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

Reconsidering Form in Mr. Palomar by Italo Calvino

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mr-palomar-italo-calvinoI always think I like Italo Calvino because his sentences are as clean as his ideas are wildly creative. I know he was at least as interested in the form of writing and the semiotics of text as I am and I like Calvino so much that I own every one of his books that was ever translated into English (plus a few that weren’t). But that wasn’t where I was when I picked up Mr. Palomar on a recent winter’s night. I didn’t need my mind blown like it was with Invisible Cities and I didn’t need to re-imagine narrative like I did when reading If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. I wanted clean enough writing that I could get something out of it in the few pages before I passed out—something that would subconsciously help me clarify my own thoughts and sentences.

Books. They always seem to give me what I need instead of what I thought I wanted. Maybe that’s why I love them so much.

Reading a Wave: The Subtlety of Form

“The sea is barely wrinkled, and little waves strike the sandy shore. Mr. Palomar is standing on the shore, looking at a wave. Not that he is lost in contemplation of the waves. He is not lost, because he is quite aware of what he is doing: he wants to look at a wave and he is looking at it. He is not contemplating, because for contemplation you need the right temperament, the right mood, and the right combination of exterior circumstances” – Italo Calvino, Mr. Palomar

In these first few lines of “Mr. Palomar’s Vacation,” I was entranced as Calvino describes the ocean. I thought it was because I, too love watching the ocean and reading the waves. I thought it was because Calvino captured the ambivalence I sometimes feel when I’m trying to settle into a meditative activity like watching the sea or reading a book.

I think I was two pages into the story when I realized what should have been obvious from just what I quoted above. The story is a wave. Mr. Palomar laps his attention out to the sea and then pulls it back inward to experience his own fluttery anxiety. This happens again as Calvino pours all his writerly attention into the next incoming wave and then pulls back again to examine more closely Mr. Palomar’s interior state.

In the few pages that make up this story, Calvino pushes us out into the sea and pulls us back over and over. What might sound like an exhausting activity is actually a transcendent experience. As is the case with actually watching the ocean, the reader experiences a fractal-like delving into the two characters here: the ocean and Mr. Palomar where with each paragraph we see more clearly the details of both.

Calvino can do this because his language is so clean. If the story had been laden with adjectives, I might have missed the underlying form entirely and instead been mildly bored by a scene where not much ever happens except a neverending push-pull between man and nature where neither progresses much.

Instead, I sat up in bed and started rummaging for a pen to annotate this marvelous book. I needed to understand how Calvino was doing so subtly something I’ve only managed to clumsily muddle through as I divide pages in twos, threes, and fours to show the movement of energy through a poem or reconsider the shape of a text and accompanying imagery to convey a larger story than is evident from the words on the page. I’m not sorry I’m making big moves like that in my own work because I think I need to in order to understand the shape of things for myself. But I do hope I someday come close to the subtle mastery of making a paragraph that is a wave, rather than simply looking like one.

The Index: Reconsidering an Entire Work

Why might a 126-page book need an index? That was my thought, anyway, when Mr. Palomar flopped open to its back pages a few nights later to show me what else I’d been missing. Because I was only reading a fragment or two a night, I hadn’t yet registered that these tiny scenes were thematically organized. It turns out each chapter is contemplated in turn from a visual, anthropological, and then speculative angle.

To be honest, now that I’ve had time to contemplate this form a little, I’m not sure it’s necessary for this read of the book. The stories are rich and interesting enough in their own ways without being part of this larger design, but I love that it’s there for future, deeper reads as I hone my own mastery of form.

What is it About Form, Anyway?

As I plod through my own experiments with form, I feel a bit sometimes like I’m creating this narrowly-defined reading experience for an audience who might otherwise miss the subtleties of what I want to say. Calvino shows me, though, that in the hands of a master, form can be an overlay (or an underlayment) to a story. Though it sets up the conditions of the story, its existence can be as ignorable as the shapes of the pipes in the walls of a home.

The true beauty of form, though, is when it gives shape and context to a story in the way that religion or philosophy give shape and context to life. We can exist without them, but there’s something very comforting about believing that each crashing wave is part of the pattern of our existence. Maybe that’s the real reason I picked up Mr. Palomar, because Calvino always gives me the comfort of believing in a greater design.

If you want to explore the world according to Calvino, pick up a copy of Mr. Palomar from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

The Art of Writing: Under the Jaguar Sun by Italo Calvino

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Under the Jaguar Sun - Italo Calvino

There are a very few authors whose work I love so much that I covet and then hide their books away so I don’t read all of them at once. Italo Calvino is at the top of that list. So when my husband gave me Under the Jaguar Sun for Christmas, I thought I’d stumble on it some day in the future when I really needed a good read.

But something he said about the title story and love and adventure made me read the book just a few days later, and I’m so glad I did. I was performing final edits on two manuscripts at the time and if there is ever a time in a writer’s life that she needs a good book, it’s during those final edits when you think you’ve done everything you can to a book and need a little boost. I’ve always loved Calvino, but what he showed me in just a few pages made my work infinitely better.

Be warned: I’m going to spoil (a little) some plots in this review, but I don’t think that will take very much away from the pleasure of reading this book for the first time. If you’re worried, though, stop reading here and come back and chat with me when you’ve read the book. It’s only 86 pages so don’t be too long.

Writing for All Senses

This book was conceived as a series of stories that each focus on one sense. Although Calvino worked on it over a period of 13 years, he only completed three. I’m somewhat embarrassed to say I didn’t realize that was the conceit of the book until the end, but that also tells you a bit about how I surrender to Calvino and just let him do whatever he wants with my brain.

It’s not uncommon in writing workshops to draft a story that focuses on a sense. I wish I could do it as well as Calvino does and I love the way that his focus shapes the very nature of the story. “Under the Jaguar Sun” is a relatively traditional narrative about a couple visiting Mexico that focuses on taste. The story is gorgeous and well-written, which I’ll go into more in a moment, but it didn’t prepare me at all for “A King Listens.” That second story is a monologue told in second person to you, the reader, the king. The way the focus of the narration shifts from quotidian advice to implications of rumor that breed suspicion and paranoia is flat-out brilliant. It played with the fleeting nature of hearing and how we interpret the implications of what people tell us.

“Epigraphs in an undecipherable language, half their letters rubbed away y the sand-laden wind: this is what you will be, O parfumeries, for the noseless man of the future.” – Italo Calvino, “The Name, the Nose.”

The third story, “The Name, the Nose” captures the ineffable magic of scent as a man seeks to find the woman who so bewitched him with her perfume. The story plays with the power of our sense of smell to provoke memory and also the way that memory sometimes shifts as we recall it. The way the story unfolds is a huge part of the magic, so that I will not spoil here.

Showing Your Hand

The art of writing, in the hands of masters, is about manipulating the experience of the reader so the words you put on the page evoke what you want them to, even though each person brings his or her lifetime of connotations into their reading of it. Like a magician, one of the ways Calvino does this is by telling you what he’s going to do to you before he does it.

This is most obvious in “Under the Jaguar Sun” when the couple encounters Salustiano who becomes a sort of guide. The narrator describes him thusly:

“It was his way of speaking–or, rather one of his ways; the copious information Salustiano supplied (about the history and customs and nature of his country his erudition was inexhaustible) was either stated emphatically like a war proclamation or slyly insinuated as if it were charged with all sorts of implied meanings.” – Italo Calvino, “Under the Jaguar Sun”

Okay, that’s all a pretty cool description of character. But it’s also the key to what the narrator is interested in about the man and about what he’s just learned from this character and will soon try out on us.

“From one locality to the next the gastronomic lexicon varied, always offering new terms to be recorded and new sensations to be defined. Instead [of chiles en nogada], we found guacamole, to be scooped up with crisp tortillas that snap into many shards and dip like spoons into the thick cream (the fat softness of the aguacate–the Mexican national fruit, known to the rest of the world under the distorted name of “avocado”–is accompanied and underlined by the angular dryness of the tortilla, which, for its part, can have many flavors, pretending to have none)” – Italo Calvino, “Under the Jaguar Sun”

What Calvino is doing here, besides giving me a wicked craving for guacamole, is deconstructing the sensation of encountering these things so that they are new to us by calling attention to the renaming of the avocado. He’s insinuating that the things we encounter that seem bland–the tortilla chips–have a flavor and rich experience all their own. In the context of the story, this passage also has implications about how we fail to appreciate the flavors of our lovers.

Because Calvino is so adept at this sleight of writing, this manipulation expands and enhances the story for me. I enjoy it rather than bucking against it.

Repetition

A friend once told me that things need to be repeated seven times in a book for a reader to really catch on. I’m not sure if that same number holds for a short story, but Calvino definitely uses repetition as emphasis and he does it so subtly that you’re constantly re-encountering information without feeling like you’ve heard that all before.

In the case of “Under the Jaguar Sun,” some of the most powerful repetition revolves around Olivia, the narrator’s lover, and eating. At first he very carefully observes her eating, following as she chewed “the tension as it moved from her lips to her nostrils, flaring one moment, contracting the next.” Later, they are at a temple having just heard about human sacrifice and he focuses on her “strong, sharp teeth and sensed there a restrained desire, an expectation.”

The subtle repetition of theme slowly sinks in as you read, and the way Calvino handles eating, especially in relation to Olivia, evolves very quickly throughout the story. What it ultimately says about her relationship to the narrator made me glad this wasn’t the story of my relationship. But the story is very evocative and I think we’ve all been in that place at least once.

I’ll return to this book, as I plan to return to all my Calvinos, when I need that boost of writing excellence. Who are the writers who speak to the way you write and who teach you with every word they put on paper?

If this review made you want to learn from Calvino, pick up a copy of Under the Jaguar Sun from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Inspiration in Iteration: Italo Calvino and Pixar in La Luna

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Cosmicomics Italo CalvinoAs I was reading Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino this weekend, I felt like the story “The Distance of the Moon” was somehow familiar. I had seen it—with my eyes, not in my imagination. But it wasn’t quite the same story. It took a few hours for me to remember that I was thinking of Pixar’s La Luna, the short film at the front of Brave.

Sometimes I forget how much art and literature feed off one another. I shouldn’t because my writing is often inspired by other art forms. At this very moment, I am watching a random film and taking notes in a separate document on the interactions of the characters to help me understand the characters in my latest novel. But I was surprised (and delighted) to find something I consider to be relatively obscure had inspired a Pixar short.

Italo Calvino vs. Enrico Casarosa and Pixar

This could become a post about pop culture versus art, but I’d rather not make those distinctions, not today anyway. What interested me about the Calvino/Pixar relationship is that screenwriter Enrico Casarosa and Pixar were bringing this beautiful story of people rowing boats out into the sea to climb ladders onto a low-hanging moon to an audience who would mostly not read Calvino.

Though the setting of “The Distance of the Moon” and La Luna is the same and both are filled with childlike wonder, there are substantial differences between the stories. “The Distance of the Moon” is written for adults and in that wonderfully concise Calvino fashion, contains an undercurrent of sexuality and an allegory for unrequited love. The characters change from the page to the screen and the elements of danger and loss are omitted. Instead, Casarosa presents a film about family relationships and how the brightest ideas sometimes come from the youngest minds.

The Beauty of Variations

Chinese painters repaint masterpieces to learn the strokes of the masters who came before them. But can we ever create the same artwork or do we always leave a piece of ourselves behind?

I started thinking about “The Street of Crocodiles” by Bruno Schulz and the short film by the Brothers Quay (known for making music videos for Tool) of the same name. The story by Schulz is colorful and alive, whereas the film is truly creepy and compelling.

What I love about this process of iterative creation is that each new interpretation feels like rediscovering a story as each artist adds bits of themselves to the project.

Calvino and Schulz are inextricably linked in my reading habits. It’s like I’m locked in some Western European tapestry where Calvino creates the clean yet inventive geometry governing the weft while Schulz weaves and embroiders the warp with his crazy wild descriptions. It’s pretty awesome.

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

How I (Almost) Fell in Love with Hemingway

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I’ve always hated Hemingway—as controversial as that sounds to my generation of writers. I thought his women were insipid—I’m afraid of the rain because sometimes I see me dead in it—and he so often wrote of hunting and fishing where I usually read about war and oppression. Most of all, Hemingway is my father’s favorite author.

A Father’s Influence

I was read to as a child by both of my parents and then I learned to read by reading aloud to myself, but it is my father’s voice I hear when I read. Over the years as I’ve impugned Hemingway, my father often responded by quoting Papa’s short, declarative sentences. I hear my father give weight to the proper word. I feel the emotion behind his voice as he imbues the masculine writing with all the feelings boys are taught not to openly express. Perhaps that’s what is really meant by clean prose—a holding back of what is just beneath the surface. I love my father’s voice, but even he could not make me hear the beauty in Catherine’s fear of the rain.

As I learned to become a writer, I was surrounded by Papa—starting with the Nick Adams stories and their brilliant setting. Someone wrote an imitation of “The Hills Like White Elephants” and I pretended to get it. My father continued to quote Hemingway. I read and fell for authors like Calvino who themselves loved Hemingway. I loved them for their clean prose—the very thing they were imitating from Hemingway—and I started to see I would have to face Papa someday, but I wanted to do it on my own terms. I worried my father would have to die before I could do that.

Midnight in Paris

When I watched Midnight in Paris, I fell in love with Woody Allen’s Hemingway and with his manner of speech. I wanted to listen all night to his trailing tangents. My father argued that he was merely a caricature, but there was a glimmer of self-awareness in the actor or the portrayal that made me love what I had considered to be cheese.

A Farewell to Arms

I’ve been feeling Papa draw closer as I exhausted my supply of Calvino and Pavese. My husband and I planned a trip to Croatia and Slovenia—places that from the American travel blogs you would think had never existed before Hemingway—even if his presence there was greatly exaggerated. So I picked up A Farewell to Arms and I danced around it for weeks. But then I read McMurtry’s treatment of ’s letters in Harper’s and I saw the human. I wanted to be near Papa.

How can I describe those opening paragraphs without using the words “there were.” The cadence was there—my father’s and Woody Allen’s and Hemingway’s. The reportage of scenery in simple language. I felt its weight. I brought meaning to his simple, clean sentences. I came to love that style and by page three I was crying at their beauty. I was afraid to turn each page because I didn’t want to lose my awe. I wanted to call my father and read to him, but I also wanted Papa all to myself.

And then came Catherine. And the rain. I know from his letters that Hemingway truly loved the real-life Catherine and maybe he respected her more than I am giving him credit for. I dreaded every mention of the rain. The simple sentences that had carried so much import became cloying with their symbolism. The war sections were still beautiful and strong, and I know from friends that I’m not the only one who loves the war and hates the romance, but I am left deeply divided. He was capable of so much and then it feels like he simply phoned it in.

I know now that I have a lot to learn from Hemingway. I also know that he is not a god. I am not ready to read the complete works and who knows what I will find when I do. I respect my father’s love for Papa. I wish I could devote myself as fully.

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

Italo Calvino’s Dreamlike Invisible Cities

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Invisible Cities by is unlike any book I’ve read before. It seems to exist in another plane entirely with its dreamlike short sections that each end with some philosophical statement. Each section left me wanting to ruminate on what I’ve just read rather than turning to the next. All of the cities are named for women and it made me wonder if Marco Polo (or rather Calvino through Polo) was talking about cities at all. Calvino peppers modern references like airplanes and Ferris wheels throughout the stories as if to say time is immaterial.

Building My Own Cities

Calvino’s descriptions of these cities are ethereal enough that I’m asked to construct my own images of the cities if I want them. Calvino has Polo describe one aspect of each city that is characteristic of it, and many of these are not concrete elements but rather a spirit of the city. Even when Polo specifically lists objects, as in this description of Zora, “[T]he copper clock follows the barber’s striped awning, then the fountain with the nine jets, the astronomer’s glass tower…” he uses few adjectives and my mind is free to make most of the picture, although I found myself grasping for these specifics to have something to begin building with. Of course if the physical description were essential to the experience he wanted to convey, Calvino would have written them in. This left me looking for what he was trying to convey.

With sentences like, “Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: a foreignness of what you no longer are or possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places,” Calvino asks the reader to bring both meaning and interpretation into the story. What is it that you no longer are? What do you no longer possess? How is a space unpossessed or for that matter possessed? Long after I finished reading Calvino’s words, my mind worked over them.

Finding My Bearings Among the Grand Ideas

The difficulty for me lies in that much of the book is made up of these wide open ideas that I was trying to knit together and I found it hard to get my bearings. After the first ten cities I felt I was beginning to understand the world Calvino was creating. After the next ten I was looking for metaphors. After the full 165 pages I felt the meaning was so large I would never be able to grasp it and I was disheartened. This book was something I would have liked to have read one city at a time during a year or more just to absorb it—to fully explore all the possibilities of the cities and to construct the character and characteristics of each in my mind before moving onto the next. The cities were like the stones in Polo’s arch, but I wasn’t able to see the arch that the individual stones formed. The lasting impression of the book in my mind is instead the first line of Coleridge’s poem.

It is as though Calvino is using the words on the page to teach me to unlock those same words, for example Calvino writes, “But what enhanced for Kublai every event or piece of news reported by his inarticulate informer was the space that remained around it, a void not filled with words.” I often wondered how much of the story was written on the page and how much of it I was meant to bring to it as a reader. At the end of “Tamara,” Calvino writes, “However the city may really be, beneath this thick coating of signs…you leave Tamara without having discovered it.” I finished the book as I left Tamara—not having discovered it.

Twice I have suggested that for me Calvino was speaking through Polo in this book. Perhaps it was the modern elements, perhaps it was the lack of emphasis on character development, but Polo did not present as a fully realized character as much as Kublai did. I enjoyed the way the conversations between Kublai and Polo framed the descriptions of the cities, although I kept looking for them to relate more closely to each other. Often I read hungrily to the next portion of dialogue.

This is one of those books that I think will percolate through my brain for quite some time. Invisible Cities reminded me that a reader will construct their own world out of whatever they are given and there is no need to be didactic about it unless I am purposefully so. While I as a reader (perhaps like Kublai) was expecting a more straightforward travelogue, because Calvino’s descriptions were compelling, I was willing to follow him as he described the essences of these cities (and therefore the essences of life) rather than their architecture.

If this review made you want to read the book, support indie booksellers (and reviewers—I get a commission) by picking up a copy of Invisible Citiesfrom Powell’s Books.