Point of View Archives - A Geography of Reading

The Methods in Jakov Lind’s Madness

October 5, 2012 by Karen Hugg, MFA 1 Comment

Most stories don’t smash me to bits. As I read them, I’m moved, enchanted, worried, dismayed, relieved, sometimes annoyed. But Jakov Lind’s Soul of Wood and Other Stories just left me flattened, feeling empty, and as if I were stranded in a strange shapeless place. The question “Wow, what was that all about?” kept looping in my head like a song, and I was unable to find an answer.

But I think the answer lies in not only the mad brilliance of the story itself, but more so, for me as a writer, in the craft of how Lind created the story. By story I mean the novella, Soul of Wood, which opens the collection. The later short stories are also impressive in their own way, but Soul of Wood is the masterpiece. It’s set in Austria in the 1940s and follows Wohlbrecht, a crippled Austrian soldier, who works to hide Anton Barth, a mostly paralyzed Jewish boy, in a mountain cabin. He enlists the help of Alois, his brother-in-law, and the first half of the book centers on the two’s endeavors of dragging Barth up through the woods while trying to avoid the Nazis and their random air attacks.

Shot from all Sides by Point of View

Lind’s voice is somehow casual, witty, romantic and brusquely masculine all at once. It doesn’t just blast its way through the narrative, but rather tumbles with a clear urgency. This was probably the first technique that I’d love to emulate (oh, if I could.) But what’s crazier and even more unattainable is how the point of view wanders. It, at times, becomes dreamy and surreal before landing flatly in stark reality. Take, for instance, the following passage occurring early in the story, which by the way could be a spoiler, depending on how you view the narrative. Read at your own risk.

As Wohlbrecht and Alois return from the cabin, they stop at the side of the road. Wohlbrecht lays and dozes in the hay as Alois talks of his post-war plans. Alois plans to visit Rumania in an effort to cure his epilepsy. In one paragraph, Alois talks about a renowned doctor and his treatment that Alois believes will mend all aspects of his life. In another, the grand wealth that he and all of Vienna will enjoy after the war. As readers we are relaxed at this point in the passage, imagining hopeful situations and feeling a tender intimacy with Alois.

Then: “The loud engine sounds woke up Wohlbrecht.” This kicks off a random rotation of omniscient narration, stream of consciousness and Wohlbrecht’s spoken words. There’s little punctuation to help us distinguish between what’s happening, what’s being said and what’s being thought.

“Jumping Jesus, he cried, they’ll fly right up my ass. A burst of machine-gun fire beat down like rain on the tin roof and by the time Wohlbrecht cried ‘Cover!’ Alois was dead. Hit right in the back of the head. The blood gushed like a geyser. Alois, Alois, Wohlbrecht yelled thinking he was still asleep. Alois, where’d it get you? Alois didn’t move. Alois, don’t pretend, say something. Alois said nothing. It was so still he could hear a beetle scratching in the hay.”

Here, this mishmash of point of view hits us in the gut. We’re dealing with the sudden chaos of the moment, which poetically reflects the sudden chaos of the entire war experience. It also shows the contrast between life and death, the potential of the future and the negation of it in how Alois is dreaming of better years to come when he is suddenly killed. By the end of these few paragraphs, we’re jarred, upset, and left processing what just happened – as Wohlbrecht is. Lind doesn’t just describe trauma, he hurls us into it so we experience it first hand. That he does this by manipulating point of view is amazing.

There are other amazing aspects to Soul of Wood as well. The plot of the book later bends back on itself and we discover that much of the seemingly random events, forgotten images and off-hand mentions of names and people actually come together in a larger symbolic coherence. That coherence makes this novella one of the most under-appreciated of our time.

The Shorter Works

The Other Stories in the title are mostly outlandish, grotesque short stories rooted in the trauma of World War II. In one, a piano teacher is haunted by his past as an S.S. officer. A traveler stumbles upon a family of cannibals. A man follows his neighbor to a kind of speakeasy only to find a featureless woman who somehow sets him free. A killer about to be executed dreams of killing his father in revenge. Two men, a Jew and a Catholic-converted-Jew, share a snug hole as they hide from the Nazis. Somehow these shorter pieces unfold with a tongue-in-cheek wit. They’re also somewhat allegorical though what they represent is too complex and hidden to explore here. Suffice to say they embody Lind’s seemingly unstable spirit, macabre wit and clever narrative arcs, which leave writers like me both horrified and smiling.

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

Dividing Identity and Point of View with Ondaatje’s Divisadero

May 25, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

In Divisadero, Michael Ondaatje uses an odd narrative point of view. Though Ondaatje shifts between passages in the first person points of view of Anna and of Lucien Segura and also third person omniscience, the novel can be read as a compilation of Anna’s reminiscences, extrapolations, and imagination.

The first chapter begins in the first person point of view of Anna as she reflects on growing up with her sister Claire and Cooper, a boy they were raised with. There are glimpses of omniscience in Anna’s voice: “[t]here is a broken path in both our memories toward this incident, even now.” What verges on omniscience here is that Anna is speaking for herself and for Claire as though they are still in touch, but so far as the narrative is concerned, Anna and Claire haven’t seen each other since they were sixteen and may never again.

Throughout the book, identity is confused, adopted, and changed and this mirrors the shifting quality of the point of view. When Cooper rescued Anna from the barn, he “called [Anna] ‘Claire.’ So that Claire herself became confused, uncertain for a moment as to who she was.” Anna refers to herself as “this person formerly known as Anna” and Cooper confuses Anna for Claire and later Claire for Anna. This quality of never quite knowing who is narrating made me want to understand how the different narrators fit together.

To add to the strange quality of the point of view, there is one section narrated in first person plural. In this scene, we are looking at pictures of people who have lived in or near Lucien Segura’s house and Ondaatje writes about the second of two photographs “[w]e are much closer to the subject in this picture. Photography has moved in from the middle distance as the century progressed.” Anna is referred to in the third person, as “[t]he woman” and “[t]his person who is barely Anna,” so it feels as though Anna is not the narrator, but Ondaatje is also giving a clue here. This section in with its odd point of view and passages about shifting distance was my key to unlocking the point of view. I started to understand what I had sensed earlier, that Ondaatje had created a world where the reader is seeing things from both inside and outside of Anna, but the narrator is always Anna.

It is easy to understand how Anna could have constructed a first person narrative for Lucien Segura. She is living in his home and she is studying him and his papers. It feels somehow natural for her to fall into his voice and Ondaatje reinforces this scholar-subject interaction in the last section of the novel, Say Your Goodbyes. Here the reader is gently lifted step by step out of Segura’s world by the third person narrator as Segura’s actions are less and less dramatized and more and more reported on as the narrator, who I have assumed is Anna, begins to analyze Segura’s life and his works and his life is wrapped neatly up. The book ends with Anna narrating in the first person.

Entire portions of the novel are told in a third person point of view that Anna could not have the information to relate. She so much as says: “I would never see Coop again.” If Anna is the narrator, only a few things could account for her omniscience about Claire and Cooper. Anna could have gained her power through some supernatural means, or, more likely, Anna has invented narratives for Claire and Cooper using her intimate knowledge of them from before just as she constructed a narrative for Lucien Segura based on his papers and her encounters with Rafael.

In the section titled The Person Formerly Known as Anna, the first-person Anna alludes to her inhabiting of Claire: “[i]n my work I sometimes borrow Claire’s nature as well as her careful focus on the world” and “I feel I can imagine most things about Claire accurately. I know her.” She goes on to say “[b]ut Coop I know only in one distinct way–as the twenty-year-old I fell in love with,” and it is true, Cooper’s narrative of becoming a lonely cardsharp and then being tempted into danger by a woman could easily be extrapolated from the loner lifestyle he led within Anna’s family and the risks he took to be with her. Claire’s rescue of Cooper and the love that develops between them as he calls her Anna seems like something Anna could have invented to assuage her guilt over leaving these two people she loved deeply behind while at the same time ultimately triumphing over Claire because Cooper is still in love with Anna, not Claire. It is as though Anna brought Cooper and Claire together in a mocking atonement for the moment in the barn where Cooper rescued Anna instead of Claire.

The point of view in this book was difficult for me to get a handle on. I sensed that Anna was narrating, but when portions of her life were recounted in the third person, I kept flipping back to see if I had misread the first section. I’m not sure yet that I completely understand whether there was something I missed in the mixing of Claire and Anna. Ondaatje managed to convey Anna’s disembodiment through his complicated construction of point of view and I’m not sure it could have been captured as well in any other way. I enjoyed mulling over the book and reading passages over and over, but at times I was also frustrated by not being to accurately place all of the pieces on my chess board. I couldn’t tell whether the narrator was reliable, because I didn’t know who it was and I kept looking for someone other than Anna to turn up as the third person narrator. That said, I like some aspects of the complexity of the narration.

In my own work, I am still grappling with point of view. At one time I wanted to construct Polska, 1994 from a series of narrators who were all observing Magda so that she would be drawn entirely from the observations of others until the rape when she decides to embody herself. In the long run, I found that I wanted to inhabit her more than that, but I still ache to create a richer world than I can totally create through the eyes of a girl of seventeen.

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

Embodiment and Disembodiment in The Lover

May 6, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

Marguerite Duras throws the reader into the memory of her narrator in The Lover. By switching narration between the first person and third person limited, Duras embodies the experiences of a fifteen and a half year-old girl who takes on a Chinese lover in Saigon. She also conveys the sense of the girl as object which allows the reader to both sympathize with the character and subject her to judgment. This mimics the way the narrator is simultaneously reminiscing about a specific period in her adolescence and also judging herself.

Because the narrative voice doesn’t change when the narrative point of view does, the reader has the sense that the same first person narrator is relating the story from two angles. In one section the narrator describes her shoes: “These high heels are the first in my life, they’re beautiful, they’ve eclipsed all the shoes that went before.” This is followed by a section break and then the very next sentence is: “It’s not the shoes, though, that make the girl look so strangely, so weirdly dressed.” Three sentences later in the same section the narrator is back to first person in describing the provenance of the hat she was wearing: “How I came by it I’ve forgotten.” In each of these sections, the narrator is talking about the same girl and her possessions but the reader is encountering her as both separate and part of the narrator.

Switching back and forth between narrative points of view could be maddening for a reader, but the switch is seamless and gives the reader a much fuller picture of the narrator’s recollections than one viewpoint or the other could have done. The ease of transition is accomplished by zooming in to look at one object (here the shoes and the hat) and then zooming back out to show the same object from a different vantage point.

The key to the reasons behind the shift in perspective is in the following passage: “He answers my mother, tells her she’s right to beat the girl…The mother hits her as hard as she can.” I was struck by the poignant disassociation in the shift here as the narrator transitions from “my mother” to “the girl.” Moments before, the narrator used the first person to describe the beginning of the incident: “My mother has attacks during which she falls on me…punches me.” “Has attacks” is habitual, not of the moment, and not in scene. But as the description progresses, the specificity of the action as the other brother flees and the mother calms down and the girl lies about her relationship with the Chinese man, makes the description seem like one particular instance. The narrator is separating herself from the girl who is the center of this action. She sets herself apart from the chaos and pain of these relationships as though it happened to someone else. This disembodiment is characteristic of someone who has undergone trauma and is particularly poignant because the character is at an age where one internalizes this type of experience and blames oneself for it.

Shifting back and forth between these narrative points of view is tricky, but Duras managed it well. As a reader, I was able to engage with the character on a deeper level and could feel the shift into third person almost as the narrator’s wince. I don’t think this could be prudently imitated except in the rarest of circumstances because it creates a very specific effect. However, it is important to keep in mind that our characters, being the astute little observers that they tend to be, are likely aware of how they are perceived. There are other ways to view even a first person narrator from the outside, e.g. conveying anxiety at how they are being perceived. In my novel, Polska, 1994, being seen and the perceptions of others is an important part of Magda’s world and I work to show this through how she thinks others are seeing her. Duras reminded me that it is important to consider how my character views herself.

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