Eastern Europe Archives - A Geography of Reading

Living Life through Nonfiction

February 14, 2021 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

After my lowest weeks, days I spilled over into tears at the slightest provocation, I started to think I might have cabin fever. I may have researched winter-over syndrome, wondering if there was something clinical. I’ve definitely read this article about the pandemic wall more than once. Recently, though, I realized that I’m profoundly bored and that I’m using the fitty energy of that to gnaw at my leg and any other thing I can reach. This whatever feeling has also explained my reading tastes of late—I’m reading almost entirely nonfiction, a category I mostly avoid, except, perhaps, when I’m trying to experience something that feels more like life than this routine we’ve developed to get through the thing. I should say that we’re well, financially stable, and okay in general. But humans weren’t designed to live a full year mostly indoors and away from other humans. Screens aren’t helping. So I thought I’d share some of the lives I’ve been living lately in case you need your own escape.

Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets by Svetlana Alexievich

This polyphonic history of post-Soviet Russia is fascinating. It’s fascinating as events unfold with Navalny in Russia. It’s fascinating as the U.S. seems intent on forgetting our own attempted coup. It’s fascinating in general to remember what it was like to live through the fall of the Soviet Union and the clashes and shifts in that country in the years following. It’s also fascinating for me as someone who’s always been interested in the Eastern European parts of my heritage.

Alexievich includes first-person narratives of everyone from dedicated sovoks to capitalist dreamers, from oppressed minorities to people who lived The Gulag Archipelago, and this book helped me realize how rich and complex the post-Soviet experience is. At times it made me feel better about the political situation in the U.S. At times it did not. Because of the failure of our Congress to hold Trump accountable for trying to kill them and their colleagues, I’ll leave you with this quote from someone who was part of massive anti-Lukashenko protests in Belarus in 2010:

“As long as it’s only us educated romatics out in the streets, it’s not a real revolution.” – Tanya Kuleshova as reported to Svetlana Alexievich

Land of the Firebird: The Beauty of Old Russia by Suzanne Massie

My Russian deep-dive may have started with an attempt to finally get this tome off my to-read shelf before the opening the stack of books awaiting me for my birthday. It might also have started because I was remembering my Djiedo, who died about two years ago. Regardless, Land of the Firebird was fascinating. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything quite like this cultural history. While it’s easy to be skeptical about any book about Russia published in America in the 1980’s, it’s clear that Massie loves the country of her ancestors and the book is filled with fascinating information.

Massie takes us through the history of early Russia where I learned that the Ukrainians and Russians used to be one people (which flipped some of my Reagan-era prejudices on their head). The early parts of the book are more history as she details Mongol invasions and other political transformations and I enjoyed reading about Catherine the Great after having watched The Great. In more recent history, though, Massie really goes beyond history and deep into the culture and arts of Russia (ending at the revolution). I took so much from this book as I forced my son to sit through Russian composers I’d never considered and started more than one poem tracing lines through the artistic side of my Ukrainian heritage. It’s a nice book, but one I’ve already found occasion to share with another writer online.

The Face Series: Tash Aw, Chris Abani and Ruth Ozeki

I was thrilled when I found this gem in a local Little Free Library one day this past fall, because Ozeki and Abani are two of my very favorite writers. I was also excited to delve into the very personal stories in the book as I work to learn more about individual experiences of race.

True to form, Ozeki’s meditation on her literal face is as inventive, intelligent and humorous as the rest of her books. Her Buddhist perspective is always fascinating and humbling, and I loved how she interspliced mini essays on her life with the minute-by-minute observations of staring at her face in the mirror.

“Making familiar things strange is the job of the artist.” – Ruth Ozeki, The Face

Abani’s book contains his characteristic humanity, gorgeous writing, and knowing humor. His look at identity weaves us through stories of his life, conversations with his brother, and greater lessons about Western African culture. This book is one step in the trail of love he leaves wherever he goes.

I did not previously know Aw’s work, but now I can’t wait to read more of it. He belongs among Pico Iyer’s global souls and this book takes us on a fascinating journey through what it is like for him as a Malaysian writer who both does and does not blend into a variety of cultures throughout Asia. Despite having traveled in several Asian countries, I learned so much about different experiences of the continent from the nuances of this book.

As much as I’d like to, I can’t really do any of these three (short but rich) books justice here, because so much of the beauty is in discovering the way these three writers structure their thoughts. What I can do is highly recommend each and every one.

The Hunger Angel by Herta Müller

This book is actually fiction based on stories from someone who experienced the same deportation to the gulag. I’ve lost the book somewhere (or given it away, it was oh so very depressing), so I cannot treat you to any of Müller’s sentences or the fantastic imagery she imbues into this bleak, bleak experience, but this book is one of the most beautifully written things I’ve read in a very long while and it will make almost any pandemic experience seem cheery.

New Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton

Now we’re snowed in for the long weekend, and after finally finishing the Alexievich book (so good, so long, such small print), I decided to treat myself to Thomas Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation. I’m not very far along, but already it’s a bit like reading Simone Weil (which I loved). Because I’m a reluctant agnostic (and most of the time Buddhist), I do not resonate deeply with Merton’s relationship with God, and still I connect deeply with the content of his writing. When he writes of Descartes as a being alienated from his feelings, “in exile from his own spiritual depths,” I recognize a struggle I’ve been working to overcome for the last decade as I integrate my thoughts and my feelings.

In January 2020, I had come to the conclusion that I needed to focus on being more mindful of my everyday experiences, their effects on me, and my relationship with the world at large. Which lasted until about February, when the only thing I was able to be mindful of was my need to stock up on basic supplies and the fear I was beginning to feel every time my son went to daycare. A year later, I feel stable enough (despite the pandemic wall) to breathe and think. And I’m excited to have Merton as my guide on the next step of whatever is to come.

Of course, this nonfiction fixation started before I realized it and most of my last pandemic reading list qualifies. May these (or any other) books bring you some comfort until we get to live our own lives again.

Olga Tokarczuk’s “House of Day, House of Night” and the Beauty of Not Knowing

February 2, 2019 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

Bless the books that find you at just the right time in your life. I first started hearing about Olga Tokarczuk and House of Day, House of Night this past fall, received it for Christmas, and started reading it the weekend after my grandfather (Djiedo) died. The book so perfectly met me where I was that I felt as though Tokarczuk was sitting at my side, comforting me with stories and reminders that the best things in life are unknowns. No matter that the book was first published 31 years ago on a different continent in a language I barely speak anymore.

First Impressions

I did not know what Tokarczuk was doing when I read the first seven pages of House of Day, House of Night, but I was in love enough to recommend it to everyone at the cabin where I was staying. I knew the book was about a town in Poland that had once been German and then the Germans had been relocated, the empty town filled with Poles from the side of the country that was now Russia. But that’s not how the book starts at all.

It begins with a dream.

“The first night I had a dream. I dreamed I was pure sight, without a body or a name.” – Olga Tokarczuk

Writing teachers always tell us to focus on our opening words and to hone them until they slice open a reader’s curiosity. Achievement unlocked. The dream continues for a page as the narrator hovers over a valley as she seeks her location in space, consciousness. And then it ends.

The tone shifts in the next section as we encounter the quotidian details of the narrator’s home and life including meeting her mysterious neighbor, Marta, a woman whose life details are as elusive of my understanding of this text. I had no idea where Tokarczuk was taking me, but I loved it and trusted her with my fragile psychic state.

The Power of Linked Stories

Linked short stories go in and out of vogue, I think, because so few people do them well. Creating a world that’s larger than one character’s lived experience seems like a great idea. It allows you to see things from a broader perspective and to understand the world as myriad. I’m in. But the temptation to over-fill the blanks between characters is huge, which can result in a world where we know too much about too little. Other writers react to this temptation but linking the stories so sparsely that they become a “Where’s Waldo” where only the truly cool kids are in on the linkages.

Tokarczuk, though, manages her links just right. Maybe it’s because the characters are odd enough, maybe because they’re inhabited enough, maybe because there are connections we clearly see but can’t understand—the result is that we feel as though we are truly in a town full of people as weird, normal, knowable, and mysterious as our own neighbors. There’s Marta from next door (a woman who may or may not be a mushroom), a lycanthropic classics teacher with a fascinating (but hidden) life story, a hermaphroditic saint (and the scholar monk who worshipped them), and a German man who returned to this town to find who he once had been (only to find a final truth), plus a comet, an eclipse, and cloud-based divination.

Fascinating, right? With a list like this, House of Day, House of Night could have been a veritable circus side show except that each of these characters and ideas is so carefully, so literarily, so humanly handled that they feel like a beautiful part of our every day. Which they might be. My Djiedo was a prize fighter, a trumpeter, a coal miner, a professor, an editor, a father, and a presidential advisor. My father has been a pilot, a forester, an economist, a hippie, a Voyageur, a professor, and more. And I, a marketer, mom, wife, poet, novelist, and essayist have lived on three continents and speak five languages. The stories we don’t know about our friends and neighbors are myriad.

Which reminds me, you can put anything in a book if you’re willing to be open to how weird life is and how it’s part of a larger story than maybe you’ve even understood yourself.

“Peter wanted to see his village again, and Erika wanted to see Peter looking at it. She thought it would finally help her to understand him fully, from start to finish, with all his sadnesses.” – Olga Tokarczuk

It helps that much of the story is surfaced in the scenes we see, but it’s also essential that Tokarczuk leaves ample breathing room in the interstices for us to fill in our own rich ideas about the connections therein.

The Not Knowing Bit

“His brain was busy creating the narcotic of a merciful death” – Olga Tokarczuk

“Only sleep closes the old and opens the new—one person dies and another awakes” – Olga Tokarczuk

There’s something about someone you love dying that changes everything. Even if that person is 103 and their death is a mercy. You wonder if you did enough, if they knew they were loved, if holding onto objects will help you hold onto them, if you even should hold on, what your own aging and death will look like, how you can possibly afford forty years of retirement.

Not only did Tokarczuk touch on some of these topics, as with this lovely look at the aging of ~~garments~~ ~~people~~ garments:

“I could see that they were wearing out, going at the seams, softening and getting older all by themselves without my input. And there was a sort of beauty in it, the opposite of ripening.” – Olga Tokarczuk

She also reminded me of the beauty of simple, thoughtful exploration:

“When you’re travelling all you really encounter is yourself, as if that were the whole point of it. When you’re at home you simply are… You can put yourself to one side—and that’s when you see the most.” – Olga Tokarczuk

That in my mourning, I was doing the work I needed to do in order to eventually heal. Here are some other ideas Tokarczuk left me breadcrumbs to explore:

The stasis of monks who “live in a constant present”
Collectively our dreams mean more than they do individually
It’s our “duty to save things that are falling into decay, rather than create new ones”
“Only in darkness does the light of the earth become visible”
Inside our bodies is only darkness
How aging involves taking action only slowly and “watching the ebb and flow of time”
Life goes on

I still miss my Djiedo. If the trajectory of mourning for my Baba holds any clues, I always will. But House of Day, House of Night helped me feel part of a greater, unknowable world in the days when I needed it most. And I will love this book and Olga Tokarczuk always for that.

“She recognizes an era not by the people who were alive then, because people are woefully similar to one another, but by the colour of the air and the leaves, the way the light fell on objects.” – Olga Tokarczuk

Embark on your own Tokarczuk adventure, pick up a copy of House of Day, House of Night from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Books that Don’t Make the Cut

January 16, 2016 by Isla McKetta, MFA 2 Comments

If you’ve read more than a few of my reviews, you’ll notice that I usually only take the time to review books I like. That’s because I prefer to delve into the positive aspects of a work but also because my time is valuable and I often don’t finish books I’m not enjoying. At the beginning of this month I went back to work after maternity leave and time is now more precious than ever—evidenced by the fact that I tossed aside book after book in my first week back. This is the story of the books I didn’t finish and why.

Parallel Stories by Peter Nadas

This was actually the second time I tried to read this book. I took it on a week-long beach getaway for my husband’s and my first anniversary. Then it sat on my bedside table for a couple of years and I managed to read 100 pages before tucking it away. So when I knew I’d be home for a prolonged maternity leave, I dug it out again. I knew from reading Love and A Book of Memories that his work is often gorgeously slow but worth the effort.

Parallel Stories started out strong. A body is found on a bench and the first scene is a delicate and thoughtful interplay between an investigator and the man who either found the body or murdered the man. Nadas reveals so much of the men’s psychology as the scene unfolds and we come to learn that the investigator does suspect the man but that he actually doesn’t care. It’s very soon after the Berlin Wall came down and there is so much more going on in all of their lives. The scene is surprising and riveting.

If only the rest of the book was that way. Instead, Nadas starts following the story of a family in Hungary. We only really ever see two characters at a time in conversation and I came to understand that the juxtaposition of odd bits of these characters’ natures was the source of the title. I also stumbled on the most extensive and dull scenes of masturbation I’ve ever read. I kept trying to push farther into the book to see if we could get back to the mystery or if there was anyone I could care about in the book, but, well… eventually my poor brain was as chafed as the character’s genitals and I had to stop reading. At least I got over 200 pages into this 1100+ page tome.

Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes

I picked this book up at the local Little Free Library because I’ve enjoyed many of Julian Barnes’s novels. I thought it would be a quiet, meditative, well-written novel that would reach into my subconscious and teach me things about writing. I did not think it would be about Flaubert’s parrot. Literally. Well, actually, two parrots (because only one could have really been Flaubert’s), stuffed.

The book is filled with all kinds of biographical details about Flaubert’s life, which is great if you’re a Flaubert scholar or subscribe to the school of thought that the life of the writer is equally interesting to the work. I don’t. I did read the collected correspondence of Gustave Flaubert and George Sand because I adore the art of correspondence, and after that I knew more than enough about their lives.

It’s possible that this book contains a mystery or a brilliant narrative or some brilliant writing. I’ll never know because 60 pages were plenty to turn me off.

The Loser by George Konrad

Konrad is one of those obscure Eastern European writers I read in grad school. And loved. I read The Case Worker, a squirrely novel about a case worker in Communist Hungary. That one was hard to read but worth the effort. The Loser was just weird.

The book starts out in an outlandish nightmare then transitions to a mental asylum and then the countryside of Communist Hungary and then the asylum again. I think. The type was so small and the writing so dense that I only ever got between two and five pages read per night. So where I could have been immersed in a gorgeous metaphor that revealed what life really felt like in Communist Hungary, instead I felt like I was in a nightmare. Kind of like the time we watched a Japanese horror film in a drafty theater at midnight. This early bird kept falling asleep and waking again as the characters descended into a neon-lit Buddhist hell. I was freezing nd had no idea what was happening. All I wanted—during the movie and in this book—was to GET OUT. I think I completed a whole 40 pages.

Did I give these books their fair shake? Probably not. Am I too tired in these first couple of weeks as a working mother to really engage with literature? Maybe. Do I sound a little cranky? Yes. Sorry about that. I love books. I sincerely believe there are great books that will just never quite hit me right. These might be among them. But I’ll never know. If you want to find out for yourself whether I’ve just maligned some of the best books in the universe, check out the Little Free Library on 12th Ave NE and around 90th in Seattle later today 🙂

Thanks for bearing with me as I figure out this whole mom/worker/writer thing. I’m going to try to find something I enjoy and get a new review out to you soon. Just as soon as the kiddo and I finish another round of Dr. Seuss’s Mr. Brown Can Moo Can You? which he ADORES. And if he had his way, he’d grab this laptop right out of my hands and type up a review right quick. Or put it in his mouth. Judging by the way he “consumes” his favorite books, I’m not going to find out.

Suspended Inside The Appointment by Herta Müller

April 6, 2014 by Isla McKetta, MFA 6 Comments

When I woke this morning, I didn’t want to pick up The Appointment by Herta Müller even though I only had a few pages left to read. I successfully avoided the book all day yesterday, too. But not for the reasons you might think. I set the book aside because it was so good, so cleanly and smartly written, that I didn’t want it to end.

Constructing Time

The narrator of The Appointment, a woman living under Ceauşescu’s regime in Romania, is riding a tram on her way to an interrogation with a man called Albu. The ride across town is to take two hours, and the way that the narrator digresses into flashback, I started to wonder if the trip would also take the entire book.

A teacher once told me, “If the bulk of your story takes place in flashback, you have a problem.” In almost every other case, I would agree. But here Müller has created this incredible sense of suspense that carried me through the labyrinthine back story back to the tram (as a touchstone, a grounding point) and then back into this woman’s life history again. It works because the stories are so fascinating. It works because she can be trusted to bring us back to that forward momentum of time. And it works because it conveys the stalled sense of her life under communism. If the narrator makes it to the appointment today, there will just be another in the future. There is no escape. The continuum is a circle.

I became so enthralled with the way time was working in the book that I had to start drawing it out for myself.

Teaching the Reader to Read

Another teacher told me, “The best books teach us how to read them.” The Appointment is an excellent example of this and I can see why Müller won the Nobel. The careful orchestration of time wouldn’t work if Müller hadn’t already shown us that the digressions lead somewhere. In the first few pages of the novel, she lays the groundwork of waiting for the tram and a brief look into the interrogation that waits on the other side.

Then she takes a brief step to the side to describe the routine of insomnia that precedes these interrogations. That aside evolves into a description of her life with Paul. And then a description of a label of brandy with two plums on in. I only had her to guide me, and I was willing to follow this narration because it was early in the book and I was still trying to decide if Müller was someone I wanted to follow. The narrator then gives a glimpse of her wedding to Paul (her second) and compares their faces to the two plums on the bottle of brandy. All in four pages.

That was the moment I knew that Müller was the type of writer who is laying these seemingly random details not to obfuscate, but as breadcrumbs. I knew I could trust that every detail she’d share, no matter how dizzying, would be carefully chosen and that I could trust her to bring them back around for me if only I paid close enough attention.

I was hooked and invested and I didn’t want to leave the world of the book.

Rich Characters

Then I realized that a few pages earlier, as the narrator had dipped very briefly into a memory of her father-in-law while describing the first minutes of an interrogation with Albu, Müller was also carefully setting something up. “The Perfumed Commissar” will come back later and every time we see either Albu or her father-in-law, we will think of the other. There is a relationship between the way the narrator sees the two men that enriches our understanding of each of them as individuals. When we later learn the back story of her father-in-law, it makes Albu seem even more sinister.

Müller does something similar with Lilli, the narrator’s best friend, by setting up a comparison between Lilli’s seduction of her stepfather and the narrator’s witness of her father’s adultery. These comparisons charge the text with extra meaning and they also provide contrasts to highlight where characters diverge. The narrator does have deep feelings about her father and about sex and I feared that she would mimic Lilli. What she does instead (which I won’t spoil for you here) becomes even more poignant in comparison.

Creating Order and Meaning in the World

I recently had a fantastic conversation with my husband where he told me he can see how I like to take bits of the world and digest them down into something I can understand. This distillation for me is how I create and understand order in my world. It’s how I create meaning. As a writer, drafts are my method of pruning information until I find and understand the truth hidden beneath.

One of the reasons I love writers like Müller is that I feel her process is similar. Although she drops thousands of images of daily life in Communist Romania throughout this book, and each adds to a greater feeling of life at that time in that place, I feel like the book itself is a distillation of the feeling of charged stasis.

I am glad I finished the book this morning. I am even more glad that I have the opportunity to re-open it here for you and to share with you what I love about this book and what that teaches me about myself, about writing, and about life. Next week I’ll bite off another chunk, probably Stephen Dunn’s fantastic essays on poetry in Walking Light. In the meantime, I’d love to hear more about how you process the world and about what you’re reading in the comments below.

If you can see the beauty of being trapped on a tram for the length of an entire book, pick up a copy of The Appointment from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin Fails to Woo Me

January 5, 2014 by Isla McKetta, MFA 4 Comments

Books are my sanctuary. They are how I learn about the world and myself. And they are where I take solace when having a bad day. So when a book fails me (and I fail to put it down), everything in my life feels askew. This happened recently with Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (also called Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernières.

Auspicious Beginnings

As I lay down in bed with the first few pages of this book, I was enchanted by the story of Dr. Iannis extracting a decades-old pea from a patient’s ear. It was a delightful story and so unexpected. As I drifted off to sleep, I revisited my vague, sweet memories of the movie starring Nicholas Cage and Penelope Cruz and was looking forward to more.

Maddening Monologues

When I opened the book again the next day on the bus, I was confused to be ensconced in a first-person monologue. And then it seemed to be followed by another. My recollections are inexact at this moment because I’ve tried to block the story from my mind, but I was placed directly inside the mind of Il Duce, Metaxas, and someone called (at that point) simply “The Homosexual.” The chapter titles told me who was speaking but the text failed to tell me why I cared and I struggled to find the overarching story. I kept reading because it was the only book I had with me (the argument that may some day convince me to get an e-reader), but I wasn’t happy about it.

I think if I had some understanding of World War II in Greece (and a better understanding of Mussolini), I might have gotten more out of those first-person narratives. Instead I was annoyed and felt bandied about. I was looking somewhat for the story I thought I knew (although I did not remember enough of the film to make the same mistake I had the first time I read The English Patient) or the story that enchanted me that first night, so I kept reading.

Sweet Moments of Romance

Interwoven with those first-person assaults were little gems of Pelagia and her father, the doctor. And there were adorable moments of Pelagia falling for a local boy, Mandras. They were romantic like I remember the movie being. They were also a little expected. When Pelagia admired Mandras, I felt like de Bernières was writing how he would want to be admired. Perhaps that’s a writer’s prerogative (I’ve done it), but it felt vain and made me feel more separate from the story.

When Mandras becomes inconvenient, his character becomes less interesting. I don’t take issue with Pelagia’s falling out of love with him, that seemed quite natural given their separation, but I did start to wonder why this Greek god we had been supposed to admire was suddenly shunted aside into the realm of one-dimensional characters.

Captain Corelli and Pelagia also held my interest for awhile. I kept wanting to put the book down but had just enough interest in the characters to keep me going. And, much to my relief, the monologues seemed to subside.

Choosing Titles

I’m thinking a lot about titles right now as I seek the perfect name for my novel which is due to be released later this year. I’m rubbish with titles so for a long time the book was called simply Polska. As the book neared completion I examined the themes and writing and started calling the book Murmurs of the River after Chopin’s “Murmures de la Seine” which had influenced some of the rhythm of the book, but I knew the title was weak, so now I’m looking for something that will make a reader pick my book off of a virtual shelf without betraying the content. I have pages of lists of potential words and one good candidate. UPDATE: My editor and I chose to go back to basics and call this book Polska, 1994.

What I’m saying is that I know titles are both very important and very difficult. Still, I was surprised when it felt like I didn’t meet the title character (both Corelli and the mandolin) until halfway through the book. That might not be true because I read the beginning much slower than I read the end. But to me Pelagia was the center of this book, not the mandolin.

I’ve spoiled so much that I won’t go into the ending here, but I will say that the tone and style of the book changes about halfway through. And that wasn’t just because I was skimming it while waiting for the plumber to replace our pipes. I usually try to respect a writer’s decisions as final, but in this case I will say that this large book which is trying to say so many things could have used another edit with an eye to theme. I kept reading, but I was mostly sorry I did. I should have done myself the favor of putting down the book and enjoying happy memories of the beginning.

If you are a more patient soul than I, pick up a copy of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.