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

The Language of Culture in Their Eyes Were Watching God

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Zora Neale Hurston - Their Eyes Were Watching God

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston writes in a language so rich it is sometimes nearly unintelligible. The dialogue is expressed in dialect and the imagery is culturally specific which immerses the reader into a fully-realized world.

Appreciating the Small Things

When the protagonist Janie is leaving the home of her first husband, a man she never loved, to follow smooth-talking Joe, the narrator observes: “The morning road air was like a new dress.” The image is striking in that it pulls together two simple but disparate items, air and a dress. This simile gives the reader a completely fresh image which is difficult to do, and the originality is intoxicating. The image also gives the reader a better understanding of Janie’s world. These are not rich people and a new dress is a fine, rare thing. The newness of the dress also points to the possibility that lies ahead for Janie as she leaves what was a stifling relationship. In passing through that morning road air, she is shedding her old clothes and moving into a new life—maybe even a life where she can have new things.

After Janie has spent years of her life as Joe’s wife working in his store and stifling herself when he wants her to, the narrator comments: “The years took all the fight out of Janie’s face. For a while she thought it was gone from her soul.” This reminds the reader that fight was once in her face and that she was a spirited woman. It also implies that submission is a bad thing and that Janie had to give up a part of herself, even if only temporarily, to be with this man. In Janie’s world submission equals being worn down which means that the fighting spirit is something of value.

Local Vernacular

The characters are African American and large portions of the story are set in Florida during a time when segregation was de rigueur. Most of the people are poor and barely scraping by and they are not by and large educated. This is reflected in their dialogue as in this segment from a conversation between two peripheral characters: “‘Ah’m uh bitch’s baby round lady people.’” For a white, educated, northern ear, it takes a concerted effort to completely understand the meaning behind the sentence. A bitch’s baby would be a puppy. Does that mean the character is lagging around behind women like a puppy?  And although this imagery is less fresh that the new dress, it is colorful and descriptive. I didn’t necessarily understand everything the characters spoke of during the dialogue in the novel, but Hurston’s way of rendering speech gives insight into the world Janie lives in. I could hear the characters in their native tongue. Because the diction is unusual, I understood more fully the differences between the world in this novel and my world.

Free Indirect Style

Hurston also uses free indirect style, breaking away from the narrative slightly to slip into a comment that sounds like it is coming from Janie. This happens as Janie is considering Tea Cake’s advances: “Must be around twenty-five and here she was around forty…Fact is, she decided to treat him so cold if he ever did foot the place that he’d be sure not to come hanging around there again.”  For a moment we are inside Janie’s head and she is sassy. She is judging herself but she is also intrigued by this young man. The sentences are not complete and the syntax is Southern with the “if he ever did” and the “treat him so cold.”  This gives the reader a fresh take on the inner workings of Janie, but it is also a bridge between the dialect of the dialogue and the clearer diction of the narrator.

Language is specific to culture and reveals everything that is important about everything worth talking about. For my novel, Polska, 1994, I worked with the language of my characters to denote their backgrounds and their experiences. Language can also be a barrier to understanding. I used some Polish words in my novel and I thought long and hard about each one. In some cases, the Polish was the best possible word because there is not an English equivalent. In others, I wanted the feeling of the Polish word, as with Jacek. I used more Polish in introducing Jacek than I had with other characters because of his intense nationalism. In either case, I rarely translate the word and some understanding will be lost for the non-Polish reader. Hurston’s rich language easily sucked me into her world, but often, especially during passages of dialogue, I was lost in terms of what was going on. I had to spend additional time looking at the language and it took me out of the story and took away from my experience of it. I personally have difficulty understanding novels written in dialect, but I understand is different for every reader. Some readers will find my novel more difficult too. But I hope even in the difficult reads they can love it as much as I loved Their Eyes Were Watching God.

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

Love in The Winter Vault with Anne Michaels

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I’ve been thinking about what I could say about The Winter Vault by that would express how much I loved it. The only way to start is with my own story. Five months ago I married the man I have loved for sixteen years and I thought marriage would be a capstone on our relationship. I didn’t realize our marriage would be the beginning of a new phase of love. Reading about Jean and Avery falling in love, I saw a closeness and intimacy that mirrored ours. I remembered what it was like to fall in love with my husband so long ago and that helped me understand the beauty and fullness of what was happening in this new phase of our relationship. I’ve heard it said that no marriage in literature can be a happy one, and Avery and Jean are confronted with a loss that divides them, but it does not divide the book and the ways they continue to relate and to love are an equally important part of the story.

Building on recurring themes of creation and simulacra in the wake of destruction, this novel created for me a sensation of deepening understanding as I encountered loud thematic echoes and subtler inferences throughout. Even tiny technical details of the transplantation of Abu Simbel, though woven into a beautiful story, reinforce these themes.

Michaels is first a poet and she re-imagines each sentence so that it is at once unique and seemingly effortless. It is a joy to read about new and familiar subjects and to follow her curious mind as she describes the genesis of wheat and the varieties of palms.

Portions of this book and the general structure recall Fugitive Pieces, which I also loved, but The Winter Vault is in most ways a very different story and perhaps one with a wider audience. This is a good book for the curious mind and for anyone who has ever loved deeply and lost. I’m not ready to part with it yet. Perhaps as I read it again I will fall even more deeply in love. If so, I’ll spare you the details.

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

Giorgio Pressburger Arrests the Reader

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In The Law of White Spaces by , one of the chapters starts with a second person address to the reader. It reads, “Don’t be shocked, dear brother, by the case I’m about to lay before you; don’t be ashamed or disgusted or scandalized, I beg you, by what you are about to learn.” The use of the second person immediately drew me in and made me feel like a part of the story.

Reader as Witness

In this chapter in White Spaces, the reader plays the character of a witness or judge rather than being an active participant in the story. The narrator refers to research the reader has done and the belief system that has created. He then goes on to juxtapose this belief system saying, “my own experience…stands in absolute contradiction to your conception of existence.” Pressburger uses this supposed contradiction as a way to justify fully explaining the narrator’s ideas and how he came by them. Because I, as the reader, am told that the beliefs assigned to me are wrong, Pressburger is bringing me into the story as I try to weigh the evidence.

Pressburger uses an interesting segue between the second person introduction of the story and the first person telling of the action of the story. He writes, “Of course I want to take a little time before telling you about me, but I also want to try and make you understand how much I was influenced by your research.” This statement is the equivalent of the hug and roll where the narrator compliments “my” ideas which endears me to him but then releases me to watch him elucidate how he has expanded on them and found his own way.

The narrator then does not refer to the reader again except in two passing references to the reader’s research and once to ask if I remembered Mrs. Polak and a conspiratorial reference, “We know, dear brother, what really lies behind feeling shy, feeling ashamed, blushing, do we not?” Each of these references keeps the reader in the position of engaged observer and reinforced the supposed relationship. The reader and narrator are supposed to share at least thirty-five years of memories.

Addressing the Reader

It is strange at the end of this chapter when the narrator again addresses the reader. He says, “You can meet me in the market where you’ll find me sweeping up the dirt, moving boxes and wooden cases around.” This made me wonder where the reader was to have encountered the narrator in the first place.

Pressburger has assumed that his reader is willing to give up their own point of view to get this second person narration to work. He also has to create a persona that is compelling enough for the reader to want to assume. When he addresses the reader as “you,” he has a specific character in mind and he is asking the reader to take on the role of that character. In my novel I haven’t yet figured out exactly who the “you” is. By setting up a fuller character for the reader to inhabit, I can assign the reader a more complex role that he or she can then choose to inhabit or not.

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

Orhan Pamuk, Citizen of Letters

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I took a long time to finally pull Other Colors by  from my to-read pile. I was afraid Pamuk’s essays would be too scholarly or didactic or that they weren’t quite what I needed at the time. I was afraid of their sheer number and that I would be reading something disjointed and trying. I was afraid they wouldn’t live up to his fiction.

What I found was an uncommonly generous spirit who brought his own thoughts to the table and opened up room for mine. Each of the short essays wove together into the larger themes that obsess Pamuk and filled out my understanding and love of his novels. And the Nobel speech inspired me with his faith in the world and in community. This week Pamuk became my friend in letters. I invited him into my home for deep conversation about things that matter and afterward I felt inspired and opened. Though he will never sit in the brown leather chair in my office, his writing somehow makes me feel like the appreciation is reciprocal. And that is a gift from a gifted man.

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

Empathy in Konrad’s The Case Worker

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From the day to day routine to the understanding of the masses, evokes what it must be like to be a social worker in The Case Worker. From the very first words of the book, “Go on, I say to my client. Out of habit, because I can guess what he’s going to say, and doubt its truthfulness,” Konrád is showing how routine the case worker’s job is and how it has inured him from caring about his clients. Konrád divided the first chapter into a series of short sections describing an interaction with a client, the makeup of the office, another client, more description of the building. By interspersing the narrator’s client relationships with information about floorplans and the objects stored in filing cabinets, Konrád makes the individual clients seem like tasks the narrator has to deal with during his workday and illustrates the narrator’s lack of engagement with his clients. The sections about objects are longer than the sections about clients, too, as though the whip with three lashes stored in the file cabinet is more interesting than the clients themselves. This feeling continues at the beginning of the chapter entitled “Suicide Cases” as the narrator summarizes case study after case study in short paragraphs that run into one another. The sentences about these clients are short, declarative, and devoid of emotion, for example: “In 1951 thirteen-year-old Klara G’s father was denounced as a war criminal and hanged.”

The Bandula Family

In the same chapter Konrád devotes nearly fourteen pages to the story of the Bandula family. This longest section of the book so far (with comparatively long paragraphs that go on for a page or more) both conveys a much deeper understanding of these clients and also brings the reader’s attention to the importance of this case. These are individuals not just suicide cases. I could be more aware of where I direct the reader’s attention in my own writing.

When the case worker takes on responsibility for the orphaned child of Bandula, he begins to take on the characteristics of his clients, but Konrád shows this “metamorphosis” rather than telling the reader about it. He begins with one of the more benign conditions, a compulsion for order. In the chaos of the Bandula apartment, the case worker devotes enormous amounts of time to putting and keeping the place in order. Konrád writes, “there’s no limit to my passion for tidiness….One of my clients went mad because his wife was absent-minded and things were always changing place in the apartment….I can well understand his distaste for the wanderings of salt cellars…” This is the beginning of empathy. A few pages before the case worker was describing the child as “this abstract object.” First he empathizes with the other client, then with Bandula, and eventually with the child. What’s interesting is how Konrád blends the official mind of the case worker with this newly empathetic creature when he begins to see the similarities between his position and Bandulas: “All in all, I am forced to conclude that there is not much difference between this kind of training and what I did before….In my official capacity I made decisions in writing, now I administer beatings.”

Playing with Form

But this is no ordinary case worker. Sometimes Konrád deviates from the standard form of paragraphing. For example, when the case worker is first taken to the mental hospital, Konrád renders a two page chapter that is all one sentence but a series of paragraphs that look as though they mated with stanzas. It’s not whimsical, but it is lyrical and given that these types of sections occur at various times throughout the book, the reader can see that the case worker’s mind (because the book is told in first person) is not as rigid and conventional as he would like to believe. The pattern is to have long descriptive stanzas and then a series of one-line stanzas. This punctuates the one-line stanzas and makes them stand out as though they were very short sentences among very long ones, except that these are all a part of one whole. So lines like: “reserved for male mental cases/of this security ward” come off as emphatic. Near the beginning of the novel is a similar section where instead of stanza-like paragraphs, Konrád joins a series of paragraphs with ellipses to make one sentence and it is dreamlike although the facts themselves are mundane. I like to play with sentence length for emphasis but I had never even considered breaking outside of standard paragraph form.