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

Babel: Setting a Scene in Red Cavalry

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Red Cavalry Isaac Babel

Isaac Babel has a way with atmospheric detail. In several of his short stories in Red Cavalry, he uses descriptions of the setting to shape the reader’s experience and understanding of the tone of the story.

Crossing the Zbrucz

Perhaps the best example of this is the story we discussed in our advising group, “Crossing the Zbrucz.”  In this story a soldier rooms with a woman and her father and it turns out that the father (with whom he is to share a bed) was brutally slain earlier. The details Babel provides early on in the story presage the eerie scene. After describing the flow of the river, he writes, “An orange sun is rolling across the sky like a severed head….The odour of yesterday’s blood and of slain horses drips into evening coolness.” The detail is gruesome at best, but it prepares the reader for the mindset of the narrator. Death is so pervasive that the first thing he would liken the movement of the sun to is a severed head. He knows of the killings that occurred the day before and he recognizes the scent of them on the wind. Not every narrator would recognize the smell of day old death and fewer still would use it as an atmospheric detail.

Pan Apolek

Babel uses the same technique in several other of the Red Cavalry stories. In “Pan Apolek” he writes, “The scent of lilies is pure and strong, like spirit. This fresh poison is sucked in by the deep seething respiration of the kitchen range, deadening the resinous odour of the fir logs that are scattered about the kitchen.” This is the story of a painter, Pan Apolek, who uses the faces of local people for his paintings of saints. Apolek is commissioned to paint the church and he uses the faces of nonbelievers for some of Christianity’s most important figures causing a general uproar. His paintings are beautiful like the lilies, but they cut with a double edged sword. The “fresh poison” that Babel writes of is the heretical ideas that Apolek is spreading (e.g. that Jesus fathered Deborah’s child). Babel is saying that in spreading his subversive ideas through beauty, Apolek is able to infiltrate worlds he might not otherwise have access to. Apolek is despoiling the comfortable, resinous smell of the ideas of the local people. He is covering over their homey ideas with the poison of his beautiful lilies.

Gedali

In “Gedali,” Babel writes, “Here before me is the bazaar and the death of the bazaar. Slain is the rich soul of abundance. Rich padlocks hang on the stalls and the granite of the paving is as clean as the bald pate of a dead man.” “Gedali” is the story of the narrator’s wanderings as he awaits the Sabbath. He is wandering among many closed shops, but the description made me wonder if they were closed because of the impending Sabbath—on which no work can be done—or if they were closed for good. Perhaps they are closed for other reasons, because of pogroms, or because of the death of a way of life. The stalls are padlocked up, but the cleanness of the pavement denotes emptiness. There is no litter, no trace of humans having passed through. And the reference to the “pate of a dead man” makes it sound as though the area itself is dead and that it was closed up long ago. Whether these stores were locked up for eternity or merely for the Sabbath, Babel’s description of them enhances the strangeness and isolation of Gedali’s store. Babel likens the store to Dickens’s Curiosity Shop, but he didn’t need that reference to make the shop seem obscure and isolated. He had already done so with the detail of his description.

I know this use of atmospheric detail is something I tend toward in my own work. I admit it is often an unconscious effort in early drafts, but I can see that it is a powerful tool that I would do well to pay attention to as I revise. By being specific about the details I invest in the scenery, I can point the reader in very decided directions. If I am not specific, I can point the reader all over the place. I particularly enjoy this way of dealing with setting because it feels subtle but because it can have a strong effect on the way the story is read. It also gives meaning where there would not necessarily be any. For my novel, this is particularly important in descriptions of the river. A casual reader can enjoy the story without taking notice of this kind of detail, but a reader who cares to find meaning there can. I particularly liked where I felt Babel was going with his description in “Pan Apolek.”  It felt like he was describing his own subversion and that opened up for me the reading of many of the other stories in the collection. I think that is what I particularly enjoy about Russian writers is the layers of the writing. I am not yet skilled at investing layer upon layer of meaning into writing, and in some ways I don’t have the natural need because I am much less likely to be censored, but it is still something that intrigues me. I am interested in how the reader experiences satire and double entendres in writing. It always scares me a little that a reader who doesn’t get it could take the work in exactly the opposite way. I think that is at the root of my quandary over explaining and not explaining. I would hate to see a work used to the opposite end of its intent. Perhaps the atmospheric detail is one subtle way to direct the mind of even the most clueless reader (which I sometimes am).

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

Empathy in Konrad’s The Case Worker

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

The Bandula Family

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

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

Playing with Form

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

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

Unreliable Notes from Underground

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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.