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

Pynchon’s Crazy Voice in The Crying of Lot 49

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In the The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon weaves together a series of unlikely events using the voice of a compelling narrator to form the story of a postal conspiracy. From the first sentence of the novel as the narrator takes the protagonist Oedipa from Tupperware party to being the executrix of the estate of a real estate mogul, the novel is full of wild and unexpected turns. These turns might be difficult for a reader to navigate if it weren’t for the extraordinary voice of the narrator.

The voice is whimsical and often strays off topic. For example, just after Oedipa hears about her role in the Inverarity will, the narrator muses:

[s]he tried to think back to whether anything unusual had happened around then. Through the rest of the afternoon, through her trip to the market in downtown Kinneret-Among-The-Pines to buy ricotta and listen to Muzak (today she came through the bead-curtained entrance around bar 4 of the Fort Wayne Settecento Ensemble’s variorium recording of the Vivaldi Kazoo Concerto, Boyd Beaver, soloist); then through the sunned gathering of her marjoram and sweet basil from the herb garden” (10).

The reader is given all sorts of extraneous details, but because the details are so interesting and unusual and because the narration always loops back to the topic at hand (in this case, Oedipa thinking about whether anything unusual had happened), I was interested in learning more and was not lost in the narration. I was however carried away by it. The voice of the narrator was like someone telling a story who has so much detail they want to pack in but they are trying to keep in mind the forward thrust of the story. Because the novel becomes a sort of mystery, I wanted to re-read portions of the novel and see if this extraneous information was in fact pertinent or led somewhere. The voice of the narrator was interesting enough to make me think everything he said had meaning and import.

I have read breathless narrators before, the type who are trying to keep up with the pace of the story and the effect is “and then, and then, and then…”, but this narrator was in control of the story and was going to let it unfold at his pace. The effect was intoxicating. Despite the odd character names and the implausibility of the events, I was willing to follow this story through orgiastic sex scenes and nights spent following a bum just to see where on Earth he was going with the story.

It’s an interesting effect to have a narrator who is so in control of what’s happening. Control may be the wrong word, because it doesn’t seem as though he is orchestrating it. Rather it seems as though he alone knows what is going on. This novel would have been a mess with a less omniscient narrator because Oedipa has no idea what is going on. The reader would be immersed in her confusion and would have difficulty following the threads of the mystery. In fact, it is the juxtaposition of this compelling, competent narrator with Oedipa’s confusion that gives the reader the freedom to follow the narrative. It could and does go anywhere, but the coolness of the narrator gives the novel a semblance of order and perhaps even predestination. I wouldn’t go so far as to say the narrator in this novel is God, although narrators can take on a certain deific quality, but the narrator does provide order to the universe of this novel.

I did not use an omniscient narrator in Polska, 1994, but I can see from this novel how important it is for the voice that is doing the storytelling to be compelling. I considered using a cooler retrospective voice for the part of my novel where Magda is leading up to her regrets and then transitioning to in-the-moment narration for the remainder of the book. By starting with the cooler voice, I would like to keep a reader’s confusion to a minimum as she comes to understand the world the way Magda sees it. The retrospective voice would have allowed Magda to draw some conclusions about her life and her experience and to let the reader understand her life through those conclusions. I ended up going with something that was more raw and immediate—something that spoke to her post-rape turmoil.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of The Crying of Lot 49 from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Mercè Rodoreda’s Breathless Narrator in The Time of the Doves

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Merce Rodoreda The Time of the DovesThe narrative voice in Mercè Rodoreda’s novel, The Time of the Doves, wraps the reader in the dizzying world of a young woman. Through first person narration and the use of stream of consciousness, Rodoreda places the reader inside the head of Natalia as life happens to her.

Rodoreda starts sentence after sentence with “And,” even she using it as a conjunction between sentences: “[a]nd I stuck up for Quimet’s mother and said yes, she had put salt in the food. And the neighbor said if she ate food that was too salty it took her appetite away and Quimet said…”  This and the lack of commas gives Natalia’s narration a breathless feeling like she is so wrapped up in the story that she couldn’t stop talking if she tried. This hurriedness also gave me the impression that she wasn’t stopping to think about what she was saying, there was no after the fact analysis. It was an interesting effect for something narrated in the past tense. Most often writers add layers of reflection and reinterpretation to stories narrated in the past tense. The character has had years to mull over events and interject meaning. By combining the breathlessness with the past tense, Rodoreda gave me the impression that Natalia was reliving these events and there was a lot of unprocessed anxiety wrapped up in them.

Natalia is aware of the actions going on around her: “Quimet started complaining furiously about his leg;” and to a certain extent she feels how those actions impact her: “I felt like they’d emptied me out of myself and filled me with something very strange. Someone I couldn’t see kept blowing into my mouth and played at inflating me;” but she doesn’t even contemplate escaping it. Natalia needs a sympathetic audience and the reader is closer than a girlfriend to whom Natalia complains about her life, but she has no concept that she has any control over her own fate. This intimate quality means the reader is involved in Natalia’s confusion.

Natalia was so caught up in the whirlwind of her life that the war crept up on her. Her life existed outside of history or political context for most of the first half of the novel. Rodoreda drops in a reference to the king on page 71 and Natalia mentions “the rich were mad at the Republic.” It isn’t until “Cintet and Quimet never stopped talking about the street patrols and how they’d have to be soldiers again” that the war comes home for Natalia. This was a very interesting effect. Usually when I read books about wars, they are about wars, the war is heavily foreshadowed through the rest of the book and often there are battle scenes. What Rodoreda accomplished was showing how ignorant people can be about impending political strife when they are wrapped up in their lives. Natalia couldn’t meditate on ridding her house of doves, let alone how the political situation was shaping up around her.

Although I interjected my own thoughts and feelings into the novel, e.g. wondering why she didn’t know what a jerk Quimet was, so strong was the narrative voice that Rodoreda changed the way I read the book. Natalia is living without much premeditation, evidenced by sentences like: “[u]p to the moment he got undressed, you could say I’d never really taken a good look at him.” I am used to reading for clues to a character’s ultimate fate, to having some idea where the character is going. This sentence was like a smack in the face. It forced me to experience Natalia’s life as she was experiencing it because she was so unpredictable. I could worry for her, but I couldn’t anticipate her. We are so controlled by Natalia’s worldview that when “a militiaman knocked on the door and told me Quimet and Cintet had died” and she goes up to the roof “to breathe,” we don’t know if she is relieved or in shock or devastated.

I find myself slipping into the “and, and, and” mode sometimes when I am writing, but I usually go back and edit it out. This novel conveyed that sense of rawness, where the character is experiencing everything simultaneously, that I would like to experiment with, but I sometimes found it exhausting to read. I felt like I was being whipped around like Natalia was allowing herself to be and the only control I had was to put the book down. I think it is something I could use as an effect, but I wonder if I would be able to give up the control of having my characters act on their own behalves. Rodoreda’s treatment of Natalia and the war was spot on. To worry and anticipate political strife would have implied some sort of forethought and would have been completely out of character. I was truly placed inside Natalia’s world and at the mercy of her interpretation of it.

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