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

Babel: Setting a Scene in Red Cavalry

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Red Cavalry Isaac Babel

Isaac Babel has a way with atmospheric detail. In several of his short stories in Red Cavalry, he uses descriptions of the setting to shape the reader’s experience and understanding of the tone of the story.

Crossing the Zbrucz

Perhaps the best example of this is the story we discussed in our advising group, “Crossing the Zbrucz.”  In this story a soldier rooms with a woman and her father and it turns out that the father (with whom he is to share a bed) was brutally slain earlier. The details Babel provides early on in the story presage the eerie scene. After describing the flow of the river, he writes, “An orange sun is rolling across the sky like a severed head….The odour of yesterday’s blood and of slain horses drips into evening coolness.” The detail is gruesome at best, but it prepares the reader for the mindset of the narrator. Death is so pervasive that the first thing he would liken the movement of the sun to is a severed head. He knows of the killings that occurred the day before and he recognizes the scent of them on the wind. Not every narrator would recognize the smell of day old death and fewer still would use it as an atmospheric detail.

Pan Apolek

Babel uses the same technique in several other of the Red Cavalry stories. In “Pan Apolek” he writes, “The scent of lilies is pure and strong, like spirit. This fresh poison is sucked in by the deep seething respiration of the kitchen range, deadening the resinous odour of the fir logs that are scattered about the kitchen.” This is the story of a painter, Pan Apolek, who uses the faces of local people for his paintings of saints. Apolek is commissioned to paint the church and he uses the faces of nonbelievers for some of Christianity’s most important figures causing a general uproar. His paintings are beautiful like the lilies, but they cut with a double edged sword. The “fresh poison” that Babel writes of is the heretical ideas that Apolek is spreading (e.g. that Jesus fathered Deborah’s child). Babel is saying that in spreading his subversive ideas through beauty, Apolek is able to infiltrate worlds he might not otherwise have access to. Apolek is despoiling the comfortable, resinous smell of the ideas of the local people. He is covering over their homey ideas with the poison of his beautiful lilies.

Gedali

In “Gedali,” Babel writes, “Here before me is the bazaar and the death of the bazaar. Slain is the rich soul of abundance. Rich padlocks hang on the stalls and the granite of the paving is as clean as the bald pate of a dead man.” “Gedali” is the story of the narrator’s wanderings as he awaits the Sabbath. He is wandering among many closed shops, but the description made me wonder if they were closed because of the impending Sabbath—on which no work can be done—or if they were closed for good. Perhaps they are closed for other reasons, because of pogroms, or because of the death of a way of life. The stalls are padlocked up, but the cleanness of the pavement denotes emptiness. There is no litter, no trace of humans having passed through. And the reference to the “pate of a dead man” makes it sound as though the area itself is dead and that it was closed up long ago. Whether these stores were locked up for eternity or merely for the Sabbath, Babel’s description of them enhances the strangeness and isolation of Gedali’s store. Babel likens the store to Dickens’s Curiosity Shop, but he didn’t need that reference to make the shop seem obscure and isolated. He had already done so with the detail of his description.

I know this use of atmospheric detail is something I tend toward in my own work. I admit it is often an unconscious effort in early drafts, but I can see that it is a powerful tool that I would do well to pay attention to as I revise. By being specific about the details I invest in the scenery, I can point the reader in very decided directions. If I am not specific, I can point the reader all over the place. I particularly enjoy this way of dealing with setting because it feels subtle but because it can have a strong effect on the way the story is read. It also gives meaning where there would not necessarily be any. For my novel, this is particularly important in descriptions of the river. A casual reader can enjoy the story without taking notice of this kind of detail, but a reader who cares to find meaning there can. I particularly liked where I felt Babel was going with his description in “Pan Apolek.”  It felt like he was describing his own subversion and that opened up for me the reading of many of the other stories in the collection. I think that is what I particularly enjoy about Russian writers is the layers of the writing. I am not yet skilled at investing layer upon layer of meaning into writing, and in some ways I don’t have the natural need because I am much less likely to be censored, but it is still something that intrigues me. I am interested in how the reader experiences satire and double entendres in writing. It always scares me a little that a reader who doesn’t get it could take the work in exactly the opposite way. I think that is at the root of my quandary over explaining and not explaining. I would hate to see a work used to the opposite end of its intent. Perhaps the atmospheric detail is one subtle way to direct the mind of even the most clueless reader (which I sometimes am).

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

Mr. Rochester, Mr. Rochester

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In Jane Eyre, shows the development of Jane’s feelings for Mr. Rochester by the subtle changes in the way Jane observes him each time they meet.

Tepid Feelings at First Site

The first time Jane ever sees Mr. Rochester he is preceded by a “rude noise” as his horse rushed toward Thornfield. The rude noise turns into a “din” and a dark horse approached. Jane is afraid it may be a spirit and is relieved when there is a man on the back of the horse because that means it is not a spirit. Mr. Rochester and his horse fall and when Jane approaches to offer assistance she remarks, “I think he was swearing” which is a rather coarse activity for a gentleman in front of a lady at the time. He ordered her to stand aside as he inspected himself. When Jane finally remarks on his looks, she sees “stern features and a heavy brow; his eyes and gathered eyebrows looked ireful” and is not put off, because if he had been heroic looking, Jane fears he could not have borne her presence. Instead, “the frown, the roughness of the traveller set me at my ease.” Jane is not immediately repulsed by this man, though his initial appearance is somewhat frightening. Because he is not handsome, she is able to meet him as an equal and offer him assistance.

A Gentle Warming

When Jane reaches Thornfield, she is as yet unaware that the gentleman she met on the road is her master who she has been anxious to meet during the long time she has already been his employee. She is told that Mr. Rochester has arrived and she comes down to meet him. She sees him “half reclined on a couch.” She observes of his physique, “I suppose it was a good figure in the athletic sense of the term.” He is brusque with her and this intrigues Jane, for “[a] reception of finished politeness would probably have confused me.” Mr. Rochester is now at ease and Jane is more at ease with him than before. Questions have been answered as to who her master is and it appears he may be someone she can relate to. He is not handsome and elegant and all of the other things Jane thinks she is not. But it is not yet love although they engage in amiable banter.

At Last, My Love Has Come Along

Weeks later, Jane retires to her room and re-observes Mr. Rochester and his behavior during the first several weeks of their acquaintance. She thinks about how much more even his temper has become and that “he had always a word and sometimes a smile for me.” As Mr. Rochester is opening up to Jane more, she is opening up to him. She goes on to think, “[T]he friendly frankness…with which he treated me, drew me to him.” More directly she asks the question of whether he was ugly in her eyes and the reply is: “gratitude, and many associations, all pleasurable and genial, made his face the object I best liked to see.” Jane likes him very much at this point, whether she is yet in love with him or not.

When Mr. Rochester brings guests into the house, Jane compares him to his company and finds a certain kind of handsomeness in the softening of his demeanor that is much more attractive to her than the easily seen handsomeness of Lord Ingram or Colonel Dent. I would posit that Jane is now fully in love with him.

It is true to this character that Jane only gradually warms up to Mr. Rochester, because she has been treated harshly in life. It is also consistent that she takes comfort in the unconventional nature of his looks. Jane could not have fallen in love with a conventionally handsome man. Because this book is narrated in a retrospective first person voice, the reader is allowed to see the unfolding of Jane’s feelings from inside her mind and it is natural to experience her observations of other characters. The reader is allowed to fall in love with Mr. Rochester at the same time as Jane does because we are privy only to her view of the world.

I worked with something similar in my novel, Polska, 1994, with Szymon. I also have a first person narrator. Magda encounters Szymon several times throughout the story and because initially he is someone she has never met, Magda examines him and reexamines him each time she meets him. The reader will get to feel what Magda is feeling without me having to explain whether she now likes him.

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

The Structure of Secrets in The Informers

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’s novel, The Informers, is a collection of three stories wrapped together in a brilliant structure. Rather than three consecutive books forming a trilogy, the action of the second book (the one we are reading) takes place after the first has been published. Vasquez reveals little of the text of the first book, the story of the exile of a family friend from Germany in Colombia during and after World War II, to the reader. Instead, its action is revealed in counterpoint to the action of the second book, which deals with the reaction of the narrator’s father to his first book and the aftermath of this reaction.

It is this reaction by Gabriel Santoro Sr. to his son’s book that hints at the underlying link between these three stories. Without revealing too much of the plot, it is enough to say a theme of informing develops and it is not until the third book, which forms a postscript to the second, that I truly understood the nature of the writer as informer.

I highly recommend this book to anyone writing memoir or anyone grappling with the ways in which writing reveals greater truths about its author than we sometimes intend. It is also a good book for anyone looking for a completely fresh way of looking at World War II and how it affected more than just Europe.

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

Don DeLillo: The Man behind the Curtain in Mao II

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A novel is a fiction, necessarily orchestrated to form a cohesive story. In Mao II, creates a fictional world structured around specific historical events. The reader suspends disbelief and goes along with the author on the journey he set in motion. However, DeLillo seems to resist the submission by the reader to the story. He creates a world that feels cinematic instead of authentic. Then DeLillo slips in moments that feel so true, they pull back the curtain, show the two-dimensionality of the façade, and remind the reader of the fictional contrivances of the rest of the book.

Cinematic Fiction

DeLillo crafted one scene in the book so masterfully it felt cinematic. When Brita is photographing Bill in his writing room, DeLillo writes: “Bill looked for matches now, clearing papers off the desktop.” Through this action, I could see exactly the jumble of his room and the mess of his thoughts. Then DeLillo goes on: “[h]e struck the match and then forgot it.” It was beautiful. I was enthralled. I knew Bill completely through that one gesture. I could see him distractedly cogitating on his relationship with the world outside his house. I felt like I was watching the scene on screen and I didn’t mind that it felt cinematic rather than real. But then DeLillo takes it too far as Brita is taking the last pictures of Bill: “[Brita] moved in closer and refocused, she shot and shot, and he stood their looking into the lens, soft eyes shining.” DeLillo has carefully placed the reader in the position of seeing Bill through the lens of that camera to further the point he is trying to make about images. But at the same time, he is forcing the reader to step outside of the narrative and help construct the fiction. He took me from my seat in the theater and put me behind the camera. I felt forced to participate in the contrivance of the image.

A Series of Unlikely Events

DeLillo also kept me on the outside of the book looking in by throwing together too many unlikely events. If it were just the story of a man (Scott) who is led by fate (we are to believe) to his reclusive idol’s (Bill’s) doorstep, a photographer (Brita) who has sought out this idol, and the idol and his relationship with his editor (Charles) and family, I can weave together the threads and follow the story without complaint. But DeLillo ads in a myriad of disparate and improbable characters: a girl (Karen, a girl so spaced out she knows Warhol’s hair color but can’t remember his name) who was married at Yankee Stadium by the Reverend Moon and who somehow runs into Scott; Arafat; and a poet who was kidnapped at exactly the right moment to become a vehicle for Bill’s come-back. The story was too big for me, and even with a strong belief in fate, I had difficulty making the leaps DeLillo wanted me to make to believe that these characters could ever come together at precisely the right times without divine intervention. It felt like he was reminding me this was a fiction.

Moments of Truth

In sharp contrast to the contrivances DeLillo presented, there were two moments in the book that felt heartbreakingly true. One was when Bill is speaking about his childhood: “I used to announce ballgames to myself….I was the players, the announcers, the crowd, the listening audience and the radio. There hasn’t been a moment since those days when I’ve felt nearly so good.” Having read enough DeLillo to recognize his fascination with baseball, I felt like this was him ascribing his own childhood to Bill. It was so humbly written and so shockingly revealing of an author’s desire to be an entire world, this moment stood out glaringly from the rest of the text. I felt for the first time that I was reading something true. The other sentence where I felt like I could touch the author was: “[a] woman knows how to want something.” It was so cryptic and yet so universally applicable. It seemed like one of those moments where an author throws in an observation he has made that speaks more to a greater truth than to the characters. Again, I felt I was taken out of the narrative, but this time by truths rather than fictions.

I enjoyed the book. I was caught up in the breadth of the story and the seamless way DeLillo panned back and forth between the thoughts of various characters. The book felt important. He was talking about big ideas and trying to make a point beyond the flow of the story. I liked the thrust of all of that. But in trying to make his point, DeLillo forced the situation (I have to believe consciously) and as a result, the story rang tinny. I think he was making a point about the fallacy of images, but I would have preferred to have the story. DeLillo reminded me that the reader can innately tell the difference between fact and fiction. And if I lie to them, whatever story I am trying to tell or whatever meaning I am trying to get across becomes tainted. I don’t mean that I will write nonfiction–I mean instead that I have to carefully consider whether the characters’ actions and my situations ring true. My novel must be a carefully crafted world, but I have to avoid the feeling of contrivance.

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

Myriad Voices in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse

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I don’t know whether it was that the idea of going to the lighthouse was first proposed to six-year-old James, because the first sentence of To the Lighthouse was in dialogue, or because describes James’s “extraordinary joy” at the news, but when his father breaks in with the news (again in dialogue) that the weather will not be good enough, my heart broke for James. And then when James’s mother insists, despite the fact that James has declared his father incapable of untruth, that the possibility still remains of their going, my heart soared for him again.

Shifting Omniscient Perspective

The way the omniscient perspective in the novel dips into the mind of one character and then another with only a paragraph break for separation gives the narration an almost choral effect as character after character muses through their own thoughts and then comments on the action of the novel. The muse, comment, muse pattern in the first chapter opens up space within the novel where the characters come to life even though the action is sparse and takes place over a short period of time. On page 64, the narrator tells us Mrs. Ramsay is knitting and then gives us her thoughts as they wander to “How could any Lord have made this world….With her mind she had always seized the fact that there is no reason, order, justice: but suffering, death, the poor” and then the narrator returns us to the image of her as she “knitted with firm composure.”  Then back to musing and back to knitting. As a reader I feel like I know Mrs. Ramsay in a way I would not if I were to see her knitting in a chair. Because the narrator consistently brings the reader back to the action, the piece still feels grounded. This is something I explored in my novel Polska, 1994. I worked to open up spaces inside the narrative where characters can be and show more of themselves.

The Voice of the House

Whereas the first chapter of To the Lighthouse is populated with the various perspectives and internal voices of characters, the second chapter is nearly devoid of them. The narration focuses on the house itself (its rooms, its furnishings, and its environment) and a result the house and the story feel empty and sad. The reader feels that the Ramsay family and in particular Mrs. Ramsay was the soul of the house. The reader feels the loss of Mrs. Ramsay to the extent that the magic of the house cannot be regained even when the Ramsay family returns in the third chapter.

Repetition

Woolf uses repetition as Lily frequently mentally notes something that Mrs. Ramsey has just noted (e.g. that Paul and Minta are engaged). Lily also comes back to the image of the tree in her painting over and over again as dinner progresses and she decides to move it more to the middle. As the tree comes up again and again, the image is more concrete in the reader’s mind. These things that are repeated take on a greater significance than if they were merely mentioned once, and Lily’s echo of Mrs. Ramsay not only enforces the general understanding of the group but it also shows the similarity in character between Mrs. Ramsay and Lily. I worked with repetition in Murmur of the River. There are a few key scenes that happen twice but in two different ways and this repetition shows how the world around Magda is changing and also how Magda’s interaction with her world is changing.

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