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 Methods in Jakov Lind’s Madness

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lind-soul-of-woodMost stories don’t smash me to bits. As I read them, I’m moved, enchanted, worried, dismayed, relieved, sometimes annoyed. But Jakov Lind’s Soul of Wood and Other Stories just left me flattened, feeling empty, and as if I were stranded in a strange shapeless place. The question “Wow, what was that all about?” kept looping in my head like a song, and I was unable to find an answer.

But I think the answer lies in not only the mad brilliance of the story itself, but more so, for me as a writer, in the craft of how Lind created the story. By story I mean the novella, Soul of Wood, which opens the collection. The later short stories are also impressive in their own way, but Soul of Wood is the masterpiece. It’s set in Austria in the 1940s and follows Wohlbrecht, a crippled Austrian soldier, who works to hide Anton Barth, a mostly paralyzed Jewish boy, in a mountain cabin. He enlists the help of Alois, his brother-in-law, and the first half of the book centers on the two’s endeavors of dragging Barth up through the woods while trying to avoid the Nazis and their random air attacks.

Shot from all Sides by Point of View

Lind’s voice is somehow casual, witty, romantic and brusquely masculine all at once. It doesn’t just blast its way through the narrative, but rather tumbles with a clear urgency. This was probably the first technique that I’d love to emulate (oh, if I could.) But what’s crazier and even more unattainable is how the point of view wanders. It, at times, becomes dreamy and surreal before landing flatly in stark reality. Take, for instance, the following passage occurring early in the story, which by the way could be a spoiler, depending on how you view the narrative. Read at your own risk.

As Wohlbrecht and Alois return from the cabin, they stop at the side of the road. Wohlbrecht lays and dozes in the hay as Alois talks of his post-war plans. Alois plans to visit Rumania in an effort to cure his epilepsy. In one paragraph, Alois talks about a renowned doctor and his treatment that Alois believes will mend all aspects of his life. In another, the grand wealth that he and all of Vienna will enjoy after the war. As readers we are relaxed at this point in the passage, imagining hopeful situations and feeling a tender intimacy with Alois.

Then: “The loud engine sounds woke up Wohlbrecht.” This kicks off a random rotation of omniscient narration, stream of consciousness and Wohlbrecht’s spoken words. There’s little punctuation to help us distinguish between what’s happening, what’s being said and what’s being thought.

“Jumping Jesus, he cried, they’ll fly right up my ass. A burst of machine-gun fire beat down like rain on the tin roof and by the time Wohlbrecht cried ‘Cover!’ Alois was dead. Hit right in the back of the head. The blood gushed like a geyser. Alois, Alois, Wohlbrecht yelled thinking he was still asleep. Alois, where’d it get you? Alois didn’t move. Alois, don’t pretend, say something. Alois said nothing. It was so still he could hear a beetle scratching in the hay.”

Here, this mishmash of point of view hits us in the gut. We’re dealing with the sudden chaos of the moment, which poetically reflects the sudden chaos of the entire war experience. It also shows the contrast between life and death, the potential of the future and the negation of it in how Alois is dreaming of better years to come when he is suddenly killed. By the end of these few paragraphs, we’re jarred, upset, and left processing what just happened – as Wohlbrecht is. Lind doesn’t just describe trauma, he hurls us into it so we experience it first hand. That he does this by manipulating point of view is amazing.

There are other amazing aspects to Soul of Wood as well. The plot of the book later bends back on itself and we discover that much of the seemingly random events, forgotten images and off-hand mentions of names and people actually come together in a larger symbolic coherence. That coherence makes this novella one of the most under-appreciated of our time.

The Shorter Works

The Other Stories in the title are mostly outlandish, grotesque short stories rooted in the trauma of World War II. In one, a piano teacher is haunted by his past as an S.S. officer. A traveler stumbles upon a family of cannibals. A man follows his neighbor to a kind of speakeasy only to find a featureless woman who somehow sets him free. A killer about to be executed dreams of killing his father in revenge. Two men, a Jew and a Catholic-converted-Jew, share a snug hole as they hide from the Nazis. Somehow these shorter pieces unfold with a tongue-in-cheek wit. They’re also somewhat allegorical though what they represent is too complex and hidden to explore here. Suffice to say they embody Lind’s seemingly unstable spirit, macabre wit and clever narrative arcs, which leave writers like me both horrified and smiling.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of Soul of Wood from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business.

Drakulić Decrypts the Language of Mothers and Daughters in Marble Skin

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Is there a relationship more complex than that between a mother and a daughter? Love and admiration mix ineffably with jealousy and resentment. Through the seemingly simple (but deeply layered) language of Marble Skin, Slavenka Drakulić unweaves the conflicts and emotions that estrange and entangle women.

A girl admires her mother’s body and yearns for the day when her own will blossom. If she becomes impatient with the slowness of her growth, jealousy of her mother’s womanliness can take root. The mother in turn becomes jealous of her daughter’s youth.

Drakulić’s narrator deftly slips through time as she expresses this love, admiration, and resentment for her mother. She outlines with equal complexity the feelings of a burgeoning adolescent for her stepfather and how his presence catalyzes the relationship between mother and daughter.

”We don’t have a body, we are a body” – Slavenka Drakulić

At the beginning of the book, the narrator is reflecting on an art show and a comment by a friend that her “sculptures of the female body seemed eaten away from the inside.” She begins sculpting her mother’s body. As she shapes breasts and thighs, she begins thinking of her mother’s body and of a scene she witnessed as a child.

The Primal Scene

Psychoanalysts talk about the primal scene when a child witnesses a sex act and it affects her view of sexuality for life. The narrator views a watches her stepfather in a sexual act with her mother in their marriage bed. It is an act this man will later reenact with the girl.

The way Drakulić crafts the scene, with a gentle allusion to Alice in Wonderland, the reader simultaneously experiences the dread of entering the room as an adult and the memory of the mother’s body splayed on the bed. Without revealing the later molestation, the reader is still left with the sense of a lurking secret. The sense of the small child within all of us.

What was most haunting about the book for me was that these are normal human emotions that I have experienced but never knew how to express. Drakulić split open her characters and subjected them to horrible things and their responses always returned to the common human reactions. Witnessing the girl’s devastation of sexuality helped me understand my own relationship with sexuality.

The Craft of Writing

It may be evident by the somewhat articulate nature of this post so far, but this book invaded my psyche in a way I can’t yet understand. The simple sentences expressed emotions I had been trying to unlock and explain for decades. The metaphors were gentle and expansive. The literary allusions were subtle and perfect.

”With this one sentence I emptied her out, like squeezing a tube of oil paint.” – Slavenka Drakulić

Drakulić emptied me out too. Her writing ate away at me from the inside. I’m putting the book aside until I can read it again. I think I can read and reread this book for decades and it will still have things to teach me about writing and about being a woman. That is the most beautiful feeling in the world.

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

Bringing Light to Characters in In Darkness

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Writing rich characters can be difficult. I’ve been told I should take a stereotype then add something unexpected—as though two dimensions plus one quirk equals a round character. But humanity is more than two layers deep and your audience can tell the difference. Agnieszka Holland’s film In Darkness, written by David Shamoon, displays some of the richest characters I’ve seen in a while.

I will admit to Holocaust fatigue and I was leery of this film for that reason. I’ve been reading various memoirs and histories of the horrors for over two decades. While there is no end to the human suffering that the Nazis inflicted, there is a limit to the nuance I can absorb from these stories. It was daring to try and tell a new story. But the movie succeeded.

I don’t normally review movies (though I might start doing more) but this one is related to TWO books: In the Sewers of Lvov by Robert Marshall and The Girl in the Green Sweater: A Life in Holocaust’s Shadow Krystyna Chiger.

Our Hero

The protagonist, Pan Socha, is a Polish sewer worker during WWII who makes extra money on the side by looting the homes of recently relocated Jews in Lvov. When he hears some Jews trying to escape the ghetto by breaking into the sewer, he could make the obvious choice—the one that is “in character,” but his character is richer than that. Throughout the movie he continues to wrestle between his selfish motivations (greed, not getting shot by Nazis) and his need to do the human thing and help save those lives.

Socha continues to wrestle with his base greed throughout the film, but he also displays growth. There is a moment where he defends Jews as a people (a very dangerous thing to do) while lecturing his friend in a public place. At another time, he steps from the shadows to save the life of a Jew who had given him nothing but trouble.

Socha made Spielberg’s Oskar Schindler look two dimensional. Yes, there is the moment at the end when Schindler cries because he could have saved more Jews, but it felt like a tacked on emotion rather than a breakdown. Socha evolves and grows throughout the film, and though he is imperfect, I loved him for it.

Other characters

Socha’s wife has a central conflict that is very simple, but the way it manifests is beautiful and rich. She initially teaches her husband that Jews are just like everyone else and gives him a lesson on religion to prove it. But when she finds out he is helping Jews, she is livid. You can see her wrestling between her humanity and her need to preserve her family. She does this over and over throughout the film.

Klara Keller also has conflicting desires—she is trying to keep alive the sister she never really liked. Yanek is forced to choose between his wife and his lover and even then can’t find peace. In fact, every character in this film seems torn which befits a movie about such a turbulent time.

Perhaps that’s where some Holocaust portrayals fail—they turn into tales of good and evil. Holland and Shamoon forced me to examine the good and evil within myself. Perhaps the best reason to create robust, lifelike characters is to encourage your readers to examine that complexity within themselves.

Note: I completely failed to credit the writer in the original post. This has been revised to reflect the exemplary work of David Shamoon.

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting: Variations on a Form

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book of laughter and forgetting - milan kunderaMilan Kundera discusses variations in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting: “Variation form is the form in which concentration is brought to its maximum; it enables the composer to speak only of essentials, to go straight to the core of the matter.” He goes on to write, “This book is a novel in the form of variations. The various parts follow each other like the various stages of a voyage leading into the interior of a theme, the interior of a thought.” The form he chooses to use for this book, the form of variations, provides the majority of the structure for the novel.

Without acknowledging this structure, the sections of the book are only loosely related through theme or geography. Mirek is a Czech writer who in visiting a former lover leaves his political writings and letters at home exposed and vulnerable to seizure by the secret police. Marketa and Karel are being visited by their lover, Eva, and Karel’s forgetful mother, Mama. Mama helps Karel remember a childhood attraction to his mother’s friend, a woman who reminds him of Eva, and this one clear memory reconciles him with his mother. Two American girls discover the power of laughter in a small French town. The narrator recounts a story of clandestinely writing a column and his musings on circles (having stepped outside and being unable to rejoin). Then there is Tamina, who is by Kundera’s admission, the focus of the novel. She fled Prague with her husband who died tragically soon after. She longs to have the letters and journals she left behind to relive their life together. She allows Hugo to have sex with her, but he never retrieves the letters. Kristyna is an older woman from a small town who has an unconsummated affair with a student poet. Tamina is spirited away by a man who asks her to “forget your forgetting” and then she travels over water to a place where children molest her and she cannot swim home. Jan goes to a beach house where everyone has sex with everyone.

Themes emerge, laughter and forgetting of course, but also litost, dangerous papers, meaningless sex. The characters sometimes show up again, but never outside of their original context. Their lives never physically overlap with anyone from other sections. What do recur are variations on themes. Papers are lost and it turns out the value wasn’t contained in the papers themselves, but in the writer’s memory. Characters grow close through their connections and shared experiences, not through sex. Sex is itself meaningless or sometimes a violation. Some steps, whether leaving your country or giving up on life, cannot be retraced (the circle cannot be re-entered).

To be honest, the book was a bit over my head, and I struggled to see the connections between the sections. I did enjoy, though, the way it made me look at the themes more closely. Because the characters were not related to each other and did not recur outside of their own contexts, my attention was directed to the elements that recurred and I started to make meaning from those connections. I don’t think I would go this far in my own work, I am still married to a more traditional narrative, but I can see how Kundera allowed me as a reader to use the natural human tendency to seek meaning to engage me in this work. I am interested in seeing whether themes can take on the same importance without removing as much of the connection between the characters and the reader as Kundera has.

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

The Absurdity of Obstacles: Gogol’s Russia in Diary of a Madman and Other Stories

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Nikolai Gogol portrays the rigid social and governmental institutions in Diary of a Madman and Other Stories. By setting characters up to functioning inside the system to the point of absurdity or to function in opposition to the system, the reader can see the societal norms that may otherwise be invisible.

In the story “How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich,” Gogol presents two landowner friends. They quarrel over the sale of a gun and ultimately Ivan N. calls Ivan I. a goose. The dispute seems silly to the reader, but Ivan I. takes it to such heart that the action of the story unfolds from this slight insult. Because Ivan N. asks, “‘What’s so slanderous about it and why are you waving your arms about?’” the reader can feel justified in the assumption that Ivan I. is overreacting and even laugh at the image of this “goose” flapping his arms. The two Ivans bring complaints against each other in court and eventually in a deliciously funny scene Ivan I.’s pig eats Ivan N.’s paperwork. Ivan I. is declared guilty of stealing the document (a capital offense) because he owns the pig. At first it seems as though the mayor who is delivering this news is quite serious, he later settles for the idea that the pig be killed and asks for a share in any sausages that might result which makes the punishment seem arbitrary and highlights the relationship the characters have with the rigid mores around them. The characters live within strict societal rules and are willing to enforce them, but they also circumvent them when necessary. This brings about an “us against them” mentality even when the characters (mayors, judges) ostensibly would be a part of the institution and therefore a part of “them.”

Gogol also pokes fun at the rigid expectations of his society in “The Madman.” In this story, the humor in the rigidity lies in how internalized the social norms are. It rapidly becomes obvious that the protagonist Axenty is insane but he never strays from the accepted social manners of his day. Axenty is in love with the boss’s daughter and becomes convinced that a dog is interfering with his prospects, so he knocks on the door of the house and demands of the maid that he be admitted to talk with the dog. If he were to chase the dog down the street or abuse it or even call the humane society, Axenty would be living in a different society. But in his society, propriety demands that one present themselves to the maid and request an audience in order to settle a dispute. Axenty’s madness also seeks redress in the reading the dog’s letters. The humor lies in the fact that this man has so internalized his culture, he is attempting to use proper etiquette when dealing with a dog.

In “The Overcoat,” Akaky is a poor government worker who is content in the rote mediocrity of his life as a copyist. He scrapes together enough cash to have a new overcoat made. The new overcoat is an object of great pride for him and his coworkers throw a party and invite him and his overcoat to the party. On the way home, the overcoat is stolen and Akaky’s quest for redress begins. At first he works within the system as he meekly asks for audiences to explain his situation but the bureaucracy shuffles him along without satisfactory result. Eventually Akaky stands up for himself at the urging of his fellow clerks and demands to see the Superintendent, but he is thwarted because the man turns the questioning around on Akaky. The clerks in his office give him advice on how to work around the systemic constraints and Akaky is eventually persuaded to seek the help of an Important Person who again abuses Akaky because he has not followed proper procedure. Akaky dies of an illness brought on by not having a proper coat and he begins haunting the area where his coat was stolen. Only when freed from his earthly constraints is Akaky able to sift through the rigidity of social and bureaucratic norms and he steals the Important Person’s overcoat.

Gogol portrays a world where both internal and external constraints are very rigid. There are some characters (like the clerks in Akaky’s office) who are able to work around the system, but the protagonists aren’t. Watching these characters unable to break free from their norms can be frustrating, but by portraying both the humor and tragedy of these characters, Gogol is able to speak to the condition of the society he was writing about. Writing about existing normative constraints can be difficult because readers not of the society may not understand the norms of that society and readers from within that society do not always recognize those norms as something worth talking about. Every society has norms and every character must act within them or thwart them. By writing about characters who are prisoners to their norms to the point of absurdity, Gogol is able to create a commentary on his society that speaks both to his countrymen and to outsiders.

In my own writing I am very interested in the way societies function and how that affects individual behavior. What I can see from Gogol is that without commenting on the norms the reader may not understand them. Gogol either sets up some opposition force to the norms (Akaky trying to talk to the Important Person) or has a character follow the norms to the letter (Axenty seeking proper introductions to a dog or holding a pig accountable for a crime).

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