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

The Wildness of Women Who Run with the Wolves, a Story of Becoming

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Opening Women Who Run with the Wolves by , I found a scrap of adding machine tape with my mother’s handwriting. In the top left corner was my own writing from the days when I was learning to shape eights from sixes (before I decided I liked two circles better). I remember sometime long ago when my mother gave me the book, but it had sat so long on the to-read shelf that it was dusty and I no longer remembered what she had said that day.

I enjoyed reading about wild women who trust their instincts and feed their souls. I found post-its beneath important passages and imagined what my mom was thinking about my dad. I’m old and settled enough in myself now that I want her advice on life and love, but it is a newish feeling and I am still hesitant to ask. The mystery deepened when one of the post-its was covered in handwriting that was not my mother’s.

Reading this book and feeling a connection to my mom and to all womanhood was a wonderful way to spend this weekend. Clarissa Pinkola Estés touched on the importance of growing into ourselves and trusting ourselves. She talked about what to do when we have been diverted from the path to ourselves by our families, culture, and choices. I could feel this book feeding my newest novel (the one I’m not ready to talk about). I could feel it feeding me, too. I was learning about my spirit and also my psyche. I was reading about Baba Jaga and Jung. I was integrating and growing.

My first critique is the book is not tightly written. Estés goes on and on in loops and often says in ten paragraphs what she could have said in one. But as she was repeating things, I was taking the chance to daydream about the lessons she was imparting and the fairytales she had introduced. I had the space to create my own thoughts and get closer to myself. I was sorry the length of the book (and my mistaken assumption that it would be dense) kept me from reading it all these years.

My second critique is that this book need not be geared toward women only. There are some lessons that are women-centric (most men, I’d wager, don’t spend time worrying if they are nice enough), but the ideas of learning from instinct and trusting yourself and becoming are universal. Though it will be easier for some women to enjoy the book because it is geared toward them (and I’m sure most of the self-help market is women anyway), I felt sad that men might not see this book’s value for them as well.

Third and last critique. Estés often uses Spanish words where English would have done. I think she was trying to create a voice that was more open and free while evoking her own heritage. As a Spanish speaker, I kept looking at the words wishing that there was a reason they were in Spanish, that there was a strong connotation only Spanish could capture, when often the English meaning is the same.

On Mother’s Day, I spoke with my mom about the book and about how much I was learning from it. She said she never could get into it. A friend had given it to her saying that my mom was a wild woman. Perhaps she couldn’t get into it because my mom already is a wild woman. Perhaps I was quietly learning lessons she already knew. Perhaps I started reading this book at exactly the right time.

My copy of Women Who Run with the Wolves is now heavily underlined and the dog ears at the bottoms of pages grow more frequent toward the end. Those turned corners along with the initials “HG” denote passages I will explore as I write my new book. A book about being a woman not a girl. A book about wildness. A book about becoming.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Love Note to Jonathan Lethem

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Seven years ago my husband taught me to love Jonathan Lethem. This is unusual because, though my husband is a deep and careful reader with a fantastic memory, I am the voracious one who recommends authors and always hungers to discuss the latest book with him before I forget it. When he kept telling me about this fantastic detective novel he was reading for school, I picked up Motherless Brooklyn and never gave it back.

This week I pulled Gun, With Occasional Music from my to-read shelf because I was tired after a long Soviet binge and wanted something familiar, something easy, something I knew I would enjoy. I have read exactly one novel I didn’t like—Amnesia Moon—but even that may have been my mood. Late at night as I picked up this new read, I didn’t even care what the book was about—I simply sought comfort in Lethem’s pages.

I should have taken a clue from the Raymond Chandler epigraph, still I was surprised by the classic detective novel opening. I’ve read a lot of detective novels and one of the things I liked about Motherless Brooklyn was how it reimagined the genre whereas this book seemed to be pulled straight from it. I closed the book to examine the blurbs—references to both Chandler and Philip K. Dick. I’ve (sadly) never read Dick, but I have watched Blade Runner more times than I care to count. I started reading again and I started to understand—Lethem had immersed himself deeply in the genre so he could play with it from the inside. And it was fun.

One of my favorite things about Lethem is the freedom and playfulness with which he writes. From The Disappointment Artist to Men and Cartoons, I always feel like he is enjoying the writing process and that makes my reading all the more fun. I could go on and on about all the craft elements, and Lethem is an artist, but this week I simply want to appreciate the gift of a writer who loves writing.

I am reading this book slowly—savoring it—so it has been at my bedside for many nights. When my husband saw it, he mentioned how much he had enjoyed it. I said, yes, I loved Motherless Brooklyn but that this was a different approach to a detective novel. He said he’d read Gun, With Occasional Music years ago and asked me whether the kangaroo had started to talk. It was his copy I was marking up night after night and it must have lain on my to-read shelf for years. I’m glad I picked this book this week. I’m even more glad I can discuss every delicious page with my husband.

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

Jay Gatsby: Boat Against the Current

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the great gatsby f scott fitzgerald

Jay Gatsby is set in opposition to the other characters in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. The harder he tries to row towards them, the farther away he gets. Where other characters are fleshed out in their foibles, Gatsby is silent on the beach against the moonlight, drawing the characters and the reader to seek him out. Fitzgerald accomplishes this through his characterization of Gatsby.

Gatsby is physically separated at his house in West Egg, across the bay from the rest of the cast in East Egg. The only other character we meet from “the less fashionable” West Egg is the narrator, Nick Carraway, who is also set apart from the in crowd. By setting these two characters (one of whom is the point of view character) across from the others, I felt the distance from East Egg and that East Egg is the lifestyle these characters desire. But even more so, I felt the desire to know Gatsby.

Fitzgerald introduces the phantasm of Gatsby on page 2 as the man who “represented everything for which I have unaffected scorn” but he doesn’t speak until page 47 where he is initially unidentified. Until then, his physical presence is an enigma in the moonlight, a man stepping from the darkness and stretching “out his arms toward the dark water.” His reputation, though, precedes him. Gatsby is frequently brought up as the hero or more often villain of endless rumors that tease the reader until I was gagging for a chance to meet the man. He is either related to Kaiser Wilhelm, has killed a man, is a German spy, a bootlegger, or an Oxford man; perhaps he is all. Even the concrete “truth” about the man is first revealed in a summary by Carraway. He is most certainly a man who picks his words with care.

In contrast, the rest of the characters have verbal diarrhea and reveal themselves all over the place, even without always speaking directly about themselves. Daisy speaks of her daughter, “I hope she’ll be a fool-that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.” Tom speaks of Myrtle’s new puppy, “It’s a bitch…Here’s your money. Go and buy ten more dogs with it.” Myrtle’s sister Catherine speaks of a trip to Monte Carlo, “We had over twelve hundred dollars when we started, but we got gypped out of it all in two days in the private rooms,” even the man in the library reveals himself in marveling at Gatsby’s books, “What thoroughness!  What realism!  Knew when to stop, too-didn’t cut the pages.” Daisy comes across as horribly jaded, Tom is an ass, Catherine blames the world for her circumstance, and the man in the library is a snoop though capable of change. All of them are world-weary and cynical.

Fitzgerald draws Gatsby by filling in the negative space around him. The absence of direct observation leaves the reader to accept or deny the conclusions other characters have made about him. By the time Gatsby finally starts speaking for himself, I felt his character was already all sewn up. And in many ways, he was. If he isn’t a bootlegger, he has a “business gonnegtion,” though he didn’t graduate, he did go to Oxford; I don’t know if he killed a man, but he was a soldier in World War I. What Fitzgerald shows us is that these tidbits don’t define Gatsby at all. Reaching across the water that first night was the only true thing the reader knew about Gatsby. He is defined by his quest for Daisy. Everything he appears to be and has done was created for her.

In creating a mysterious façade and giving the reader a meaty parallel story, Fitzgerald sets up a slightly shady but impervious hero. Fitzgerald hints at what he is doing. Carraway’s first encounter with Gatsby has the effect of “stimulating my curiosity,” speaking of Jordan Baker he notes “most affectations conceal something eventually,” even when Gatsby is revealing his past for Carraway, Carraway notes, “The very phrases were worn so threadbare that they evoked no image except that of a turbaned ‘character’ leaking sawdust at every pore.” Despite this, I thought I had him pegged, but when Gatsby meets Daisy for the first time, he glows and “a new well-being radiated from him.” His soft center, his Achilles heel, is revealed and he becomes an entirely different man. Because he was so distant before and because the tease was so compelling, I fell for the man and empathized with him as he is reintroduced to Daisy, loves her, loses her, and dies. Gatsby is revealed as a man with a passion for love and for life. This sets him against the cynicism of other characters and earns him Carraway’s derision

In my novel, Polska, 1994, I also have a character who exists mostly as a legend. Fitzgerald manages to make Gatsby the focus of the book even when he is not present not just through the title, but by always having him mentioned by other characters. Even when he is not present in body, he is being talked about and the reader is getting a sense at least of who he is perceived to be. By creating conflicting accounts of the man, a crook who also replaces a girl’s damaged dress, Fitzgerald keeps the reader interested and also hints at the depths of the man. It is a difficult thing to do, to draw around a character. The juxtaposition of his absence against the cloying presence of other characters is one way to make the reader hunger to know more about that character.

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

Madame Bovary: Flaubert’s Symphony

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There are many beautiful phrases in Madame Bovary as uses the world around the characters to evoke something greater about their condition, but his similes are some of the most melodious description.

He uses simple similes, often about natural phenomena, such as: “Then, like two scissors, they would cut him with their comments and their observations,” “she responded as do tightly reined horses; she stopped short and the bit slipped from her teeth,” “The patch splintered into an infinity of stars and their silvery light seemed to slither all the way down like a headless snake covered with luminous scales,” “On Emma’s satin dress, as white as a ray of moonlight, the watered texture shimmered.” These images turn the tune of the story into a harmony. Even more powerfully he uses similes that are later echoed by other similes or by occurrences or objects. These echoes give importance to seemingly simple parts of the story and bring all instruments of the story together in a symphony.

Flaubert uses rare plants as symbols of Emma and of love. Of Emma, he writes: “She felt that certain places on the earth must produce happiness, just as a plant that languishes everywhere else thrives only in special soil.” Emma sees herself as such a plant and when next she thinks of plants: “Didn’t love, like the Indian plants, need cultivated land, a special temperature?” I understood she is thinking about her own need for special cultivation. Emma blooms at the moment when she is first ready to cast her husband aside: “her continually youthful illusions had nurtured her gradually, as fertilizer, rain, wind, and sunshine nurture a flower, and she finally blossomed forth in all the fullness of her being.” The cactus Léon brings is a rare plant like Emma that dies before they can consummate their love.

Flaubert relates music to strong emotions: “[Emma] felt herself vibrating with all her being, as if violin bows were being drawn over her nerves” and “Her heart filled with the melodious lamentations that were drawn out to the accompaniment of the double basses, like the cries of the drowning amid the tumult of a storm.” In the beginning, Emma is a pianist and at the end she pretends to take up piano again in order to have time to see Léon. Chillingly, the argument that is brought forth to convince Charles Emma should go to piano lessons, is so that she can teach her daughter about music.

Sometimes the similes speak more directly to later actions of the characters: “There were no illusions left now. She had gradually spent them in all the adventures of her soul, in all her successive conditions, in her virginity, in her marriage, and in love; losing them continually as she grew older, like a traveler who leaves part of his money in every inn along the highway.” Of course Emma does eventually in fact also spend her money in the adventures of her soul, first on Rodolphe and then on Léon. The moral connotations of the passage are astounding. Each of the three “successive conditions” is sexual in nature. By referencing the “traveler” who visits “every inn along the highway,” Flaubert is alluding to a likeness between a prostitute and Emma who “visits” by at the very least flirting with every willing man she comes upon. The illusions Emma has “spent” refer to the idea that she can gain a sense of worth through her interactions with men. She starts out as a pretty young thing, men are attracted to her, and it makes her feel special that they take notice. She grasps at the very brief attentions paid her by the marquis and begins to believe she could aspire to his social milieu. While Rodolphe is having a bit of fun, Emma is having a love affair. She again thinks she has found the love of her life when she meets Léon, although for him she becomes a complication. It is Lheureux who ultimately shows Emma exactly what her beauty is worth. She can prostitute herself to pay off her debt, but he will offer her no sweet words beforehand. She finally sees herself as a commodity and starts to realize that her “love affairs” are in fact the object of ridicule. She has spent her reputation along with her fortune and she is ruined financially as well as idealistically. Her last illusion spent, Emma takes her own life.

Also regarding actions of the characters, Flaubert makes a great deal about people watching situations from the outside:  “[Mother Bovary] observed her son’s unhappiness with a sad silence like a ruined person who watches, through the windowpanes, people sitting around the table of his former home.” When the Bovarys are at the ball at Vaubyessard, Emma sees “some peasants, their faces pressed to the window, staring at her from the garden.” The simile introduces an idea that is carried throughout the book as Emma strives for a life that is other than hers, a pursuit that leads to her ultimate ruin.

From houses: “He felt sad, like an abandoned house,” “her life was as cold as an attic with northern exposure,” to eyes: “Her eyes, filled with tears, sparkled like flames under water,” “her eyes were beginning to disappear under a viscous pallor, as if spiders had spun a web over them,” to horse hoofs: “In the dim light of the studio the white dust flew off from his tool like a shower of sparks beneath the hooves of a galloping horse,” “[he] remounted his nag, whose feet struck fire as it flew off,” Flaubert revisits images throughout Madame Bovary. Each time he addresses the subject, he adds a layer of nuance to the image, a melody to the harmony, and reminds me of where the characters have been and how that speaks to where they are.

Obviously, Flaubert’s language is beautiful and I’d love to emulate it in my own writing. Not every simile recurs, but they all enhance my understanding of the novel. Several similes surprised me with the obscurity of the comparison, but those were the strongest because the items compared were in fact alike. In my own work, I tend toward metaphor rather than simile, but the lesson I can take from Flaubert is how carefully placed these images are and how strong they can be if they recur “naturally” throughout the novel.

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

Embodiment and Disembodiment in The Lover

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the lover marguerite duras

Marguerite Duras throws the reader into the memory of her narrator in The Lover. By switching narration between the first person and third person limited, Duras embodies the experiences of a fifteen and a half year-old girl who takes on a Chinese lover in Saigon. She also conveys the sense of the girl as object which allows the reader to both sympathize with the character and subject her to judgment. This mimics the way the narrator is simultaneously reminiscing about a specific period in her adolescence and also judging herself.

Because the narrative voice doesn’t change when the narrative point of view does, the reader has the sense that the same first person narrator is relating the story from two angles. In one section the narrator describes her shoes: “These high heels are the first in my life, they’re beautiful, they’ve eclipsed all the shoes that went before.” This is followed by a section break and then the very next sentence is: “It’s not the shoes, though, that make the girl look so strangely, so weirdly dressed.” Three sentences later in the same section the narrator is back to first person in describing the provenance of the hat she was wearing: “How I came by it I’ve forgotten.” In each of these sections, the narrator is talking about the same girl and her possessions but the reader is encountering her as both separate and part of the narrator.

Switching back and forth between narrative points of view could be maddening for a reader, but the switch is seamless and gives the reader a much fuller picture of the narrator’s recollections than one viewpoint or the other could have done. The ease of transition is accomplished by zooming in to look at one object (here the shoes and the hat) and then zooming back out to show the same object from a different vantage point.

The key to the reasons behind the shift in perspective is in the following passage: “He answers my mother, tells her she’s right to beat the girl…The mother hits her as hard as she can.” I was struck by the poignant disassociation in the shift here as the narrator transitions from “my mother” to “the girl.”  Moments before, the narrator used the first person to describe the beginning of the incident: “My mother has attacks during which she falls on me…punches me.” “Has attacks” is habitual, not of the moment, and not in scene. But as the description progresses, the specificity of the action as the other brother flees and the mother calms down and the girl lies about her relationship with the Chinese man, makes the description seem like one particular instance. The narrator is separating herself from the girl who is the center of this action. She sets herself apart from the chaos and pain of these relationships as though it happened to someone else. This disembodiment is characteristic of someone who has undergone trauma and is particularly poignant because the character is at an age where one internalizes this type of experience and blames oneself for it.

Shifting back and forth between these narrative points of view is tricky, but Duras managed it well. As a reader, I was able to engage with the character on a deeper level and could feel the shift into third person almost as the narrator’s wince. I don’t think this could be prudently imitated except in the rarest of circumstances because it creates a very specific effect. However, it is important to keep in mind that our characters, being the astute little observers that they tend to be, are likely aware of how they are perceived. There are other ways to view even a first person narrator from the outside, e.g. conveying anxiety at how they are being perceived. In my novel, Polska, 1994, being seen and the perceptions of others is an important part of Magda’s world and I work to show this through how she thinks others are seeing her. Duras reminded me that it is important to consider how my character views herself.

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