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

Unreliable Notes from Underground

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Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Notes from Underground

Notes from Underground by is strangely constructed. The narrator, who seems to have logorrhea, goes on about the laws of math and nature and why he could never be an insect and really every other thing for the first half of the novel. It isn’t until the second half of the story that a more conventional narrative develops, by which point the narrator has so discredited himself as a reliable narrator that I didn’t know whether to believe what he said or not. Except that he portrayed himself in such an unflattering light as he insults everyone from schoolmates to a prostitute; it seems unlikely he would have been lying. He often contradicts himself and sometimes out and out says he was just lying. As a reader I felt afloat with nothing to grab onto because I didn’t know what to believe in except my own judgment of this man’s character.

Sound of the Text

The initial sentences of the novel are made of such short clauses that they take on a staccato sound and it is somewhat jarring to read. Dostoyevsky writes, “I’m a sick man…a mean man. There’s nothing attractive about me. I think there is something wrong with my liver.” It isn’t just that the sentences are so short, it is also that the subject matter seems to wander. I wondered at times whether the narrator was mentally ill. This wandering subject matter contributed to my afloat feeling. I was exhausted just trying to follow his train of thought.

Drafting a Manifesto

The first section reads like a manifesto or a confession. The narrator keeps addressing an audience (who later turns out to be imaginary) as in, “Do you think I’m trying to make you laugh?” or sometimes as ladies and gentlemen. This second person plural address gave the effect of him being in an institution, whether mental or correctional. I loved the way Dostoyevsky implied questions and comments from this audience within the narrator’s ramblings. He took the words right out of my mouth when he said, “if you’re irritated by all my babble (and I feel you must be by now).” In that way Dostoyevsky turned this monologue into a dialogue. At times he goes so far as to provide a counterargument for what the implied audience would have said, as in, “’Ha-ha-ha!  Strictly speaking there is no such thing as will!’ You may interrupt me.” I’m still trying to decide whether to use the second person address in my second novel, but I found the use of implied dialogue much more engaging than when the narrator was talking to himself and I would borrow that for certain.

Allegorical Insertions

There is one point in this first section where Dostoyevsky seemed to be making a point about free will through his narrator that could be taken as a larger commentary on Russian society, “Now you scream that no one intends to deprive me of my free will, that they are only trying to arrange things so that my will coincides with what is in my own interest.” It seems harmless enough because at this point I was convinced the narrator was quite mad and a few sentences later he retracts it saying, “Of course I’m joking, my friends, and I realize my jokes are weak.” But the point is made. I liked the way Dostoyevsky slipped in information that could ostensibly be recanted but couldn’t really.

The transition between the first section and the second was lovely. A few sentences before the actual shift from manifesto to story, the narrator says, “Today for instance I am particularly oppressed by an old memory.” He then intersperses ramblings with lead up to the story until the changeover. It made for a very nice transition because he alerted the reader that the subject was changing but also interspersed the logorrhea with the more narrative quality of the next section which tied the two together. I used a lot of white space between my sections for Polska, 1994, though I thought for a long while about looking for ways to better transition between them like tempering eggs before adding them to a batter.

The second person address and the blurts continue into the second section but what is really interesting is the note at the end of the novel, “Actually the notes of this lover of paradoxes do not end here. He couldn’t resist and went on writing. But we are of the opinion that one might just as well stop here.” This note simultaneously validates the second person address and brings into question the whole meaning of the story. I’m still thinking about this. I like that the story has given me something open and unfinished to ruminate on.

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

Imre Kertesz and the Lesson of Nonconformity in Fiasco

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fiasco - imre kertesz

I’ve been reading Fiasco by Imre Kertesz since March 20. That’s a long time considering I usually read a book in a day or less, but it may be because, in this case, reading means that the book has been sitting on my nightstand and sometimes traveling in my purse to work and back. Despite the fact that I cannot seem to get past page forty, I am thinking about this book and I am talking about it more than any other.

Delaying the Beginning

Story. Perhaps the key lies in that word. I was offended by the beginning of this book as the writer gathers himself together to not write and throat-clears his way through lengthy descriptions of furniture. We’ve all sat through the exercise where you write about not writing. I’d even considered starting my next book with something similar. But in this case, Chapter 0 goes on for over 100 pages. I checked. I will at some point endure Chapter 0 because I genuinely like Kertesz and am interested in the story I think he will eventually tell, but I am rankled by the presumption that I will wade through this opening, even as I am trying to listen to why he started where he did. I am bothered because it goes against the writing rules.

Secret Message?

I will stick with Kertesz because I think he is is pointedly refusing to conform to my expectations. Images of Soviet soldiers in lockstep make it easy to see how any work about the world behind the Iron Curtain should deal with conformity in some way. Conformity is something that’s sat in the back of our collective conscience since the Holocaust. In this book, Kertesz will ostensibly be writing about coming home from that holocaust to a totalitarian government. Maybe he is teaching me as a reader that my expectations make me as rigid and artificial as the Soviet regime.

In the US, we haven’t been fighting conformity as much as taking solace in it. My image of the Fifties (admittedly created from the movies) is one of uniformity. There was the wonderful breaking out of the Sixties but then all those rebellious youths settled down into the Eighties when it was  important to be “In” and there were even acceptable ways to be “In” the “Out” group. I live in Seattle where cultural norms are so deeply embedded that the populace considers it a right to be (silently, passively) angry at transgressors.

Fighting Conformity

What if those norms that we cling to are wrong? I fell loudly and hard in Westlake Park yesterday. The collective crowd did nothing but gawk. It was a homeless man—the type of person we push outside of our culture—who stopped to help me pick myself up. He was the only transgressor of the norms and conformity and I am grateful to him.

I understand most of the rules I have learned over the years about writing and life are arbitrary, but I think I needed Mr. Kertesz and the anonymous man in the plaid shirt to remind me just how hard they are to break out of. I hope someday to finish Fiasco and get to the story I was so craving, but I am glad I picked it up and the first forty pages have taught me more than I ever dreamed and I can’t wait to break some rules with my own writing—even if my own Chapter 0 won’t exceed six pages.

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

Painting The Street of Crocodiles with Bruno Schulz

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Bruno Schulz - The Street of Crocodiles

Reading The Street of Crocodiles by after reading Invisible Cities nearly put me in a state of descriptive shock with the juxtaposition of Schulz’s rich tapestry of description against Calvino’s spare detail.  Whether it is a candlelight “scattering flocks of shadows so that they fled sideways along the floor and up the walls” or an aunt who becomes “smaller and smaller, black and folded like a wilted, charred sheet of paper, oxidized into a petal of ash, disintegrating into dust and nothingness,” Schulz’s stories are “fantastically exaggerated.”  Schulz takes me into a world where I too am “convulsed by the horror of the visions which he had conjured up from the darkness.”

Luscious Description

From the very first page his descriptions are wild and almost overwrought as he details “sides of meat with their keyboard of ribs swollen with energy and strength, and seaweeds of vegetables like dead octopuses and squids.”  By describing these foods (and everything else) in these vivid and fresh ways, Schulz invites the reader to see mundane objects and activities anew.  In this first encounter with the contents of Adela’s picnic basket I felt like I was encountering the rich texture and abstraction of a Klimt painting where I could see the cherries and morellos and apricots for what they were, but I was also seeing them as though for the very first time.

Dreamlike Worlds

Because each story is written with the same rich tapestry of description throughout, Schulz’s hyper real worlds feel dreamlike.  Contributing to this feeling is Schulz’s willingness to bend reality with streets that shift and disappear in “Cinnamon Shops” and a thirteenth month in “The Night of the Great Season.”  But these impossibilities show a greater truth in our more concrete world.  I can’t imagine a better way to describe the feeling of a child being lost than Schulz’s “street of houses with no doors.”  And the intensity of “an autumn wind…a devastating wind which would blow through the cupboards; that they would give way; that nothing would check the flood, and that the streams of color would engulf the whole city” speaks to how one night could feel like an extra month to a shopkeeper.

Brothers Quay

I watched a short film by the Brothers Quay based on “The Street of Crocodiles” done in stop-motion animation without any dialogue.  The film was so strange and beautiful and I couldn’t wrap my head around what was happening, but in reading the story I see the same elements.  I am better able to relate to them on the page but they are no less fantastic.  As Schulz describes the “paper imitation” of modernity as a “montage of illustrations cut out from last year’s moldering newspapers,” I feel the intangibility, the datedness, and the fragility of this street and of the life that surrounds it.

Making the Mundane Monstrous

Sometimes Schulz will describe something mundane fully before ever naming it as in “Nimrod.”  Schulz describes in every creepy detail the cockroach and the reader knows that it is an insect and it is creepy but the description of “a black monster, a scarecrow moving quickly on the rods of many entangled legs” almost makes any earthly creature a disappointment.

It is impossible not to quote Schulz just for the pleasure of running my fingers over his words.  I love using rich descriptions like Schulz does but mine are often less fresh and more intermittently interspersed with other descriptions.  Schulz showed me that to use these descriptions to create the type of world I’d like to, the level of detail and freshness has to be sustained and has to be always fresh.  I’m not sure it could even be done in long fiction without being fully exhausting, but the intensity works for short fiction and of course Schulz does it exceedingly well.  “Cinnamon Shops” greatly influenced the way I wrote about Magda being lost in Warsaw, and though (unless they read it here) I don’t think most people would get the reference, I feel enriched simply by having touched his world.

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

K. is for Kafka in The Trial

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Franz Kafka The Trial

In The Trial, creates a world where the court system pervades ordinary life. The only character who seems to find this out of the ordinary is K. It is accepted by all of the characters (except for K.). The only way the reader learns about the intricacies of the world is through the friction against it created by K.

Arbitrariness and Omnipotence

When K. first encounters representatives of the court system in his room in a boarding house, K. asks why and the man tells him, “We weren’t sent to tell you that….Proceedings are under way and you’ll learn everything in due course.”  Kafka is setting up a world where the court is omnipotent and the populace powerless to even question its omnipotence. When K. asks, “How can I be under arrest,” the answer is, “We don’t answer such questions” and is told to accept the situation. This creates a sense of arbitrariness of power but also makes the power feel like a façade. There may be nothing behind it, but there is no way to get beyond the façade and prove it. It is even out of the ordinary that someone like K. would question it. The proceedings are so quotidian for the proceeders that K.’s questioner says, “you’re under arrest, certainly, but that’s not meant to keep you from carrying on your profession.”  By the time K. realizes “He was at their mercy” it is a surprise only to him. And because K. provides the friction, it quickly begins to feel as though the world is designed to torment K. and K. alone. Others do not resist the law—they succumb to it or live within the system of the trial for as long as it takes.

Omniscient Observers

Kafka also imbues a sense of omniscience in the world. It starts when K.’s landlady is talking about a fellow boarder. She has observed her in other quarters with multiple men and remarks on her behavior. I started to wonder who was watching whom and if in fact this is the type of world where everyone is being watched by someone. Of course everyone is being watched by someone, but we rarely pay the kind of attention to each other that Frau Grubach paid to her boarders. This awareness of the affairs of others is most fully realized in regard to K.’s legal proceedings—everyone knows what is going on with K.’s case except for K. Whether his landlady, his uncle, his business contacts, or even a painter he has never met, everyone seems to know more about his case than K. does. This shows the reader how information pervades and makes the world around K. seem like it is closing in. Although K. has not yet accepted the seriousness of his situation, everyone else has.

Inescapable System

Kafka makes the law seem inevitable when K. shows up for his first hearing and K. remembers “the remark the guard Willem had made that the court was attracted by guilt, from which it followed that the room for the inquiry would have to be located off whatever stairway K. chanced to choose.”  Reading this I wondered if the stairways weren’t in some way shifting or meeting or all leading the same place such that there was no escape for K. Later when the painter’s atelier door leads into another attic court, it seems there is no escape from the court. It is in fact everywhere. By making all of the laws and proceedings secret, Kafka makes them feel hollow and arbitrary, but at the same time there is no redress if one cannot know what they are working against.

It was interesting that K. found kinship with women who were victims of the powerful in some way or other. Whether his neighbor who was being watched, the law clerk’s wife, or Leni, the nurse/mistress of his lawyer, K. was attracted to and attractive to women who were making their own power out of their sex—the last thing that was seemingly theirs alone to control.

In my novel, Polska, 1994, I too wanted to create an awareness of the way people watch each other. I found the tidbits peppered in about other people’s lives by Frau Grubach to be most instructive. Kafka is showing me it is sometimes more effective to talk in the abstract about how other people are affected by the situation than it is to talk directly about the main character. This makes it a condition that pervades the world rather than making the main character simply a victim of it. Of course K. reacted differently than anyone else in the story, but he was not subjected to special laws. In fact most other characters were surprised by his resistance to the laws of their world.

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

War and Meta Whimsy from Saša Stanišić

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Sasa Stanisic How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone

I picked up How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone by when I had just finished reading A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka because the crazy cover graphic promised this book was part of a trend toward accessible whimsy in Eastern European lit.

Eastern European Humor

I love Eastern European literature, and often it is the gravitas that I gravitate toward. Still I recognize that there is often an undercurrent of humor that I often miss. I loved The Master and Margarita, but I didn’t find it funny, and I’ve felt that same tickling of “this is funny to other people.” I lived in Poland for a year and I can see the love of irony and when something is supposed to be funny, but, well, maybe I’m not very good at laughing at myself or life in general.

Back to Saša. This book contains hilarious and charming views of life from the eyes of a child. It’s playful and fun. And then suddenly the war happens. It’s a weird juxtaposition, but I’m sure it’s true to life, especially for a child who wouldn’t see the same factors leading up to conflict that an adult might. I can see the point of having this jump in subject matter, but from a narrative point of view it is jarring.

Jarring Change in Direction

Speaking of jarring. Mid-way through the book, the point of view changes or the author, kind of. That sentence is as confusing and not confusing as the narrative shift, because, though this is a work of fiction, the general arc is not dissimilar to the author’s life, and as a result, I never felt Saša was that far from Aleksandar to begin with. By switching narrators and re-starting the story, Mr. Stanišić is playing with metafiction—emphasizing his own relation to the story. For me it was unnecessary.

I enjoyed the tangential essay quality of the chapters, they helped me learn more about an unfamiliar culture, but I would have liked them stitched together in a different way. I firmly believe that an author’s work is intentional and purposeful. So the fact that I would have made other choices is maybe instructive to no one but me, but recognizing the choices he did make helps me understand what he might have been trying to say with this book. Here’s what I have come up with:

  1. Life is random. That is not a profound statement, but it is a statement of worldview that not everyone would agree with.
  2. Life contains great joy and great suffering, but we should focus on the joy.
  3. People are resilient.
  4. Everyone is affected by war, even those too innocent to see it coming.

I think sometimes I like Eastern European literature because it is a part of the world that has seen a wider breadth of human experience than I hope to live through and, somehow, retained an optimistic view. Reading How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, I encountered many city names familiar from planning an upcoming trip to Croatia. Because we aren’t going to Bosnia, I may not run into Saša Stanišić’s clever cornball relatives, but I am glad to have a richer view of the Yugoslavian cultures and I hope to experience all whimsy and no war.

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