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Eight Minutes in Rome with The Pope’s Left Hand by Friedrich Christian Delius

June 8, 2019 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

Phillip Lopate once said, “The reason I read nonfiction is to follow an interesting mind.” The best nonfiction example I’ve ever seen of this travel is Virginia Woolf’s “Street Haunting” in which she goes out in search of a pencil and we learn everything there is to know about everything she sees along the way (along with all the associations those things bring up). This meander through an interesting mind is less common, though, in fiction, especially in book-length fiction. This is likely because it’s very hard to sustain over a long period and also because most fictional characters don’t have the breadth of knowledge that makes a mind truly interesting. The Pope’s Left Hand by Friedrich Christian Delius is a wonderful exception.

A Back-Alley Tour of the Corruption of Rome

An 88-page novella about the five to eight minutes that a German tour guide in Rome watches the Pope during a visit to a Protestant church, this book races rather than meanders through topics as varied as “the complete fabrication of the life of St. Francis of Assisi,” the Numidian stallions, and why a Roman police car might park empty in front of a fashionable store. While many of these tangents have corruption at their core, each digression is diverse and detailed enough to be fascinating in its own right (and would have led me on countless Wikipedia dives if I had been anywhere near a computer).

Reading The Pope’s Left Hand is like having a drunken dinner with a disgruntled and wildly intelligent tour guide as he goes off on a city that he’s grown weary of but can’t get off of his mind. It is both fascinating and entertaining. I learned countless things about the personalities attached to the Catholic Church, the Roman Empire, and the Nazi invasion of Rome. None are subjects I would have considered myself ignorant of, but Delius took me deeper and tied the stories together in waves that enhanced my understanding. There are remarks on tourists, a history of the relic of Jesus’s foreskin, and more than a few pokes at Augustine.

Grounding the Reader in a Non-traditional Narrative

One of the things I have hated about Roberto Bolaño is the feeling that I’m trapped next to him at a bar and he just won’t shut up. Which is to say that I’m not always down for a chatty narrator who thinks I should be interested in what he has to say. In The Pope’s Left Hand, though, Delius draws me in with his careful observation, applying an archaeologist’s eye to every detail of the few minutes the narrator is in the Pope’s presence. This gives the reader something concrete to hold as the diversions start. Most importantly, Delius returns us again and again to our close observation of that hand. It’s these loops that give the book a strong enough structure to hold the digressions together.

“There are sights more exciting than the pope in profile, and I felt little inclined to stare at one side of a milky, careworn face. I just peered over at the partially shaded hands, hanging, resting, supporting, on their fingers no sign of the ring that his subordinates and the devout are wont to kiss. Turn on your brain camera, I commanded, point the zoom at the hands.” – Friedrich Christian Delius

In the beginning it’s necessary for Delius to intersperse these observations more closely to build the groundwork for us to return to. As the book continues, though, he’s free to wander farther and farther because the moment is built and we know already what we’ll be coming back to.

My only advice when reading this book is to find a place where you can sit with it uninterrupted for a couple of hours. That’s the closest you’re likely to get to the full feeling of spending the evening with Delius’s fascinating narrator.

To tour millennia of Rome’s corruptions with Friedrich Christian Delius, pick up a copy of The Pope’s Left Hand.

Revisiting a Beloved Childhood Favorite for #TheDarkisReading: The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper

December 23, 2017 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

When I saw on Twitter that Robert Macfarlane had proposed a book group where we all start reading The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper on Midwinter’s Eve (the day the book starts) and share our experiences under the hashtag #TheDarkisReading, I was in heaven. He’d brought together my so many of my favorite things in one simple idea: my favorite social platform, sharing thoughts about books, and a beloved childhood classic. What a wonderful trip the past few days have been.

The First Time I Read The Dark is Rising

I can’t remember if I was nine or ten when I read Greenwitch, the third book in this series, for school, but I was instantly hooked and read the whole series. Though I’ve always been a reader, this was my first “gotta read ’em all” experience. I don’t remember a lot else from that first exposure, except a swelling pride in my Welsh heritage and maybe (just once I swear) asking my mom if we were descended from Welsh magicians. And when I saw the word “rook” in this text, I remembered these books were my introduction to that word (and others) and what that quest to understand first felt like.

The Dark is Rising in the Past 30 Years

I may have re-read the series once since I was a child, but my main relationship to the books since then has been forcing them on anyone I cared about who I thought would enjoy the books themselves and maybe also sharing in this magical other world that I carried in my heart. My victims included my brother (who lost my copies but eventually bought me the new ones I’m reading today), my now husband (who probably never actually read the books but humored me with Salinger so he’s forgiven), and my stepbrother (who found the books too scary at his tender age and was the reason I stopped forcing them on people). I’ve been saving my (new, thanks Tosh!) copies in my son’s closet for the day I thought he might be ready for them, but at the age of two he thinks Gruffalo is scary, so we have a ways to go.

What Re-reading The Dark is Rising Felt Like

The Old is New Again

In opening The Dark is Rising for the first time in decades this past week, I realized how little I remembered and how much this book now reminded me of other books. From echoes of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse on the first page to more expected similarities between Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and Grossman’s The Magicians and L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. Some of these convergences are unavoidable coincidences of trope and some are loving tributes (in all directions because some of those books predate The Dark is Rising, one is a contemporary of the book and one is modern to now). Regardless, The Dark is Rising manages to feel fresh and compelling throughout. Even to someone who’s read it before.

Coming of Age, Coming to Light

“As he stared at the fierce, secret lines of that face, the world he had inhabited since he was born seemed to whirl and break and come down again in a pattern that was not the same as before.” – Susan Cooper, The Dark is Rising

Perhaps one of the most important things The Dark is Rising made me appreciate was the way books written for children use the specialness of one child to inspire generations of children on their own individual quests for greatness. This should have occurred to me with Harry Potter (which I still haven’t read) or any number of other books, but the craft in The Dark is Rising is such that I could see how other children could aspire to be like Will, an otherwise ordinary boy among a passel of siblings, who happens to be born on Midwinter’s Day as the seventh son of a seventh son. It isn’t until his eleventh birthday that he starts to realize he is special, the last of the Old Ones to be born, and even that realization takes much coaching from a mysterious old fellow called Merriman Lyon (a name that made my heart leap with glee and reminded me instantly of his true name—but that’s a story for another book).

“He was crystal-clear awake, in a Midwinter Day that had been waiting for him to wake into it since the day he had been born, and, he somehow knew, for centuries before that.” – Susan Cooper, The Dark is Rising

This type of story reaches into the heart of every child at an age where they’re growing from the light of their mothers’ eyes to being parts of a much larger world. It’s a tricky age and a difficult transition and, while a standard formulation for a coming of age novel, Cooper does a better job than most of creating that atmosphere where each of us is special enough to become something more than we are today. She shows us some of the struggles and the work, specialness isn’t simply handed out, and that we each have a role to play. Whether we’re descended from Welsh magicians or not.

The Craft of Unfolding

The biggest literary lesson I’m taking away from The Dark is Rising is how Cooper uses Merriman Lyon to teach the reader about the world Will is newly entering. On the surface, Merriman is teaching Will with lines like “Expect nothing and fear nothing, here or anywhere” because the Dark cannot kill an Old One, but these words also tell the reader what to expect. From direct instructions on what will come next to advice on how to cope, Merriman imparts these lessons throughout the book which keeps Will from bumbling through a disorganized quest and also helps us understand the rules of the book we are reading. This is not a tactic I’d actually recommend to most writers because it’s far too easy to end up telling the reader things you want them to experience instead, but Cooper’s allusions are just delicate enough and the rest of the text enthralling enough that it’s the perfect choice here.

About the Magic

I start to crave magical stories at this time of year. Maybe it’s because I’m not religious but would like to be. Maybe because my dad read Lord of the Rings to my brother and me at a very early age. Or maybe it’s because it’s easy to get a little cooped up in a Seattle winter. But I had just finished binge-watching the latest season of The Magicians on Netflix when it was time to read The Dark is Rising and I didn’t see the connection until I read this piece in The Guardian and understood that this is a season when many of us seek wonder. Because virgin births and a man who can fit through every chimney don’t quite do it for me (though my son thinks Santa is the shit), I’m glad for a great series of books that can connect me to a more ancient form of wonder.

I sometimes wish I could write books like these—full of wonder and eschewing the boundaries of our world. I can’t, yet, but I can run back and start this series over again with Over Sea, Under Stone. Maybe we can re-read it together.

Buy The Dark is Rising for a young person, buy it for yourself. If you buy it from Bookshop.org using that link, your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Finding Home in the World’s Best Bookshops with Jorge Carrión

November 18, 2017 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

I opened my review copy of Bookshops: A Reader’s History by Jorge Carrión the week I was to finally visit the famed City Lights Books in San Francisco for a friend’s book launch. Like most avid readers, bookshops have long been an important part of my life—from perusing the dusty stacks of Twice Sold Tales with my dad as a child, trying to figure out if I had enough quarters to add another Stephen King to my collection, to discovering that I actually like the new Elliott Bay Books even better than the old as I thumb through the poetry section at its heart. Still, Bookshops had a lot to teach me about my beloved haunts, both those that are familiar and those that are not.

Travelogue in Bookshop Form

Bookshops is not a reassuring collection of thoughts on why bookstores are important like My Bookstore. Instead it’s filled with micro essays and deep contemplation, glimpses of booksellers both longstanding and soon-to-be forgotten and, yes, loving tributes too. This is a curious book and the way that it’s ordered would drive a researcher mad, but if you surrender to Carrión’s particular labyrinthine logic, it’s magical. For example, you’ll find the history of City Lights Books not in “America (I): Coast to Coast” but instead beside its sister shop, Shakespeare and Company in “Shakespeare and Companies,” a pairing that reminds us geography is only one way of finding kinship. But it’s a fascinating psychogeography and I enjoyed learning about Carrión’s way of thinking as much as I enjoyed learning about the bookshops he describes.

Busting Up My Ethnocentrism

Speaking of geography, one of the highlights of reading Bookshops was Carrión’s Spanish perspective. As much as I feel like I read widely, especially in Latin America and Eastern Europe, he exposed me to so many writers I’d never even heard of. It was a pleasure to step outside the echo chamber of contemporary U.S. writing. While there are North American writers writing in English whom I adore, Carrión reminded me that I’d let my world get too small again and my to-read list is now forever blessed by this book.

Covering bookshops on five continents, Bookshops also reminded me of some of the pleasures of other cultures from haggling to the experience of finding a collection of books in your own language while traveling in a distant land.

Book Learning

I very much enjoyed the way Carrión wove historical tidbits about books and publishing into his narrative with lines like “Books depended on the rag-and-bone man until the 18th century,” a note which forever changed my view of the rag-and-bone man, the books I hold, and our current disposable culture. I had also never stopped to consider that “the first publishing houses comprised groups of copyists” or that the bound nature of a book is something I shouldn’t take for granted.

Carrión also thinks deeply about what it means to be a reader and a writer. His assertion that “literary bookshops shape their discourse by creating a sophisticated taste that prefers difficulty” made me reflect on my own reading and writing habits and desires. While a remark on how “changes of abode and language led to a state of artistic extraterritoriality” fell uncomfortably close to home.

I won’t go into how many of the bookshops Carrión describes closed before he could even put their glory down on paper—it makes me too sad—but maybe that’s part of the importance of experiencing our favorites now and of this loving documentation of the ones that once were. In that way they don’t leave us at all.

Visiting the Hallowed City Lights

“You create books solely to forge links with others, even after your own death.” – Stefan Zweig

Because of my father, the first poet I ever loved was Lawrence Ferlinghetti, which led me to love the idea of the Beat Generation and developed in me a reverence for City Lights Books. But, after a brusque encounter with the man himself at a reading one night, I was reminded of Flaubert’s maxim: “Il ne faut pas toucher aux idoles, la dorure en reste aux mains,” which translates loosely as “don’t touch your idols because the gold might come off on your hands.” So as many times as I’ve walked past this landmark while visiting San Francisco, I’ve never let myself walk in so as to preserve my reverence. But when my grad school advisor and friend was launching her newest book there, I thought it was probably time to get over myself. It seemed too much like one of those confluences of the universe that you probably shouldn’t avoid.

I’m a little shy to say that I rushed into the store and up to the poetry section where the reading would be held, but that particular trip was stretching me in a lot of ways and it’s what I could manage at the time. What I found in that bookstore, though, was better than anything I could have expected. The building that had been built up into some Sacre Coeur-like icon shining brightly from a hill was, once I crossed the threshold, approachable and homely. It felt small and cozy and the reading was mercifully easy to find. The stairs creaked familiarly and I wanted to take pictures of each and every hand-lettered sign encouraging readers to sit and enjoy or the posters for iconic events. But I didn’t. I didn’t have to. City Lights Books became to me one of those places I could sit and absorb. I was at home there. I read an entire book by Kimiko Hahn while waiting for the reading, I met writers old and new. I even met the proprietor of a bookshop whose balcony table became my momentary home—sustaining me during the precarious year after grad school as I scribbled letters to fellow writers trying to keep hold of the community I felt slipping away.

So while for Carrión City Lights was an anchor and a genesis for “new levels of literacy and sophistication in The West after the Second World War,” for me it was a reminder that the bookshop is my home and that when I feel lonely and far from myself, I’d do well to return there. I don’t know if I can make time for weekly letter-writing (and book-buying, let’s be real) field trips to Elliott Bay right now, but I think I’d better try.

To travel the world’s bookshops with Jorge Carrión, pick up a copy of Bookshops: A Reader’s History from the magnificent Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Wickedness in The Redemption of Galen Pike by Carys Davies

March 19, 2017 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

Wicked little books. They’re all I read these days when on a good night I can manage 20 pages and most nights I can’t even remember any of what I read the night before. By wicked little, I mean very short, except in the case of The Redemption of Galen Pike by Carys Davies which is short, but it is also wicked in the most delicious of ways. The stories are compact enough that I could read a few each night if I wanted to, but, more importantly, they are dincredibly well drawn which made them oh-so-memorable. Perfect for a newish mom with a dark sense of humor and an interest in the baser side of human consciousness.

I should have known I’d like this book. I was reading a review copy sent by the publisher, Biblioasis, and Biblioasis seldom does me wrong. I grabbed it off of my ever-expanding to-read shelf just for that reason, and because I needed an antidote to some of the mindless “eating mindfully” books I’d been putting myself to sleep with lately. I was a little trepidatious, though, that the book was a collection of short stories—a form I can’t usually get into because I want to invest more time in the characters. Little did I know that the distilled form would be part of this book’s strength. Let me tell you about two of my favorites…

“The Quiet”

Davies starts the first story in this collection by masterfully accomplishing something I tried desperately to in my first book and couldn’t.

She didn’t hear him arrive.

The wind was up and the rain was thundering down on the tin roof like a shower of stones and in the midst of all the noise she didn’t hear the rattle of his old buggy approaching. She didn’t hear the scrape of his iron-rimmed wheels on the track, the soft thump of his feet in the wet dust. She didn’t know he was there until she looked up from her bucket of soapy water and saw his face at her window.

With these few sentences, Davies creates a bubble of anticipation for the reader while creating an honest, believable ignorance on the part of the protagonist. We dread the arrival of this man, even as it’s happening. We dread it as much as we soon learn that the main character, Susan, dreads it. But we don’t need to know just yet how much she hates him. We just need to know that he’s creepy and he’s creeping and he’s coming. And Susan doesn’t know.

Davies goes on to describe in equally original and specific detail just how this fellow, Henry, grates on Susan’s nerves each time he comes to visit her husband. It’s soon revealed that said husband is not home on the lonely homestead just now and that Susan is alone with Henry. The power of this story is that even more than a month after I first read it, my skin is prickling with anticipation as I summarize these initial pieces for you.

I will not reveal what happens in this story. It’s too good. But I will say that Davies has complete control of her writing and of the reader as she piques our dread while unfolding a story that is very unlike what we fear might happen. I was terrified in reading it and no less terrified at the end, but the surprises she unwound for me made me question all of the assumptions I’d made and realize how very many levels a truly gifted writer is writing on all at once.

“The Taking of Bunny Clay”

Once you realize that Bunny Clay is a baby, the title of this story alone becomes any parent’s worst nightmare. But Davies is too subtle a writer to give us a straight up baby snatching story that plays to our every fear. Instead, she again creates an unexpected story that plumbs the real depths of our emotions. We quickly see how much working mother Nancy comes to depend on and appreciate her nanny, Cheryl. How Nancy subsumes the feelings she has about how her son should be raised because it’s more important that he’s well cared for. Until Cheryl makes an unusual ask…

The story gets fascinating when the point of view flips and we learn about Cheryl as a human rather than as an employee. I can’t say more except that love comes in many forms. The story is not anything you think and it broke my heart in a million pieces I never expected—even from the title. It’s a hard read for a mom, but a good one. One of the few things I’ve read or watched since parenthood that hasn’t simply yanked the “fear for baby” chain but instead led me to explore and inhabit that fear long enough to understand the good fortune that incites it.

There were stories I enjoyed less. Whether I was especially tired or the story was especially oblique, the only memory I have of “On Commercial Hill” is of scrawling “huh?” at the end of the final paragraph. And sometimes the loathsome characters are truly hard to take, especially when the current political climate makes me want to retract all empathy from a few real life characters.

But then in “Jubilee” Davies captures pure loneliness, or in “The Coat” she describes winter “like a big, dark shoulder, or the long curve of a road up ahead, and once you are round it, it is all downhill”, and I realize how much poorer I would have been as a writer and a human if I had never read this book. I may wait for a brighter day to re-read The Redemption of Galen Pike, but I will re-read it. I have to. There’s so much more to discover.

To explore your own darkness pick up a copy of The Redemption of Galen Pike from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Reconsidering Form in Mr. Palomar by Italo Calvino

December 17, 2016 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

I always think I like Italo Calvino because his sentences are as clean as his ideas are wildly creative. I know he was at least as interested in the form of writing and the semiotics of text as I am and I like Calvino so much that I own every one of his books that was ever translated into English (plus a few that weren’t). But that wasn’t where I was when I picked up Mr. Palomar on a recent winter’s night. I didn’t need my mind blown like it was with Invisible Cities and I didn’t need to re-imagine narrative like I did when reading If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. I wanted clean enough writing that I could get something out of it in the few pages before I passed out—something that would subconsciously help me clarify my own thoughts and sentences.

Books. They always seem to give me what I need instead of what I thought I wanted. Maybe that’s why I love them so much.

Reading a Wave: The Subtlety of Form

“The sea is barely wrinkled, and little waves strike the sandy shore. Mr. Palomar is standing on the shore, looking at a wave. Not that he is lost in contemplation of the waves. He is not lost, because he is quite aware of what he is doing: he wants to look at a wave and he is looking at it. He is not contemplating, because for contemplation you need the right temperament, the right mood, and the right combination of exterior circumstances” – Italo Calvino, Mr. Palomar

In these first few lines of “Mr. Palomar’s Vacation,” I was entranced as Calvino describes the ocean. I thought it was because I, too love watching the ocean and reading the waves. I thought it was because Calvino captured the ambivalence I sometimes feel when I’m trying to settle into a meditative activity like watching the sea or reading a book.

I think I was two pages into the story when I realized what should have been obvious from just what I quoted above. The story is a wave. Mr. Palomar laps his attention out to the sea and then pulls it back inward to experience his own fluttery anxiety. This happens again as Calvino pours all his writerly attention into the next incoming wave and then pulls back again to examine more closely Mr. Palomar’s interior state.

In the few pages that make up this story, Calvino pushes us out into the sea and pulls us back over and over. What might sound like an exhausting activity is actually a transcendent experience. As is the case with actually watching the ocean, the reader experiences a fractal-like delving into the two characters here: the ocean and Mr. Palomar where with each paragraph we see more clearly the details of both.

Calvino can do this because his language is so clean. If the story had been laden with adjectives, I might have missed the underlying form entirely and instead been mildly bored by a scene where not much ever happens except a neverending push-pull between man and nature where neither progresses much.

Instead, I sat up in bed and started rummaging for a pen to annotate this marvelous book. I needed to understand how Calvino was doing so subtly something I’ve only managed to clumsily muddle through as I divide pages in twos, threes, and fours to show the movement of energy through a poem or reconsider the shape of a text and accompanying imagery to convey a larger story than is evident from the words on the page. I’m not sorry I’m making big moves like that in my own work because I think I need to in order to understand the shape of things for myself. But I do hope I someday come close to the subtle mastery of making a paragraph that is a wave, rather than simply looking like one.

The Index: Reconsidering an Entire Work

Why might a 126-page book need an index? That was my thought, anyway, when Mr. Palomar flopped open to its back pages a few nights later to show me what else I’d been missing. Because I was only reading a fragment or two a night, I hadn’t yet registered that these tiny scenes were thematically organized. It turns out each chapter is contemplated in turn from a visual, anthropological, and then speculative angle.

To be honest, now that I’ve had time to contemplate this form a little, I’m not sure it’s necessary for this read of the book. The stories are rich and interesting enough in their own ways without being part of this larger design, but I love that it’s there for future, deeper reads as I hone my own mastery of form.

What is it About Form, Anyway?

As I plod through my own experiments with form, I feel a bit sometimes like I’m creating this narrowly-defined reading experience for an audience who might otherwise miss the subtleties of what I want to say. Calvino shows me, though, that in the hands of a master, form can be an overlay (or an underlayment) to a story. Though it sets up the conditions of the story, its existence can be as ignorable as the shapes of the pipes in the walls of a home.

The true beauty of form, though, is when it gives shape and context to a story in the way that religion or philosophy give shape and context to life. We can exist without them, but there’s something very comforting about believing that each crashing wave is part of the pattern of our existence. Maybe that’s the real reason I picked up Mr. Palomar, because Calvino always gives me the comfort of believing in a greater design.

If you want to explore the world according to Calvino, pick up a copy of Mr. Palomar from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.