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

Gabriela and the Widow: Jack Remick Teaches Writing through Writing

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The old adage, “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach” does not at all apply to Jack Remick. Before I read Gabriela and the Widow, Jack taught me about writing with the insightful questions he’d ask after we read our work aloud during the long-standing writing group at Louisa’s Café in Seattle. Reading Gabriela was even more of an education in the subtleties of craft.

Significant Detail

Driven from her village in Mexico by a civil war that kills her family, young Gabriela faces many hardships. Remick uses details like a “cotton blouse embroidered by hand in the faint light of the evening fire” to convey tender allusions to what Gabriela’s life must have been like before the war. When La Patrona, a woman who has “rescued” Gabriela, then takes this blouse and says she will burn it, the reader has a deeper understanding of how fully the woman is stripping away the essence of Gabriela.

When Gabriela craves a pair of white Nikes, it is easy to see that what she is really craving is a life like the Norteñas who wear these shoes. Later, Gabriela will be coaxed into other shoes, but even then the Nikes serve as a grounding point to indicate how much Gabriela is changing.

Objective Correlative

Terrible things happened to Gabriela when the war came to her village. Remick could have detailed them and we’d be struck by the horror without ever really getting inside Gabriela’s experience. Instead, Remick creates a correlation in Gabriela’s mind between toads and the horrible events—events that she refuses to quite remember. The reader sees her visceral reaction over and over anytime toads cross her path and in this way learns to empathize with her.

Remick builds on Gabriela’s reaction to toads throughout the story. What makes this relationship for me is when Gabriela begins remembering times of innocence that involved toads as well. The glimpse at what life was like before is heartbreaking and the tension between the dark and light memories makes both exponentially more touching.

Myths Retold

Gabriela finds safety in the North where she takes care of an ailing widow whose memory is failing. Gabriela helps her work on a list of objects and photographs and what they meant in the woman’s life. In return, La Viuda teaches Gabriela about what it means to be a woman. Though La Viuda has a somewhat colored view of the experience of womanhood, she doesn’t let her life turn her into a Miss Havisham. Instead, La Viuda intersperses myths and stories of great women with her own stories. Through tales about everyone from Helen of Troy to Xipe Totec, she helps Gabriela create an identity based on strength and womanhood as she transfers her life force to the young girl.

There are hundreds of things I could say about the reasons I loved this book—like the way Gabriela and La Viuda seamlessly slip from English to Spanish and back in their conversations, the magical realism (especially in relation to mirrors), or how in answer to La Viuda’s aging forgetfulness, Remick creates a shifting repetition that grounds the reader and also builds the narrative. What you need to know is the elegant craft reveals just the right amount of information to engage you, the reader, in telling the story.

Jack Remick can teach and he can sure as hell write. Read Gabriela and the Widow and find the things that speak to your writing. You’ll fall in love with the story and you’ll be a better writer for it. Although my work schedule doesn’t allow for weekday afternoons at Louisa’s anymore, I am grateful I can pick up Gabriela and learn from her and from Jack any old time.

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

Haunted by Pedro Páramo

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pedro paramo - juan rulfoPedro Páramo is the spookiest book I’ve read in a long time. Juan Rulfo created a world where the living interact with the dead in such a way that the reader can’t immediately be certain who is living and who is dead, which creates this suspicion that everyone is dead. Because the stories told about the lives of the dead are much more detailed and intricate than the stories of Juan Preciado, who is alive at the start of the book, the world of the dead seems more real than the world of the living.

Spoilers Ahead

Rulfo does not immediately tell the reader that most of the ghosts Juan encounters are in fact dead, but on some level you can tell. Simple lines like “I saw a woman wrapped in her rebozo; she disappeared as if she had never existed” are easily read over and dismissed. Eduviges has had word from Juan’s dead mother that he is coming—perhaps she is sensitive to the spirit world. Later, Eduviges tells Juan that Abundio with whom he traveled to town is in fact long dead. Then Damiana says Eduviges is long dead.

My mind started stripping away the stories I had rationalized for myself and I started to see everyone as dead. I was so immersed in this novel that when a mentally ill woman perched next to me on a bench at lunch, I kept looking in her eyes to see if she was a ghost.

Layering Experiences

The way Rulfo intersperses short sections with glimpses of characters interacting with Juan and then follows up with a second more detailed section (sometimes then a third or even fourth) of the character in the past makes these spirits feel as alive as Juan Preciado is at the beginning of the novel. When Juan dies midway through the novel, I already felt like the majority of the story was in the flashbacks. I felt like I had been gradually led deeper and deeper into the spirit world until I was left there like Juan was.

I loved this book. I can learn a lot from the way Rulfo managed information so that he only revealed what was absolutely necessary to draw me further into the story. The mystery and suspense he created by mentioning Pedro Páramo’s name, then mentioning he was Abundio’s father also, “living bile,” and then later telling us he was dead. I hadn’t met this character and I wasn’t sure I wanted to, but he was immensely intriguing. I wondered if I could do something similar with Jacek in Polska, 1994 by building a reputation first and then introducing the character. I decided not to go that particular direction, but it definitely shapes a reader’s expectations. Every action Pedro Páramo took was tainted for me by Abundio’s preconceptions. Not that his actions, except in the case of his wife Susana were at all laudable.

Atmosphere and Mood

I also like what Rulfo did with the atmospheric descriptions. From walls “stained red by the setting sun” to lines like “February when the mornings are filled with wind and sparrows and blue light,” the description creates the mood of the story and impacts the reader’s understanding of it. The detail of the red stains recurs as Eduviges says goodbye to her sister who is also stained “by the dusk filling the sky with blood.” Whereas when Dorotea remembers the “February wind that used to snap the fern stalks before they died from neglect” and the “little whirlwinds [that swept] across the earth,” it feels like the air in Comala is still and has been for some time. There is no cleansing wind. There is no blue light. There is only heat and stillness and death. In annotating the book, it was actually difficult to decide which atmospheric details to choose because they were everywhere. However, Rulfo’s details blended so seamlessly into the story that they were at once omnipresent and sitting comfortably in the background.

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

The Poetic Narrative of Pablo Neruda’s Memoirs

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memoirs - pablo nerudaPablo Neruda had a fascinating life and met all sorts of interesting people from Che Guevara to Federico García Lorca. But in reading his Memoirs, I felt like he was recounting all of these stories to me as opposed to letting me relive them with him. Although Neruda uses some dialogue, he rarely ventures into full-blown scene. The closest he gets are little vignettes like:

“A few hours later I was buying some apples in a fruit store when a horse-drawn carriage halted at the door. A tall, ungainly character dressed in black got out of it. He, too, was going to buy apples. On his shoulder he carried an all-green parrot, which immediately flew over to me and perched on my head without even looking where it was going.”

This section proceeds for three more paragraphs in ten lines as Neruda inquires about the man’s identity. The last paragraph is, “I didn’t know him and I never saw him again. But I accompanied him into the street with due respect, silently opened the carriage door for him and his basket of fruit to get in, and solemnly placed the bird and the sword in his hands.” It is interesting for certain, but it seems as though Neruda is ascribing meaning to the interaction that the reader does not necessarily have access to.

Neruda utilizes a lot of description in his summary and his language is quite poetic, but it is always presented to the reader rather than experienced. There are passages of pure narration that are quite pleasant, “I am writing in Isla Negra, on the coast, near Valparaíso. The powerful winds that whipped the shore have just blown themselves out. The ocean—rather than my watching it from my window, it watches me with a thousand eyes of foam…” At the end of many chapters he includes passages of commentary so descriptive and without chronology or incident that it may be a poem and seem better understood by the soul than the mind: “…How many works of art…There’s not enough room in the world for them anymore…They have to hang outside the rooms…How many books…”

The effect is that the reader is completely at Neruda’s mercy. When something historical or salient emerges, I expect scene and get summary. When he is musing on mundane details, Neruda comes closer to scene than anywhere else in the narrative. It is difficult to engage in a normal fashion with the book for this reason. But he did lead a fascinating life.

I find I am increasingly drawn to books with strong narrators, like Pynchon, Kundera, and Duras, who can weave a spell for me and let me surrender to the narrative. What this book shows me is that a strong narrator is not enough. The narrator has to let me into the world, to give me the keys as it were, otherwise I feel like I am watching Last Year at Marienbad—interesting, but I don’t necessarily understand it enough to engage with it. Most of Neruda’s writing is intelligible, but the lack of sensory detail in the vignettes kept me separate from the narrative. I want to be careful of this in my own work. I am learning it is alright to tend towards summary rather than scene, but if I do, then I have to be very careful about engaging the reader. Otherwise it becomes an oration, not a narration. Readers often pick up a memoir because of who wrote it. Fiction writers need to first build trust with a reader before the reader will follow them.

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

The Structure of Secrets in The Informers

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’s novel, The Informers, is a collection of three stories wrapped together in a brilliant structure. Rather than three consecutive books forming a trilogy, the action of the second book (the one we are reading) takes place after the first has been published. Vasquez reveals little of the text of the first book, the story of the exile of a family friend from Germany in Colombia during and after World War II, to the reader. Instead, its action is revealed in counterpoint to the action of the second book, which deals with the reaction of the narrator’s father to his first book and the aftermath of this reaction.

It is this reaction by Gabriel Santoro Sr. to his son’s book that hints at the underlying link between these three stories. Without revealing too much of the plot, it is enough to say a theme of informing develops and it is not until the third book, which forms a postscript to the second, that I truly understood the nature of the writer as informer.

I highly recommend this book to anyone writing memoir or anyone grappling with the ways in which writing reveals greater truths about its author than we sometimes intend. It is also a good book for anyone looking for a completely fresh way of looking at World War II and how it affected more than just Europe.

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

Anne Moore’s Life on a Shelf: Roberto Bolaño’s Oddity of Tragedy

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Last Evenings on Earth - Roberto Bolano

The story “Anne Moore’s Life” by Roberto Bolaño from the collection Last Evenings on Earth, reads as unfulfillingly as I imagine Anne Moore’s life to have been. Bolaño accomplished this by rarely venturing into scene as the narrator recounts Anne Moore’s recounting of her life. Nearly the entire story is told in summary and even the scenes are rarely more than a paragraph or two. Despite what could have been adventures that ranged from Montana to Mexico, California, Washington, Spain, and back again, Anne’s life reads flat.

Storytelling from Afar

The first scene in the story is the most shocking but it remains distant. Bolaño hinted at menace behind Fred’s motives as he drove the girls around town and to his parents’ house and we see later that there was in fact danger, his parents were dead and not likely from natural causes. By throwing in phrases such as “According to what Anne told me,” the author separates the reader from the material just enough that it was difficult for me to engage with the characters. There is ample tragedy in this story as Anne flounders through relationships, prostitutes herself and disappears and her sister becomes a suicidal alcoholic, but Bolaño left me with the sense of resignation rather than desperation on the part of the characters, especially Anne. Because Anne wasn’t fighting for her own life and I didn’t know her, I wasn’t interested in fighting for her.

Bolaño writes about a similar sense of remove on Anne’s part as she overhears a conversation between Susan and Paul. “Anne remembers that there was something oddly artificial about this conversation between her lover and her sister, as if they were assessing the plot of a film, not something that had happened in real life.” As a reader, I also felt like I was watching someone assess a plot and part of it was how Bolaño’s narrator kept interrupting the story with “Anne remembers” and “says Anne.” Over and over again he pulled me out of the story and presented it to me as a tableau instead of letting me experience it.

Specific and Sexual Detail

Bolaño gives only the sparsest detail when he does go into scene, and those details are often carnal or hint at carnality. They start out as sexual: “a very bright red nightgown,” hotel walls “made of meat,” the red dress and shoes of Anne the prostitute, pornographic films where “men always ejaculated onto, rather than in, their partners,” and gradually become more medical but less descriptive: “doctors diagnosed a serious illness” and then her relapse. Bolaño wet my appetite for anything to happen with the rawness of some of the earlier descriptions and by playing down the seriousness of the illness, he left me wide open for Anne’s response to Bill’s suggestion that they have a child: “inside she could feel herself starting to scream, or rather, she could feel, and see, the dividing line between not screaming and screaming. It was like opening your eyes in a cave bigger than the Earth” the very next phrase is again the distancing “Anne remembers.”

The distance is clearly intentional on Bolaño’s part. In “Mauricio (‘The Eye’) Silva,” Bolaño again summarizes nearly the entire story. However, as a reader, I felt engaged with The Eye. I wanted to know more about him, and I cared what happened to him. Perhaps it is because The Eye is introduced more sympathetically: he “always tried to avoid violence” or because the author states “The case of The Eye is paradigmatic and exemplary.” In either case, Bolaño allowed me to relate to The Eye in a way I could not with Anne.

Is it because Anne is North American and The Eye Chilean?  I don’t know why Bolaño put Anne at such a distance from the reader, but she does come off as an oddity, someone belonging in a jar on a shelf.

Writing in Summary

Summary is a tricky business. Beginning writers are often advised to dramatize, dramatize, dramatize, but there is a place for summary in writing. It is the place of transitions, of time passing, of the narrator. Bolaño’s lack of scene makes his stories feel more like a story told in a bar or beside a fire and it makes the reader more intimate with the narrator that with the protagonists. I love to write in summary, but this collection of stories made me more cautious because my own writing isn’t as “let me tell you a story” as Bolaño’s and in comparison I could come off as didactic. However, that chum in a bar style did open my eyes to a new way of writing summary where the interaction between reader and narrator is almost as intimate as the reader interpreting a scene. I would like to cultivate some of that intimacy.

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