girls and Women from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

The Diaspora According to Mukherjee’s Darkness

July 5, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

In a rapidly globalizing world, we are all moving away from our ancestral homelands. As an American, I have too many ancestral homelands to even choose between them, which I think means I cannon truly understand what a homeland is. Bharati Mukherjee captures beautifully the feeling of displacement in her story collection, Darkness.

For at least the last century it has been possible and not uncommon to uproot oneself and seek a better fortune and life elsewhere on the globe. People from different cultures have migrated at different times and for different reasons. Sometimes they take their family or neighbors with them and parts of their ancestral culture as well. Sometimes they are forced to give it up in the name of assimilation.

Mukherjee’s characters hail from what used to be the British colony of India—from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India. They are Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh. What they have in common is that they are far from home. This is never more evident than in “The World According to Hsü.”

In the story, a half-Indian, half-Czech Canadian woman (Ratna) and her Canadian husband vacation on an island off of Africa that finds itself in the midst of a civil war. In that chaos and among people of many nationalities, Ratna is for the first time at ease.

“She poured herself another glass, feeling for the moment at home in that collection of Indians and Europeans babbling in English and remembered dialects. No matter where she lived, she would never feel so at home again.” –Bharati Mukherjee, “The World According to Hsü”

When I reviewed The White Mary, I wrote about how I was once a traveler. Having lived on three continents, I wonder sometimes where home is and what it means.

“The traveler feels at home everywhere, because she is never at home anywhere.” –Bharati Mukherjee, “The Lady from Lucknow”

It was very important to me to make a home in Seattle with the man who became my husband. I wonder sometimes if we would have been freer to make adventures and live life if I had a stronger sense of a homeland—someplace I could have returned to. Like Ratna, I have more trust in the chaos of the world than in a homeland that has shifted beneath me. And I am finding that home is what I make of it rather than something I can rely on.

As people travel farther and more frequently away from their ancestral homelands, I wonder what is lost. I am not sorry for the many experiences abroad that have made me who I am. There are parts of my soul that are deeply Chilean and Polish—even though those countries as I knew them no longer exist. But I do sometimes wish there was one place on the globe that I could always return to. Someplace I could call home.

Perhaps that is why I have always found comfort in this quote:

“One never reaches home….But where paths that have an affinity for each other intersect, the whole world looks like home, for a time.” –Hermann Hesse, Demian

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of Darkness from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.