Literature Archives - A Geography of Reading

Reconsidering Michael Ondaatje’s Hana in The English Patient and In the Skin of a Lion

August 12, 2013 by Isla McKetta, MFA 6 Comments

I have a confession to make. I am a bad reader. I chew up books and then cast them aside. I suck the marrow of inspiration from them and then leave them to gather dust. Sometimes I even discard them entirely–selling off boxes at a time at used bookstores. So when I read The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje, I read it wrong. And it wasn’t until years later as I was reading his In the Skin of a Lion that I realized my mistake.

Is There a Wrong Way to Read a Book?

There are one hundred and fifty thousand right ways to read a book. More than that even. And there are very few wrong ways to read one. You can pick up factual errors along the way or misread a line of text. But my sin was greater. I came to The English Patient with an agenda. I had watched the film over and over and loved its golden hues and the story of Katharine and Almásy. I’d been told the book was difficult to read so I ignored it too long. When I finally did read it, I read in search of that love story. I was hungry for Ondaatje’s gorgeous language and how he’d describe a love affair.

Isn’t That What The English Patient is About?

I actually hope you’ll never ask yourself this question. I hope you’ve read this beautiful book and saw in it what I failed to… Almásy, eponymous though he may be, is not the protagonist. Hana is.

“Words, Caravaggio. They have a power.” – Michael Ondaatje

It’s been years since I read The English Patient and I might never have discovered my mistake if I hadn’t been rushing through In the Skin of a Lion this week. I was feeling fitful and hoping once again that Ondaatje could quell my inner fuss. I read a few pages a night and then fell asleep and forgot what I read. I wasn’t considering the book. I looked for Hana and Caravaggio because the jacket copy said they had first appeared in this book, but when I didn’t find them, I convinced myself I’d misread that.

And then I had lunch with a writer friend and we talked about In the Skin of a Lion and how it was her husband’s favorite book and that she enjoyed it as well. I started to think about how much I enjoy Ondaatje and why I was so impatient with him just then. I thought back to a gorgeous scene on a bridge as Nicholas saves a nun. I decided to slow down. I read the book when I had time for it instead of trying to make it bend to my sleep schedule. And like a flower in the desert, I met Hana.

Hana isn’t a main character in In the Skin of a Lion. In fact, I’d wager Caravaggio gets more pages. But it didn’t matter. All of a sudden I realized that Hana and Caravaggio came first. When Ondaatje wrote The English Patient, it wasn’t Almásy and Katharine at the front of his brain. It was Hana and Caravaggio.

How Did this Change the Book for Me?

“Do you understand the sadness of geography?” – Michael Ondaatje

With Hana at the front of my mind, I was compelled to pick up The English Patient again. You can ask my husband, it was one of those things where I picked up the book and was reading snippets of it between conversations or when he went outside. I even read a couple of passages aloud. What I realized is that the book starts with Hana. Almásy is there and there are allusions to Katharine, but that love story I’d rushed to find doesn’t actually start until page 142. A page on which I’d had the audacity to write “Now it starts.” That’s more than one third of the way through the book.

As I started reading for Hana, I saw the tenderness between her and Caravaggio and their history. I saw the connection to a life she could no longer relate to–to parents who had died and to a continent and a life far away. I could see her struggle against the pains of her very short adulthood. I realized the big role that Kip plays in her life and the smaller one that Almásy does. I watched Hana open herself up, even against all the pain in the world. I saw her become.

“She had grown older. And he loved her more now than he loved her when he had understood her better, when she was the product of her parents. What she was now was what she herself had decided to become.” – Michael Ondaatje

And of course the book is about the other characters as well and what’s most beautiful is how they interact and form in relation to one another. But I was so grateful I had this opportunity to reconsider Hana. To find the girl who became a woman and who chose, in the face of war and loss, to blossom instead of wilt.

I can’t promise that I will always read books well. I think I failed Danilo Kiš last week. But I hope I will always be lucky enough to re-encounter those beautiful books when I am ready to read them for what they have to offer.

If this review made you want to read more about Hana, pick up a copy of The English Patient or In the Skin of a Lionfrom Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Enduring Mundanity with William Trevor in After Rain

June 5, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

In After Rain, William Trevor presents many stories that play with the reader’s plot expectations. Often he creates a compelling, even dangerous, scenario, but then the story unfolds to reveal that the reader was watching the magician’s assistant rather than his hands. Whether the crooks are the protagonists or the antagonists, the result is always the same: Trevor pulls the rabbit from the hat as we expected in the first place, presenting the triumph of conventionality.

In “Timothy’s Birthday,” Trevor writes of an old couple anxious for their son, Timothy, to come home and celebrate his birthday with them. The initial scene is warm and homey as Charlotte cooks and Odo prepares a fire. Timothy convinces a friend, Eddie, to go in his place and say he is ill. Charlotte is the picture of a concerned mother: “[Timothy’s] tummy played up a bit once.” Eddie makes himself at home, fixing the toilet and helping himself to gin and trinkets. The reader starts to worry for the old couple. Is Eddie going to hurt them? How can he show such disrespect for people who have treated him so kindly? But Eddie leaves and when Odo and Charlotte discover the missing decoration, “[t]heir own way of life was so much debris all around them, but since they were no longer in their prime that hardly mattered….Their love of each other had survived the vicissitudes.” They are beyond caring. They have endured and their life remains fundamentally unchanged.

“A Bit of Business” follows a similar pattern except this time we meet the crooks first as they rob the neighborhood while everyone is out waiting for the Pope. When we learn that Mr. Livingston is at home and elderly, the story seems to be set. Surely these youths will come upon Mr. Livingston and something dire will happen. The tension rises as Trevor cuts between the points of view of the thieves and of Mr. Livingston. “At once Mangan knew there was a bit of trouble.” They tie Mr. Livingston up and leave. So they haven’t hurt him, but still “[h]e’ll squawk his bloody guts out.” and they’ll get what’s coming to them. Surely they’ll go back to finish him off or at least they’ll get caught, but no, they pick up a couple of girls. In fact, it is the crooks who are changed by the encounter with Mr. Livingston: “[t]he lean features of Mr. Livingston were recalled by Mangan….they’d bollocksed the whole thing” and “there was nowhere left to hide from the error that had been made….Privately, each calculated how long it would be before the danger they’d left behind in the house caught up with them.” By having the thieves changed by their interaction with the normative Mr. Livingston, Trevor again creates an aura of the persistence of mundanity.

In “Widows,” Trevor set up a rivalry between sisters Catherine and Alicia with passages such as: “[i]n her girlhood she had been pretty – slender and dark….Alicia, taller, dark also, had been considered the beauty of the town.” But when Thomas Leary appeared and tried to bilk Catherine out of £226, my attention shifted to Thomas as Catherine’s antagonist. His deceit was compelling and I found myself wanting Catherine to stand up to him. Trevor kept Alicia present on the page through simple actions like “replacing forks and spoons in the cutlery container,” which built the expectation that the sisters have banded together in crisis. Alicia does back Catherine up against Thomas in conversation “‘[a]nything could have happened to the receipt….In the circumstances.’” However, when Catherine decided to pay Thomas, Alicia’s hopes were dashed and she turned on her sister: “[h]er expectation had been that in their shared state they would be as once they were….If Leary had not come that day there would have been something else.” The power struggle is once again between Catherine and Alicia. The story is not at all difficult to follow, but the shifting dynamics not only shows the complexity of the relationship between the sisters, it also conveys the sense that something would have come between Catherine and Alicia eventually. Thomas was merely a catalyst, interesting though he was, and the story remains as it ever was the rivalry between the sisters. In comparison to Thomas’s thievery, the sisterly feud seems quotidian and conventional, just where I have come to expect Trevor will leave me at the end of a story.

What was interesting to me about the structure of Trevor’s stories was how clearly they articulated a singular world view without seeming forced. He feeds the reader’s interest with some of the more seedy aspects of life, but his real interest seems to be conveying the fact that ordinary endures. I can learn from the complexity of the relationships he builds between characters such as Catherine and Alicia and Charlotte and Odo. Their encounters with the seamier side of life portray the characters’ normative lives much in the way that Gatsby was drawn through the negative space around him. There were other aspects of Trevor’s work that I can learn from as well, for example, the way he handles the letter in “A Day,” by never giving us the exact text of the letter but giving us enough information to infer it. I may in the long run look at his point of view shifts versus Mary Gaitskill’s.

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

Tagalog Words, Filipino Flavor in Dogeaters

April 28, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

I’m thinking a lot about the feel of foreign words on the tongue and in print lately, so I want to talk about Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters. She uses Tagalog and Spanish words throughout this novel set in the Phillipines. Most often these phrases are used in dialogue and consist of exclamations, family designations, or food. Hagedorn sets aside the words for the reader by using italics, but it is clear that the intermingling of these words would occur naturally in the characters’ speech. These words lend the story authenticity, but they can also interfere with the reader’s understanding of the story.

Spanish

The Spanish words Hagedorn uses are easily intelligible and familiar, I imagine, even to many readers who don’t speak Spanish. Words like “abuelita,” “hija,” and “prima” are all family designations and are used with varying regularity in novels set in America. Hagedorn uses the Spanish “abuelita” to differentiate between Rio’s two grandmothers. Both women are Filipina, but one has moved to Spain and considers herself more Spanish. Rio’s Filipina grandmother, Narcisa, is addressed as “Lola” while her grandmother with Spanish pretensions, Socorro, is addressed as “abuelita.”

Tagalog

Some of the Tagalog words Hagedorn uses are easily understandable based on the context clues around them: “[i]t is merienda time at the popular Cafe España.” It is clear that “merienda” has something to do with eating. As the novel progresses, Hagedorn uses the word over and over and the reader’s understanding of the word is enriched. Although I never fully understood the word, I came to understand “merienda” happens in the morning and may be akin to brunch. I was able to substitute “brunch” for “merienda” and at least understand what was going on in the scenes. A similar thing happened with “tsismis.” At first I had no idea what the characters were talking about, but by the time I read Rio’s father saying to her mother: “what do you do all day for exercise, except move your mouth up, down, and sideways, making tsismis with your queers,” I understood it meant gossip.

Defining Words in the Text

There were two instances where the non-English words were described by the characters themselves. In the first, Rio is describing her family and says: “Uncle Cristobal flies a Falangista flag above his front door to show his allegiance to Franco.” While I have no idea what the flag looks like, I completely understand its meaning and how it might pigeonhole Cristobal politically. The second instance is while Rio’s mother and father are discussing the difference between “putok” and “spiritik,” both of which mean fake. Rio’s father says: “Congressman Abad spiritiks when he plays golf, but General Ledesma rewards his army with cases of putok liquor.” I learn the nuance of the connotations of the two words, but Hagedorn also weaves in some of the flavor of local politics at the same time.

There are phrases that I never even quite got the gist of throughout the novel. Many of these seemed like interjections. One of these was “di ba” and another was “puwede ba.” They occurred frequently in conversation, often followed by an exclamation point, but with context clues. I interpreted them as exclamations, and I didn’t feel like I lost a major point of the sentence by not understanding them, but I never did get the full flavor of the sentence.

I am used to understanding even foreign words in novels, and it was a switch for me to not be able to understand exactly what was going on at all times. Hagedorn’s use of Tagalog made me more conscious of my use of Polish in my novel, Polska, 1994. Because Polish is, like Tagalog, not widely spoken outside of its native country (and expat communities), Hagedorn is teaching me to use context clues to help the non-Polish speaker understand the words. These foreign words and phrases need to be at least intelligible to an English-speaking reader, even if they convey a deeper meaning to a Polish-speaking reader.

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