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

Italo Calvino’s Dreamlike Invisible Cities

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Invisible Cities by is unlike any book I’ve read before. It seems to exist in another plane entirely with its dreamlike short sections that each end with some philosophical statement. Each section left me wanting to ruminate on what I’ve just read rather than turning to the next. All of the cities are named for women and it made me wonder if Marco Polo (or rather Calvino through Polo) was talking about cities at all. Calvino peppers modern references like airplanes and Ferris wheels throughout the stories as if to say time is immaterial.

Building My Own Cities

Calvino’s descriptions of these cities are ethereal enough that I’m asked to construct my own images of the cities if I want them. Calvino has Polo describe one aspect of each city that is characteristic of it, and many of these are not concrete elements but rather a spirit of the city. Even when Polo specifically lists objects, as in this description of Zora, “[T]he copper clock follows the barber’s striped awning, then the fountain with the nine jets, the astronomer’s glass tower…” he uses few adjectives and my mind is free to make most of the picture, although I found myself grasping for these specifics to have something to begin building with. Of course if the physical description were essential to the experience he wanted to convey, Calvino would have written them in. This left me looking for what he was trying to convey.

With sentences like, “Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: a foreignness of what you no longer are or possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places,” Calvino asks the reader to bring both meaning and interpretation into the story. What is it that you no longer are? What do you no longer possess? How is a space unpossessed or for that matter possessed? Long after I finished reading Calvino’s words, my mind worked over them.

Finding My Bearings Among the Grand Ideas

The difficulty for me lies in that much of the book is made up of these wide open ideas that I was trying to knit together and I found it hard to get my bearings. After the first ten cities I felt I was beginning to understand the world Calvino was creating. After the next ten I was looking for metaphors. After the full 165 pages I felt the meaning was so large I would never be able to grasp it and I was disheartened. This book was something I would have liked to have read one city at a time during a year or more just to absorb it—to fully explore all the possibilities of the cities and to construct the character and characteristics of each in my mind before moving onto the next. The cities were like the stones in Polo’s arch, but I wasn’t able to see the arch that the individual stones formed. The lasting impression of the book in my mind is instead the first line of Coleridge’s poem.

It is as though Calvino is using the words on the page to teach me to unlock those same words, for example Calvino writes, “But what enhanced for Kublai every event or piece of news reported by his inarticulate informer was the space that remained around it, a void not filled with words.” I often wondered how much of the story was written on the page and how much of it I was meant to bring to it as a reader. At the end of “Tamara,” Calvino writes, “However the city may really be, beneath this thick coating of signs…you leave Tamara without having discovered it.” I finished the book as I left Tamara—not having discovered it.

Twice I have suggested that for me Calvino was speaking through Polo in this book. Perhaps it was the modern elements, perhaps it was the lack of emphasis on character development, but Polo did not present as a fully realized character as much as Kublai did. I enjoyed the way the conversations between Kublai and Polo framed the descriptions of the cities, although I kept looking for them to relate more closely to each other. Often I read hungrily to the next portion of dialogue.

This is one of those books that I think will percolate through my brain for quite some time. Invisible Cities reminded me that a reader will construct their own world out of whatever they are given and there is no need to be didactic about it unless I am purposefully so. While I as a reader (perhaps like Kublai) was expecting a more straightforward travelogue, because Calvino’s descriptions were compelling, I was willing to follow him as he described the essences of these cities (and therefore the essences of life) rather than their architecture.

If this review made you want to read the book, support indie booksellers (and reviewers—I get a commission) by picking up a copy of Invisible Citiesfrom Powell’s Books.

K. is for Kafka in The Trial

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In The Trial, creates a world where the court system pervades ordinary life. The only character who seems to find this out of the ordinary is K. It is accepted by all of the characters (except for K.). The only way the reader learns about the intricacies of the world is through the friction against it created by K.

Arbitrariness and Omnipotence

When K. first encounters representatives of the court system in his room in a boarding house, K. asks why and the man tells him, “We weren’t sent to tell you that….Proceedings are under way and you’ll learn everything in due course.”  Kafka is setting up a world where the court is omnipotent and the populace powerless to even question its omnipotence. When K. asks, “How can I be under arrest,” the answer is, “We don’t answer such questions” and is told to accept the situation. This creates a sense of arbitrariness of power but also makes the power feel like a façade. There may be nothing behind it, but there is no way to get beyond the façade and prove it. It is even out of the ordinary that someone like K. would question it. The proceedings are so quotidian for the proceeders that K.’s questioner says, “you’re under arrest, certainly, but that’s not meant to keep you from carrying on your profession.”  By the time K. realizes “He was at their mercy” it is a surprise only to him. And because K. provides the friction, it quickly begins to feel as though the world is designed to torment K. and K. alone. Others do not resist the law—they succumb to it or live within the system of the trial for as long as it takes.

Omniscient Observers

Kafka also imbues a sense of omniscience in the world. It starts when K.’s landlady is talking about a fellow boarder. She has observed her in other quarters with multiple men and remarks on her behavior. I started to wonder who was watching whom and if in fact this is the type of world where everyone is being watched by someone. Of course everyone is being watched by someone, but we rarely pay the kind of attention to each other that Frau Grubach paid to her boarders. This awareness of the affairs of others is most fully realized in regard to K.’s legal proceedings—everyone knows what is going on with K.’s case except for K. Whether his landlady, his uncle, his business contacts, or even a painter he has never met, everyone seems to know more about his case than K. does. This shows the reader how information pervades and makes the world around K. seem like it is closing in. Although K. has not yet accepted the seriousness of his situation, everyone else has.

Inescapable System

Kafka makes the law seem inevitable when K. shows up for his first hearing and K. remembers “the remark the guard Willem had made that the court was attracted by guilt, from which it followed that the room for the inquiry would have to be located off whatever stairway K. chanced to choose.”  Reading this I wondered if the stairways weren’t in some way shifting or meeting or all leading the same place such that there was no escape for K. Later when the painter’s atelier door leads into another attic court, it seems there is no escape from the court. It is in fact everywhere. By making all of the laws and proceedings secret, Kafka makes them feel hollow and arbitrary, but at the same time there is no redress if one cannot know what they are working against.

It was interesting that K. found kinship with women who were victims of the powerful in some way or other. Whether his neighbor who was being watched, the law clerk’s wife, or Leni, the nurse/mistress of his lawyer, K. was attracted to and attractive to women who were making their own power out of their sex—the last thing that was seemingly theirs alone to control.

In my novel, Polska, 1994, I too wanted to create an awareness of the way people watch each other. I found the tidbits peppered in about other people’s lives by Frau Grubach to be most instructive. Kafka is showing me it is sometimes more effective to talk in the abstract about how other people are affected by the situation than it is to talk directly about the main character. This makes it a condition that pervades the world rather than making the main character simply a victim of it. Of course K. reacted differently than anyone else in the story, but he was not subjected to special laws. In fact most other characters were surprised by his resistance to the laws of their world.

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

Yasunari Kawabata’s Quiet Contradiction in Snow Country

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Yasunari Kawabata Snow Country

Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata is a compact little book and though quiet, it has a lot to say. Because there are no large actions until the end of the novel, it is easy as a reader to devote great attention to each small element of the narrative.

Unspoken Cultural Norms

Kawabata conveys the unspoken rules of Japanese society through the actions of his characters. As Shimamura catches glimpses of Yoko in the train “window-mirror” instead of looking at her directly, I sensed the tight expectations he was controlling himself with, and then he “hastily lowered his eyes….it seemed wrong to look their way again.” Shimamura is not a shy man in general, as can be seen by his behavior with Komako, but he is careful about his public behavior. This juxtaposition tells the story of a culture where reputations are important.

Kawabata’s characters often do not say what they mean and their actions depart from their words. This is especially true between Komako and Shimamura. Toward the end of the book Komako is coming in and out of Shimamura’s room as she is supposed to be entertaining guests. She sends Shimamura a note that she is enjoying the party but then she shows up in his room only to tell him how much she likes sake and that she has to get back to work. So much tension lives under the surface of this writing as the dialogue and action conflict. I got the sense that Komako was checking in on Shimamura over and over again waiting for him to have missed her but she wasn’t really gone long enough for him to miss her.

Heated Dialogue

Kawabata also creates friction with the dialogue between Komako and Shimamura. In the initial exchange between Komako and Shimamura, he never asks her directly for a prostitute, he only ever says “geisha,” but she understands his meaning and reacts to the meaning rather than the word. Komako often contradicts herself and it creates a feeling of desperate play between them as in the following exchange:

“Please go back to Tokyo.”
“As a matter of fact, I was thinking of going back tomorrow.”
“No!  Why are you going back?”  She looked up, startled as though aroused from sleep.

In these three short lines, Kawabata is able to display Komako’s ambivalence, the games she is playing with Shimamura, and what is either Shimamura’s ignorance of the games or refusal to allow her to manipulate him. This exchange not only helps define the characters but it also illustrates the dynamic between them. This push-pull exchange defines their relationship throughout the novel and often it is so sad that I was not sure whether Komako was in fact manipulating him or whether she was terribly conflicted about her own desires.

Atmospheric Decription

Kawabata uses a lot of atmospheric description in the novel and this carries some of the weight of the narrative as in this passage where Shimamura is leaving Komako and the snow country: “The train climbed the north slope of the Border Range into the long tunnel….The dim brightness of the winter afternoon seemed to have been sucked into the earth….There was no snow on the south slope.” When Shimamura travels through that country he is entering an entirely different and darker world. I’ve said before how much I love atmospheric description. In a quiet novel like this one, it adds depth and complexity to a relatively simple narrative.

In my novel, Polska, 1994, I dealt with a group of teenagers. Teenagers are contradictory by nature but it can be difficult to effectively illustrate indecision. I would tried to borrow the friction Kawabata creates between his characters and the way he portrays their indecision. Kawabata also reminded me that every detail counts. His was a wholly imagined world I can learn from.

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

War and Meta Whimsy from Saša Stanišić

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I picked up How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone by when I had just finished reading A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka because the crazy cover graphic promised this book was part of a trend toward accessible whimsy in Eastern European lit.

Eastern European Humor

I love Eastern European literature, and often it is the gravitas that I gravitate toward. Still I recognize that there is often an undercurrent of humor that I often miss. I loved The Master and Margarita, but I didn’t find it funny, and I’ve felt that same tickling of “this is funny to other people.” I lived in Poland for a year and I can see the love of irony and when something is supposed to be funny, but, well, maybe I’m not very good at laughing at myself or life in general.

Back to Saša. This book contains hilarious and charming views of life from the eyes of a child. It’s playful and fun. And then suddenly the war happens. It’s a weird juxtaposition, but I’m sure it’s true to life, especially for a child who wouldn’t see the same factors leading up to conflict that an adult might. I can see the point of having this jump in subject matter, but from a narrative point of view it is jarring.

Jarring Change in Direction

Speaking of jarring. Mid-way through the book, the point of view changes or the author, kind of. That sentence is as confusing and not confusing as the narrative shift, because, though this is a work of fiction, the general arc is not dissimilar to the author’s life, and as a result, I never felt Saša was that far from Aleksandar to begin with. By switching narrators and re-starting the story, Mr. Stanišić is playing with metafiction—emphasizing his own relation to the story. For me it was unnecessary.

I enjoyed the tangential essay quality of the chapters, they helped me learn more about an unfamiliar culture, but I would have liked them stitched together in a different way. I firmly believe that an author’s work is intentional and purposeful. So the fact that I would have made other choices is maybe instructive to no one but me, but recognizing the choices he did make helps me understand what he might have been trying to say with this book. Here’s what I have come up with:

  1. Life is random. That is not a profound statement, but it is a statement of worldview that not everyone would agree with.
  2. Life contains great joy and great suffering, but we should focus on the joy.
  3. People are resilient.
  4. Everyone is affected by war, even those too innocent to see it coming.

I think sometimes I like Eastern European literature because it is a part of the world that has seen a wider breadth of human experience than I hope to live through and, somehow, retained an optimistic view. Reading How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, I encountered many city names familiar from planning an upcoming trip to Croatia. Because we aren’t going to Bosnia, I may not run into Saša Stanišić’s clever cornball relatives, but I am glad to have a richer view of the Yugoslavian cultures and I hope to experience all whimsy and no war.

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

Pictures of The Emigrants in W.G. Sebald

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I started reading The Emigrants by with pictures on the brain. I knew the book included photographs and I was interested to see how the pictures interacted with the text. At first the images simply interrupt the text. There are never any captions although they are related to the surrounding text. The Aare glacier is mentioned on page 15 and a photograph of a glacier is on the facing page. The reader is left to make the determination of whether this photo represents the Aare glacier or the general idea of the glacier. Because I was in a critical frame of mind, I questioned the provenance of every photograph wondering whether the children pictured on page 39 were Sebald and his classmates.

I could not, however, stop the pictures from coloring my impressions of the book. When Sebald includes a picture of an agenda book on page 127, I wanted to believe it was Ambros’s agenda book. I wanted to pick it up and feel the cracked leather against my skin. When Sebald begins integrating descriptions of the photos or references to them into the text, the pictures naturally merge more fully with the story. This happens on page 71 when Sebald writes, “The photograph that follows here, for example, was taken in the Bronx in March 1939” and he goes on to name the people in the photograph.

What is most interesting about the photographs is that although I was wary of them throughout the book, on the very last page when Sebald describes a photograph from a Frankfurt exhibition, writing, “Behind the perpendicular frame of a loom sit three young women, perhaps aged twenty….Who the young women are I do not know,”, I wanted desperately to see that picture. I had begun to take for granted the photographic “evidence” peppered throughout the text and when he describes most fully and tantalizingly this one photo, I wanted to see it.

I am still undecided as to whether or not to use images in my own text. I am suspicious that I want to fall back on pictures to make the story feel more true. Until I can find a better reason, I think I may omit them.

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