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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

Wickedness in The Redemption of Galen Pike by Carys Davies

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

the redemption of galen pike carys daviesWicked 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 Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Filed Under: Books, Western Europe Tagged With: biblioasis, carys davies, the redemption of galen pike

Understanding Grief and Love through The Life-Writer by David Constantine

December 10, 2016 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

the-life-writer-david-constantineHow well do we really know the people we love? It’s a trite question, but one I’d wager most of us ponder at one point or another. In The Life-Writer, David Constantine manages to inhabit both the reality in which we know as little as we fear and the one in which we know enough. It’s the story of Katrin, the much-younger second wife of Eric, and her search through his letters and history in the days following his death to find the person he was before they were married. Perhaps because Eric sets Katrin on this course, using his final hour to describe the first leg of the journey that changed him forever, or perhaps because Katrin’s chosen occupation is writing biographies of little-known people in famous circles who never found fame on their own—whatever the exact reason is, this could-be-pat book is instead a deep, thoughtful, and satisfying exploration of what it means to love.

In Our Grief

I live with more than the normal amount of fear that I will lose everyone I love. It comes from an illness my mom suffered early in my childhood that I didn’t properly understand. I didn’t lose her, but ever since I’ve been plagued by the reality that the people I love and depend on could evaporate at any moment. So I can sometimes be found wallowing in crap narratives like The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks that allow me to mournfully sob and then brush off the sadness with the manipulated plot and move on with my life.

So you’d think a book that starts with a chapter devoted entirely to a wife saying goodbye to her dying husband would drop me into my feelings bucket from which I’d emerge at the end of the book. But no, David Constantine is too fine a writer to depend on tropes and cardboard characters. Instead, he held me inside that moment I so deeply fear and made me care so deeply about the characters that I wanted to stay with them through their grief and through their lives. Because Katrin does go on after Eric dies. There is life after death. And though she spends the bulk of the part of her life that this book chronicles looking for the keys to Eric, she also allows herself to be pulled forward into a post-Eric stage of life where “the fact is fixed, but my attitude towards it is mine to fashion as I please.”

“Later, during passages of grief in which love and its sorrow took the form of self-recrimination, she accused herself of harbouring the thought [what about me when you leave me here, aging alone and we were never young together?] as one might a grievance, for some future occasion, to be brought up and deployed in an argument against the person you could not live your life without. Such a sad and cruel argument. For by then he was not there to answer back.” – David Constantine

It doesn’t hurt, either, that Constantine’s sentences are gorgeous. I actually read this book very slowly because I was taking such pleasure in underlining passages and conversing with the characters via marginalia.

We, the Living

“Your grief is a measure of your love, be glad if you can, rejoice if you can, grieving you love him, in your heart of hearts you would not want it any different.” – David Constantine

Though I’m not actually sure I agree that our grief is a measure of our love, this book made me appreciate how much life goes on after we lose someone who feels like our whole world. This is something I’m able to appreciate a little more these days after the very painful (and very expected) loss of my grandmother in 2011. Though we all knew how ready she was to go, the whole family was rocked by her passing and I continued to feel her loss every time I experienced some new wonderful stage of life I wished I could share with her—getting married, having a son, watching my boy take his first steps. In the month or so since I read this book, I can feel that feeling of loss fading. I still think about her all the time, but Constantine helped me find a place where I can love her and miss her without dissolving into tears. Although I still wish I could share my life’s wonders and struggles with her, I now realize she’s inside me and that I have a pretty good idea what she would have said and how her voice would have sounded when she did, and I can create the conversations I need to have.

In The Life-Writer, Katrin goes through a similar shift. Though her journey is an outward one—writing, traveling, and meeting with anyone who remembers the man her husband was before she knew him, I still had the feeling she was absorbing him into her being. As much as she may have thought she was seeking out a man who might have settled for her and the story of the woman he loved most, she was really reconciling herself to the man she did know so well.

It’s especially beautiful (and sometimes painful) to watch Katrin interact with her husband’s best friend, Daniel. Daniel is the one character who was present in Eric’s life both during the phase of glorious youth and also later when he became the (somewhat) settled professor who married Katrin. There is a tension between Daniel and Katrin that I took at times to be sexual, but the more interesting aspect of their relationship is the shared loss of a man they both knew in their own way. As Katrin seeks out Daniel as the source of the truth about Eric’s love, she engages deeply with who Eric was then but also who Daniel was then. What’s sad is how much she fails to see Daniel as he is now, a fellow in grief. It reminded me of the days following my grandmother’s death when I quibbled with my uncle over her obituary, forgetting entirely that he’d just lost his mother.

Who We Were Then

I don’t think I’m ruining the book by saying that Katrin has at her hands even in the beginning what she truly needs to know. Though she was perfectly suited to be handed the mantle of the quest, she did not seek it out. She knew her husband as he was when he married her and as he was when he died. As she also knew Daniel throughout that time. Though the experiences of their youth shaped these men, I couldn’t help feeling that they were less people when they were young. That isn’t quite right because of course they were people—interesting ones at that, but the living of their lives made them even richer humans with each passing year.

I think of my own husband and of myself when we were young and interesting. I’m lucky to have known him then because I’ve loved seeing the formation of his character over the years, but if I met him tomorrow, he’d already embody those things that formed him. He’d have moved past some, he’d be processing others, but he’d be the gorgeous, sensitive, thoughtful, and brilliant artist, father, and partner I see in front of me every day.

I guess what I’m saying is that we are whole now. I am as was wholly who I was at 38 as I was at 16 or 25. But there’s something about living that makes a 25-year-old look back and see a 16-year-old as less than whole or a 38-year-old looking back at any of them. I try to appreciate who I was and why I made the choices I did, but I am even more me now than ever. Not in an end of the life sort of cornered way, either. I feel fuller and wiser for the experience but I no more want to go back than I want to leap forward and miss the things that will enrich me in the next four decades.

Maybe in the end we know the people we love as well as we know ourselves. At least when it comes to the important bits.

To read the story of The Life-Writer, pick up a copy from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Filed Under: Books, Western Europe Tagged With: biblioasis, david constantine, marriage, the life writer

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Polska, 1994

Polska 1994

Clear Out the Static in Your Attic

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What I’m Reading

Isla's bookshelf: currently-reading

Birds of America
Birds of America
by Lorrie Moore
The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc.
The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc.
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The Souls of Black Folk
by W.E.B. Du Bois
Bomb: The Author Interviews
Bomb: The Author Interviews
by BOMB Magazine
On Writing
On Writing
by Jorge Luis Borges

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