Eastern Europe Archives - Page 2 of 7 - A Geography of Reading

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 Bookshop.org. 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.

The Lullaby of Polish Girls by Dagmara Dominczyk

November 13, 2013 by Isla McKetta, MFA 2 Comments

I can’t remember where I first heard of The Lullaby of Polish Girls by Dagmara Dominczyk a mere two days after it was released, but I know the very next thing I did was add the book to my Goodreads. Within a week I had purchased a hardback copy from Elliott Bay Books. I regret none of that. What I do regret is letting the book linger on my shelves for five months before reading it. I thought it would be an easy read, maybe a little pop-y and I was never quite in the mood. My mistake. The book was fantastic and I’m so glad I threw it in my suitcase for my anniversary getaway this past weekend.

First, a Little Background

I’m a sucker for all things Polish. I spent a year there on foreign exchange in this wondrous time (1994-5) when the country was emerging from Communism and hadn’t yet found its feet as part of Western Europe. I was so enthralled with the people, the culture, and the history that 10 years later I started drafting a novel about the place to try and grasp in fictional form some of the complexities of the place and people I loved.

As I’ve been querying agents for my novel, I’ve been seeking out books about Poland during that transitional period to 1) see if I got it right, 2) find out what agents and presses are interested in the period, and 3) recapture some of the magic. So I was predisposed to like The Lullaby of Polish Girls, even if it hadn’t been really well written.

A Book in Context

Minutes before I opened The Lullaby of Polish Girls and started reading it, I read the final pages of Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy. It was a strangely apt transition, because I’d been really interested in Bathsheba Everdene’s unusual strength of character for a literary woman of her period. At least in the beginning. Then she got kind of wimpy and I started seeing so many of the gender limitations of the era. I was getting really depressed, actually, despite the fact that I was away on vacation and reading in a spot overlooking the sea.

About The Lullaby of Polish Girls

How wonderfully refreshing, then, to open Dominczyk’s book and find not one but three strong female leads. And they weren’t cardboard strong or representing some idealized female power. Instead, Anna, Kamila, and Justyna are beautifully round characters. All three are Polish by birth, although Anna has emigrated to America, and their mothers knew each other before the girls were born. Anna first meets Justyna when she returns to Poland for a few brief moments as a tween in 1989. Justyna tells Kamila (who had been away that weekend) about Anna and Kamila takes up a deeply personal correspondence with her.

Describing an Era

So what we get to see as readers is the lives of these women in 2002 and then fully-realized flashbacks of them as they are growing up in 1989, 1992, 1995, and 1998. It’s a simple setup. Each chapter has a section focused on Anna, then one on Kamila, and a third on Justyna. The chapters alternate between the present (2002) and an ordered sequence of years in the past. But what’s happening behind that simplicity is these girls are growing up and changing as rapidly as their country is. When Anna visits in 1989, Poland is still in the last stages of Communist rule. By the time the narrative ends, Poland is two short years away from joining the European Union. That’s a whirlwind of history and it all happens in 217 pages. But Dominczyk lets this exist as rich background rather than thrusting the history on the reader.

Intercultural Identities

Dominczyk is also using her characters to describe the myriad stages of exile of the Polish people and the longing that produces. Anna’s father is a refugee from the Communist government. She was seven when her family came to the US to live the American Dream. Kamila’s parents came to the US after the Berlin Wall fell and are in the country illegally. When we first meet her in 2002, Kamila is visiting her parents as she flees from a bad marriage in Poland. Justyna and her family have always been in Poland. It’s remarkable that three families can showcase such a wide variety of experiences and it never comes off at all forced. There are some really gorgeous complexities that arise in the girls’ interactions because of their degrees of escape from Poland and it’s so well handled.

I’ve seen these experiences up close and Dominczyk gets them just right. When I was in Poland, I remember people telling me about an aunt or a cousin who had gone to the US as though I might have met them. They’d talk wistfully of America like it was the promised land. And a Polish friend I had in the US saved every year so she could go back and visit that part of her past and her family. She knew that people expected something from her because she was American–gifts or hope or a way out–and I think that always reminded her of what she had in the States. Meanwhile, as an American, I would have gladly stayed in Poland if I hadn’t been 17.

Strong Female Characters

But what I liked most about this book was the strength of those three women. Even as girls they are sharply aware (of each other when not of themselves) and they make mistakes and choices and life happens to them, but they are strong in their very core. The image I came away from Poland with was of an entire sex who was genetically blessed, good at all things home-related, and making their way in the workforce as scientists and economists. It’s a broad generalization, of course, but this book captures some of that “we’ll forge ahead no matter what” spirit that I so admired.

I haven’t been back to Poland. Maybe because it’s not in my blood I’m afraid that I won’t relate to the place after so many years. But I was grateful to Domiczyk for allowing me to revisit and broaden my memories. And I was grateful that she created this rich, tightly-written story. I’ll re-read this book with pleasure and not just as a vacation read.

If you want to visit a little piece of the Polish-American experience, pick up a copy of The Lullaby of Polish Girls from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Exploring Sun Alley with Cecilia Ştefănescu

September 8, 2013 by Isla McKetta, MFA 2 Comments

This week I am surrounded by Romania from a thought-provoking post about what people will do for a better life to a search query for my favorite tea that instead returned an album of Romanian celebration music (in French). It all started in Sun Alley, Cecilia Ştefănescu’s award-winning novel about the intoxication and torment of forbidden love.

From the moment the young Sal first sees Emi joyously cutting apart his friends’ most prized magazines, he is enthralled with her and does everything he can to overcome the friends, parents, and life that try to keep them apart.

Central Mystery

More than a retelling of Romeo and Juliet, though, Sun Alley allows the characters to grow up. In fact, what I enjoyed most about this book was the split in time. Just as we are preparing to find out what happens when Sal and Emi prepare to run away from Sun Alley together, the time period flashes suddenly forward to an adult Sal and Emi. We discover that their attempt to flee was unsuccessful (as seemed inevitable) but we don’t learn why or how until much later.

Instead, Ştefănescu keeps the unfinished quality of their love affair in sharp focus. Though they are married to other people, they again find that they cannot bear to be apart and embark on a long, adulterous affair with all of the usual stakes. I’m not trying to be flip, but it’s obvious that husband, wife, and children cannot keep Sal and Emi apart any more than friends and parents could.

Their childhood separation is alluded to over and over as the chapters flash back and forward in time which creates a delicious tension because although we know they are (somewhat) together now, we are constantly reminded how fragile that relationship is because it has been broken before. The wonderful structure conceals as much as it reveals and I started to think about how our shifting memories betray us over time.

Other Mysteries

“He cringed in terror. He knew quite well what was on that table. It was someone. A human being, a body, a creature.” – Cecilia Ştefănescu

There is a second mystery in this book, that of a dead body young Sal finds in a basement one afternoon. It’s a truly creepy scene and made me think about how children really act versus how we like to think they act. I think this book erred on the side of how they really act, though, and it was a good lesson for me about not being squeamish about letting your characters follow their paths. I’m glad Ştefănescu didn’t take a more restrained approach to Sal’s interaction with the body, but I do wish that the body subplot was a more integrated part of the story throughout. There were echoes of it and the resolution (which I will not spoil for you) is just right, but I lost the trail sometimes as I focused on Sal and Emi’s love affair.

Significant Detail

Details show a reader where to focus. When something is important, a writer will often layer in more and more detail to signal to the reader that it’s time to really examine a scene. In the case of Sun Alley I was lost in the detail for nearly all of the first chapter. There are readers who love having every sense titillated along the way as they enter a world. I usually look for a bit more guidance and this overly detailed beginning left me grasping for understanding.

“He thought a while and then lightly touched the cockroach’s hump with his nail. It stopped, curled up and slowly moved its legs, seemingly begging to be left alive. Sal lifted his finger and sat down on the kerb next to the cockroach.” – Cecilia Ştefănescu

This is a stylistic choice and some very popular books like Atonement use the same approach. On rereading this beginning, I found that Ştefănescu does as good of a job at tying these descriptions to her overall theme as McEwan does (which is to say she does it very well), but it still drives me a little nuts.

Writing True Dialogue

One of my favorite parts of the book is a fight that Sal and Emi have at the end. I won’t quote it for you here because I don’t want to reveal too much, but writing a good, tense dialogue is something I struggle with. Here Ştefănescu lays out two characters who are standing their ground firmly and we as readers can see that there are moments when they are talking about completely different things without realizing it. So there is conflict and tension and possible resolution but the scene is so well written that I can easily believe one might never see what the other is truly saying. That’s an art and a delicate balance and Ştefănescu does it very well.

Although the ethnologist in me hoped that something about this book would come off distinctly Romanian and I’d learn more about Ştefănescu’s country of origin, I was not at all disappointed to find instead a book that will appeal to anyone who has ever experienced the joy and suffering of forbidden love.

If this review made you want to explore Sun Alley, pick up a copy from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.