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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

Uprooted by Mauricio Segura’s Eucalyptus

October 28, 2013 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

Imagine a woman, born in the US but who lived for a formative year in Pinochet’s Chile, reading a book by an author born in Chile and living in Canada. The book, originally written in French, is about a Chilean-Canadian man who has returned to his native country to bury his father. Perhaps this international hopscotch begins to describe the magic I felt when opening Eucalyptus by Mauricio Segura. I’m so far inside it, I can’t even tell. Let me share with you what I loved about this beautiful book.

Literary Language

Segura captured me with the first sentence of the first paragraph: “On the horizon, pools of water vaporized as he advanced.” Writers and writing teachers make a lot of (deserved) fuss about first sentences–so much so that it can be paralyzing for a writer to try and come up with something original but not forced, interesting but not obscure. With this sentence I had no idea what country the characters were in, who they were, or what they were doing except advancing. And I was happy to advance with them. It quickly becomes obvious that Alberto is driving and he’s doing so very determinedly.

“He only came to himself when the pickup crossed the old metal bridge over the Bío Bío, where there was a gaggle of children giddy with laughter bobbing along in the river’s treacherous current.” – Mauricio Segura

This is the first mention of geography and it felled me and grounded me. I remembered driving with my own family across that same river one night to see Halley’s Comet. I remembered the children playing in the river. But even if I didn’t have those memories, this simple sentence begins to open for the reader the world that Alberto is re-entering. The children are gleeful despite the danger. Reading further the parents are watching but not very closely. This is not a world where children live on leashes and Alberto will learn some lessons along the way.

My brother, one of the most faithful readers of this blog, will be interested to know that the story takes place in Temuco. It is on the sidewalks of that town that I remember him earning the nickname “Terremoto” which means earthquake. I’ll spare his dignity a little and not commit to the Internet the other story about him in Temuco. Just know, Tosh, that I haven’t forgotten and I’m using my rights as an older sister to tease you about it for life.

“Yes, it is now that the family is breaking up, decomposing like molecules being brought to the boil, and we are scattering to the four corners of the American continent.” – Mauricio Segura

And then there are the images. This is a simple one–much of the language in this book is simple–but it’s deceptive in its plainness. In one sentence we have a family that is rotting, separating, heating up, and dispersing. In a book of only 150 pages, each word has a lot of work to do and Segura (along with translator Donald Winkler) is doing it well.

Parallels

This is a book to read closely. The story of Alberto returning from Canada for his father’s funeral is closely woven into the story of Roberto (Alberto’s father) returning from Canada for his father’s funeral. You read that right. I wondered if Alberto’s son, Marco, would someday also return…

“‘A few weeks later,’ Carmen said, ‘a policeman came to the farm.’

Opening the door, Roberto saw a youth dressed in a khaki shirt and brown pants.” – Mauricio Segura

What’s especially interesting about this relationship between parallel time periods is that there are often no transitions between them. Carmen is telling the story to Alberto after the death of Roberto but the paragraphs of time just slip into each other. It makes the book a little difficult to follow at times but it also causes this gorgeous overlap where all events feel as though they are occurring in the present. It’s a difficult effect (between that and the bouncing bus, I did a fair amount of re-reading) and not one I’d use lightly but Segura pulls it off.

Foreign Roots

I was attracted to this book first because of the title. The smell of eucalyptus trees can still take me back to long walks up Caracol Hill where I picnicked with my family beneath those fragrant trees. That scent is such a strong part of my memory that when visiting San Francisco I make a beeline for Lafayette Park to be surrounded by it.

What surprised me about this book was finding out that eucalyptus trees are indigenous to Australia, not Chile, and were as much imports to that land as I was. I liked thinking about all the degrees of native heritage that the characters enjoyed from the very native Mapuche people to Marco, a child whose father and grandfather had both bounced back and forth across the continent.

Speaking of the continent, did you catch that moment in the second pull quote on this page where Segura wrote of the “American continent”? When I first learned about the continents as a student in Chile, I memorized the names of all six of them. Imagine my surprise and confusion when I came home to the US where I was then taught that there are seven continents. Amazing how a simple denotation on a map can change your worldview.

Rich Storylines

I’ve already discussed parts of Alberto and Roberto’s stories, but there is a lot more background packed into this book including allusions to the troubled political history of Chile, evolving relationships with indigenous peoples, and a volcano. On top of that are some deeply complicated family and neighborhood relationships. But somehow the book is not at all crowded. In fact, at times there was so much going on at an almost subliminal level that Segura left me questioning whether I had any talent as a writer at all because he was weaving those storytelling threads so well. The best books leave us something to aspire to.

If you want to explore a little piece of Chile, pick up a copy of Eucalyptus from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Filed Under: Books, Latin America Tagged With: Canadian Literature, Chilean Literature, eucalyptus

The Intimate Lives of Munro’s Girls and Women

July 9, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

lives of girls and women - alice munroIn Lives of Girls and Women, Alice Munro exposes the reader to the inner world of her first-person narrator, Della Jordan. The psychic distance throughout the book is always close, as I would expect in a first person narrative. However, Munro makes use of a full range of narrative distance from distant:  “[t]he snowbanks along the main street got to be so high that an archway was cut in one of them” to close: “the thought of him stayed in my mind like a circus net spread underneath whatever I had to think about at the moment.” When Munro presents scenes of Della’s burgeoning sexuality, she uses the combination of the close psychic distance and a close narrative distance to explore the fullness of Della’s contradictory feelings.

As Della begins to fantasize about Mr. Chamberlain, we are treated to thoughts like: “Mr. Chamberlain’s voice in my mind…acted on me like the touch of rayon silk on my skin, surrounded me, made me feel endangered and desired.” The reader falls in with Della and is treated to her most intimate thoughts as she first begins to see herself as a sexual creature. I felt her naïveté as she mulls over the implications of the conversation she has just heard:  “[t]hey mature earlier in those hot climates…A man paid you to let him do it. What did he say?  Did he take your clothes off or did he expect you to do that yourself?” The questions she is asking herself reveal the shallowness of her experience, but her observations about Mr. Chamberlain imply how willing she is to explore this new, forbidden realm farther.

“His face contained for me all possibilities of fierceness and sweetness, pride and submissiveness, violence, self-containment. I never saw more in it than I had when I saw it first, because I saw everything then. The whole thing in him that I was going to love, and never catch or explain.” -Alice Munro, The Lives of Girls and Women

Della begins to fantasize about being seduced by Mr. Chamberlain, but “[t]he moment of being seen naked could not be solidified, it was a stab of light….in the corner of my daydream he was featureless but powerful, humming away electrically like a blue fluorescent light.” Because I am deep inside Della’s thoughts, I am privy to the innocence of her inability to fully imagine the scene and also to the lustiness and force of her emotions. Although Della’s hormones are coursing through her like mad, she has no concrete experience on which to base her fantasies. If Munro did not place the reader so deep in Della’s mind, it would be difficult to convey the same complexity of Della’s childlike lasciviousness. She could be a Lolita through Humbert’s eyes or a victim, but not as fully both.

I was involved with Della as she read through Fern’s papers and finds the bawdy poetry. I understand Della’s relationship with the word “fuck, which I had never been able to look at….I had never been able to contemplate before its thrust of brutality, hypnotic swagger.” Della is taking a word that she has seen and for the first time is really starting to understand. Mr. Chamberlain has already groped her and she has willingly gotten in the car with him and the word sits out there as a possibility rather than a profanity. Della is on the cusp of asserting her sexuality.

I enjoyed being so intimate with Della. I think more so because this came so late in the book. She was already a friend and I understood her to a certain extent. I felt like I was willing to grow with her through her contradictory emotions. At some points I felt like Munro was pulling thoughts out of my own adolescent head and I think that is due to the tortured duality of the thoughts. As people, especially as adolescents, we experience uncertainty. When Mr. Chamberlain finally exposes himself to Della, her observation that his penis is “[n]ot at all like marble David’s” says everything. The parts of the fantasy she couldn’t quite imagine are right there in front of her and she could (would) never have imagined them in that way.

My narrator in Polska, 1994, Magda, is of a similar age and sexual experience level as Della. As I think back on this book, I realize how much I learned from the realism of the contradictions in Della’s thoughts. And the stark contrast between the fantasy of sexuality and the reality made the reality of Mr. Chamberlain even more grotesque than a grown man molesting a teenager would stereotypically be. At the same time, the naturalness with which Della faces her sexual desires portends the healthy sexual relationship she will have with Garnet. She is not victimized by Mr. Chamberlain, he is simply one step on her path toward sexual awakening.

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

Filed Under: Books, USA & Canada Tagged With: Canadian Literature, first person, Murmurs of the River, sexuality

First Impressions Matter in Atwood’s The Robber Bride

July 1, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

the robber bride - margaret atwoodMargaret Atwood writes in the first chapter of The Robber Bride, “Where to start is the problem because nothing begins where it begins and nothing’s over when it’s over, and everything needs a preface” but she knows exactly where to begin. She begins by creating a world in which the reader could not possibly like Zenia and she does it while the actual character remains almost entirely offscreen.

“The sun moves into Scorpio, Tony has lunch at the Toxique with her two friends Roz and Charis, a slight breeze blows in over Lake Ontario, and Zenia returns from the dead.” –Margaret Atwood

When Zenia she first appears, we know only that she is supposed to be dead and that people are glad. We have met her through the Tony’s memories and Tony’s reaction to her appearance. Zenia does not interact with any of the main characters at that time.
Atwood switches the focus to Charis and then Roz and we come to know and love them and to see their hatred of Zenia, but we still haven’t met her. I sympathize with Tony and Charis and Roz and I believe in their interpretation of Zenia because I have come to know them as full, round characters. I know from them and from their friends their virtues and their faults. The only character who has only faults in Zenia.

What I love about this book so far is that Margaret Atwood is too smart to have Zenia be merely a flat, despicable villain. She has to have a backstory. But at this point Zenia could be the nicest person in the world and she would still have difficulty convincing me of it because I have made friends with Tony, Charis, and Roz, and she is the enemy of my friends. I cannot wait to see how Atwood changes my mind about Zenia.

Introducing a character through rumor is something Fitzgerald did well in The Great Gatsby. I had all kinds of preconceived notions about Gatsby before I ever met him and I loved seeing where the truth of reading proved and disproved them. Though I can see what Atwood is doing, I am loving the process of being manipulated and I am so excited to find out what she does next.

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

Filed Under: Books, USA & Canada Tagged With: Canadian Literature, round characters, Withholding

Love in The Winter Vault with Anne Michaels

April 24, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

I’ve been thinking about what I could say about The Winter Vault by Anne Michaels that would express how much I loved it. The only way to start is with my own story. Five months ago I married the man I have loved for sixteen years and I thought marriage would be a capstone on our relationship. I didn’t realize our marriage would be the beginning of a new phase of love. Reading about Jean and Avery falling in love, I saw a closeness and intimacy that mirrored ours. I remembered what it was like to fall in love with my husband so long ago and that helped me understand the beauty and fullness of what was happening in this new phase of our relationship. I’ve heard it said that no marriage in literature can be a happy one, and Avery and Jean are confronted with a loss that divides them, but it does not divide the book and the ways they continue to relate and to love are an equally important part of the story.

Building on recurring themes of creation and simulacra in the wake of destruction, this novel created for me a sensation of deepening understanding as I encountered loud thematic echoes and subtler inferences throughout. Even tiny technical details of the transplantation of Abu Simbel, though woven into a beautiful story, reinforce these themes.

Michaels is first a poet and she re-imagines each sentence so that it is at once unique and seemingly effortless. It is a joy to read about new and familiar subjects and to follow her curious mind as she describes the genesis of wheat and the varieties of palms.

Portions of this book and the general structure recall Fugitive Pieces, which I also loved, but The Winter Vault is in most ways a very different story and perhaps one with a wider audience. This is a good book for the curious mind and for anyone who has ever loved deeply and lost. I’m not ready to part with it yet. Perhaps as I read it again I will fall even more deeply in love. If so, I’ll spare you the details.

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

Filed Under: Books, USA & Canada Tagged With: Abu Simbel, Anne Michaels, book review, Canadian Literature, Fugitive Pieces, love, The Winter Vault

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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
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by BOMB Magazine
On Writing
On Writing
by Jorge Luis Borges

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