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

Outside the Narrator’s Madness with Love by Péter Nádas

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Love Péter NádasSome writers have the power to immerse the reader in a world so forcefully that your emotions are surrendered to them and your wellbeing is completely at their mercy. That is the experience I was hoping for Love by Péter Nádas.

I picked this book up because I deeply enjoyed A Book of Memories, my next book is about love (so I’m reading a lot about it), and it’s a novella, a form I adore. Love wants to immerse the reader in its world—the first line is dialogue, “’Gimme a pillow’” and immediately you are inside this moment in a relationship where they are about to have sex and then he will leave her. It’s a tantalizing cliff and at first I enjoyed watching from the edge of my seat.

Overlapping Time

Early on, Nádas describes the scene in a series of staccato sentences that portray each moment of action in a way that would make any writing teacher cringe (though the influence of Proust is strong). Except that it works. Something about the way the tense shifts between sentences and he jumps from sight to sight and back again makes you feel as though you are present in the room for a familiar scene that has been played out many times.

“At the table I was sitting in the armchair, half naked. All the paraphernalia on the table. A pack of cigarettes. Grass in a small plastic bag. Scissors, matches. A clean sheet of paper. She takes a cigarette out of the pack, then a matchstick from the matchbox. With the match she scoops out the tobacco, careful not to graze the fine paper shell of the cigarette. I am not leaning back. My shirt is on the backrest of the armchair, her green dress spread out over my shirt. She likes to walk around naked; it’s hot. The tobacco is spilled out on the sheet of paper. Her breasts tremble imperceptibly, following with a slight delay the rhythm of her movements…”

Nádas later recreates snippets of this moment so that you feel stranded in a series of overlapping moments. You feel like you are watching many versions of the same scene as it has happened over and over and the writer has overlapped them to show how the relationship is suspended in one place. It’s amazing.

Show Don’t Tell

But then the book changes. As the narrator is mired inside this moment, he starts to go mad. The luscious repetition that felt like it was describing a state of being becomes mired in its own inability to move forward. The narrator is standing in the middle of the room and he feels the draw of jumping off the balcony and he is thirsty. Time passes or does not pass. And we are entirely in the narrator’s head.

“If, then, I exist only as a fragment of my former, whole self, but this fragment now seems to be between my two potential human capacities. Where? Where my story is stripped down to its bare essentials: between existence and nonexistence. That’s where I am conceptually…”

The passage was intellectually interesting, but it left me cold emotionally. Which was weird in the middle of this tortured moment in a love affair. Here’s how António Lobo Antunes shows stillness:

“Agitated on the inside by disgust but with nothing showing in their immobile features, absolutely still, as unmoving as those of landscapes, of photographs, of summer sunsets, nothing showing in their ever-horizontal features, decomposing silently in the Formica chairs.”

Rather than thinking words like “exist” and “capacities,” Antunes uses emotive words like “agitated,” “disgust,” and “decomposing.” Okay, that last one may not be emotive but it surely is evocative. I wanted badly for Nádas to get out of his head and let me experience the moment. But maybe that’s why the narrator was mired in his situation in the first place. But I tired of standing at the edge of the cliff with him.

Conclusion

This book taught me a lot of things. First, though I grew up in an intellectual household and often revert to a thinking mode of speech, what has the power to move me is emotion and I should be using more of that in my writing. Second, just because I like a writer does not mean I will like all of their work. And third, it’s time to start looking within when writing my next book. The sources of inspiration are endless, but I know what I want and what I need and the time to start working is now.

Happy NaNoWriMo! Are you balancing inspiration and creation better than I am?

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

Empathy in Konrad’s The Case Worker

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From the day to day routine to the understanding of the masses, evokes what it must be like to be a social worker in The Case Worker. From the very first words of the book, “Go on, I say to my client. Out of habit, because I can guess what he’s going to say, and doubt its truthfulness,” Konrád is showing how routine the case worker’s job is and how it has inured him from caring about his clients. Konrád divided the first chapter into a series of short sections describing an interaction with a client, the makeup of the office, another client, more description of the building. By interspersing the narrator’s client relationships with information about floorplans and the objects stored in filing cabinets, Konrád makes the individual clients seem like tasks the narrator has to deal with during his workday and illustrates the narrator’s lack of engagement with his clients. The sections about objects are longer than the sections about clients, too, as though the whip with three lashes stored in the file cabinet is more interesting than the clients themselves. This feeling continues at the beginning of the chapter entitled “Suicide Cases” as the narrator summarizes case study after case study in short paragraphs that run into one another. The sentences about these clients are short, declarative, and devoid of emotion, for example: “In 1951 thirteen-year-old Klara G’s father was denounced as a war criminal and hanged.”

The Bandula Family

In the same chapter Konrád devotes nearly fourteen pages to the story of the Bandula family. This longest section of the book so far (with comparatively long paragraphs that go on for a page or more) both conveys a much deeper understanding of these clients and also brings the reader’s attention to the importance of this case. These are individuals not just suicide cases. I could be more aware of where I direct the reader’s attention in my own writing.

When the case worker takes on responsibility for the orphaned child of Bandula, he begins to take on the characteristics of his clients, but Konrád shows this “metamorphosis” rather than telling the reader about it. He begins with one of the more benign conditions, a compulsion for order. In the chaos of the Bandula apartment, the case worker devotes enormous amounts of time to putting and keeping the place in order. Konrád writes, “there’s no limit to my passion for tidiness….One of my clients went mad because his wife was absent-minded and things were always changing place in the apartment….I can well understand his distaste for the wanderings of salt cellars…” This is the beginning of empathy. A few pages before the case worker was describing the child as “this abstract object.” First he empathizes with the other client, then with Bandula, and eventually with the child. What’s interesting is how Konrád blends the official mind of the case worker with this newly empathetic creature when he begins to see the similarities between his position and Bandulas: “All in all, I am forced to conclude that there is not much difference between this kind of training and what I did before….In my official capacity I made decisions in writing, now I administer beatings.”

Playing with Form

But this is no ordinary case worker. Sometimes Konrád deviates from the standard form of paragraphing. For example, when the case worker is first taken to the mental hospital, Konrád renders a two page chapter that is all one sentence but a series of paragraphs that look as though they mated with stanzas. It’s not whimsical, but it is lyrical and given that these types of sections occur at various times throughout the book, the reader can see that the case worker’s mind (because the book is told in first person) is not as rigid and conventional as he would like to believe. The pattern is to have long descriptive stanzas and then a series of one-line stanzas. This punctuates the one-line stanzas and makes them stand out as though they were very short sentences among very long ones, except that these are all a part of one whole. So lines like: “reserved for male mental cases/of this security ward” come off as emphatic. Near the beginning of the novel is a similar section where instead of stanza-like paragraphs, Konrád joins a series of paragraphs with ellipses to make one sentence and it is dreamlike although the facts themselves are mundane. I like to play with sentence length for emphasis but I had never even considered breaking outside of standard paragraph form.

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