Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie (TPR #19)

There is a shelf in my home library that I affectionately call the Power Shelf. Sitting together there, so nicely, are Marilynne Robinson, Salman Rushdie, and John Steinbeck. Sometimes, it makes my heart smile just knowing they are there. These are three of the most important writers in my reading life, and I'm glad to hear of Rushdie's PEN/Pinter Prize today. I read The Satanic Verses and Midnight's Children in college and was changed by them both. It was The Moor's Last Sigh that really brought this blog to life back in 2010. He is simply one of the best in the business, and I'm always thankful for his work and his words.

He's also one of those voices collected in the Paris Review Interviews collection that sparked what I call the TPR Challenge. Here's the post where it all kicked off, or you can go to the tab above to see the full list and progress (with links). It's funny to me that I thought the project could take as much as a year (!) four years ago. Ha! My original plan was to read his Luka and the Fire of Life, which I still want to read, but after a colleague raved about his Haroun and the Sea of Stories, that's what I chose most recently, and it was wonderful. This little novel is accessible to a young audience while still being engaging and thought-provoking to the adult reader. It tells the story of young Haroun, his father, Rashid Khalifa, "whose cheerfulness was famous throughout that unhappy metropolis, and whose never-ending stream of tall, short and winding tales had earned him not one but two nicknames. To his admirers he was Rashid the Ocean of Notions, as stuffed with cheery stories as the sea was full of glumfish; but to his jealous rivals he was the Shah of Blah," and their adventures to save the Ocean of the Streams of Story on the Moon, Kahani. It is a smart and entertaining tale that introduces magical realism to young readers beautifully. In fact, this passage from the book explains the idea well: "He knew what he knew: that the real world was full of magic, so magical worlds could easily be real."

I highlighted several passages, but here is perhaps my favorite:

'But it's not as simple as that,' he told himself, because the dance of the Shadow Warrior showed him that silence had its own grace and beauty (just as speech could be graceless and ugly); and that Action could be as noble as Words; and that creatures of darkness could be as lovely as the children of the light.

This is no easy fairy tale with a typical hero narrative. It challenges our Rushdie does much with the idea of contrasts and duality and multiple perspectives. He comments on this idea in the interview:

My life has given me this other subject: worlds in collision. How do you make people see that everyone's story is now a part of everyone else's story? (Vol. III 361)

Here he explains how it is he became such a "political" writer:

The larger world gets into the story not because I want to write about politics, but because I want to write about people. (366) 

I agree with him on that point and love the way he puts this on democracy:

The question of how shall we live is a never-answered question. It's a constant argument. In a free society we argue about how we shall live, and that's how we live. The argument is the answer, and I want to be in that argument. It's democracy: the least bad system available. (385)

There is much more in the interview and in Haroun. I encourage you to read them both, to share Haroun and the Sea of Stories with the young people in your life, and maybe even to (like me) pick up Luka and the Fire of Life and keep enjoying this particular side of the always fascinating Salman Rushdie.

11/22/63 by Stephen King (TPR Challenge #18)

Remember my Audible.com dithering? I couldn't decide whether to pay for the convenience or figure out something else. Well, I finally decided to cut the cord, but not until I finished the amazing 11/22/63 by Stephen King. It took so long that I accrued two more credits in the meantime, so I downloaded two substantial books for the whole family (The Black Stallion and Anne of Green Gables) and then called it quits. The frugal ninny in me could not see paying for that convenience any longer, especially as libraries everywhere are expanding their digital audio offerings. Free is better, friends. It just is.

For my money (ironic), audio is the way to go with loooong, involved books like 11/22/63. I am a monogamous reader, so I don't often have more than one book going at a time, and sometimes, I avoid a longer book because I don't want to commit so much of my reading life to it. If it's a classic, I feel it is a worthy investment, something to accomplish, but for current stuff, I hesitate. Though I haven't read much King, I think I can safely say his stuff is an exception. It is so engaging and plot-driven that you don't get bogged down in the length. Would you agree? The audio, however, was a nice addition to the reading experience. The narrator, Craig Wasson, was very good, and though there aren't an excess of characters to juggle, he handled the voicing ably.

I like to know next to nothing about books before diving in, so all I knew about this one was that it was about the JFK assassination. With this title, it's hard not to know at least that much. I have always been especially interested in the JFK story, perhaps because 11/22/63 was my Mama's sixteenth birthday. When something terrible happens, it's always someone's birthday, but it still seems like a remarkable thing to me to have to share your day with something so huge. That said, for the first chunk of the book, I couldn't see how it was going to connect to JFK. It opens in 2011 with a Maine English teacher named Jake Epping, which seems about the furthest thing possible from Dallas in 1963. But we get there. Oh, boy, do we get there.

Is it a spoiler to say there is time travel involved? No. Here's a video from the 11/22/63 website:



The book is good, y'all. It raises interesting questions about the effects of the past on the future and made me think about the ripples we are sending out in the present. And though King's interview with the Paris Review didn't leave me trembling with shockwaves, it was still an interesting companion to this book. Conducted in two sessions (one in 2001 and the second in 2006), the interview captures King's voice (profanity and all) and spirit very well. In describing his earliest reading life, he explains,

I didn't know what popular fiction was, and nobody told me at the time. I read a wide range of books....Whatever came to mind, whatever came to hand, I would read. (466)

This quote is especially interesting because Stephen King's work stands apart from the distinction between "popular" fiction and "literary" fiction. With increased frequency, I'm annoyed by this divide. Why do we need it? Good books are good books, and I put more distance between my current reading life and my former book snob life every day. Speaking of book snobbery, this article by Matt Haig is a good one on the subject. King goes on to handle the subject more directly:

They should all be entertainments, you know. That is, in some ways, the nub of the problem. If a novel is not an entertainment, I don't think it's a successful book. (483)

The interviewer refers to his National Book Award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters acceptance speech, where he talks about building bridges between popular and literary fiction and lists some popular writers who are ignored by the "establishment." Shirley Hazzard won for The Great Fire that year, and in her speech, she misses King's point and dismisses his "reading list." In the interview, King offers this rebuttal:

The keepers of the idea of serious literature have a short list of authors who are going to be allowed inside, and too often that list is drawn from people who know people, who go to certain schools, who come up through certain channels of literature. And that's a very bad idea - it's constraining for the growth of literature. This is a critical time for American letters because it's under attack from so many other media: TV, movies, the Internet, and all the different ways we have of getting nonprint input to feed the imagination. Books, that old way of transmitting stories, are under attack. So when someone like Shirley Hazzard says, I don't need a reading list, the door slams shut on writers like George Pelecanos or Dennis Lehane. And when that happens, when those people are left out in the cold, you are losing a whole area of imagination. (484)

King concludes his NBA speech with these words: "I hope you all find something good to read tonight or tomorrow." Isn't that what we are all doing here? Just finding something good to read?

For the record, 11/22/63 is something good to read.

Eudora Welty, Photographer (TPR #17)

If I had to name my favorite Southern Writer, I would probably end up landing on Eudora Welty. Astonishingly, however, my admiration - even veneration - of this woman does not connect to any story or novel that I admire most. Her work is remarkable - strong, beautiful, intelligent, and well-worthy of the accolades it has received over the years - but it is her voice, her being in the world that I mourned when she passed away in 2001. I wrote this short piece at the time, trying to make sense of my grief:

How do we mourn the passing of someone we’ve never seen?  Wandering the stacks of the local library, I allow my fingers to trail over the bindings of the DIY and self-help books with no success - nothing on the subject of grieving for strangers.  And yet, stranger is not the word to use.  Perhaps there is no word to define the relationship between reader and beloved author.  But when someone with as much presence as Eudora Welty dies, the void left demands definition.

I first read Welty when I was in college, but it has never been exactly or only the fiction that drew me to her.  I don’t recall particularly identifying with any one character in her stories, and I don’t include Welty’s novels in any of my “all-time favorites” lists.  But I love the way she wrote.  And why choose to identify with the fictional character when I could see myself in the real thing, in Ms. Welty herself?  Every time I read her slim memoir, One Writer’s Beginnings, I want to call Ms. Welty and say, “Yes!  Me too!  That’s it exactly!”  I can only imagine that she has touched many others in similar ways.  She was the consummate real person, in all her eccentricities, and for that reality, she was beloved by all who knew her and many who did not.

So, with no instruction provided or further guidance to seek, I forge ahead in my grief.  I return to the library.  I locate the unauthorized biography on Eudora Welty and gingerly pull each of her works of fiction down from the shelves.  I hunt up archived magazine articles and interviews and circle them all around me on the floor, ignoring the stares.  I make myself comfortable there, amid her life’s work, and I once again begin One Writer’s Beginnings, allowing myself to feel her weighty presence in each page, in each precisely chosen word.  

I think I've read all her fiction over the years. I've read one biography and have another on my shelf. But what I had not yet examined was her book of photographs One Time, One Place: Mississippi in the Depression. Welty worked as a WPA publicity agent during the depression. This job required her to travel all over Mississippi, observing and writing up regular happenings like county fairs and judge installation. Her photographs were not officially part of the job, but the job made her see so much, and the results are astounding. They are among the most inspiring things I have ever encountered. She sees her photography as something separate from her writing, just a thing she did after college, but she also sees the connectivity of it, as seen in this passage:

I learned quickly enough when to click the shutter, but what I was becoming aware of more slowly was a story-writer's truth: the thing to wait on, to reach there in time for, is the moment in which people reveal themselves. You have to be ready, in yourself; you have to know the moment when you see it. The human face and the human body are eloquent in themselves, and stubborn and wayward, and a snapshot is a moment's glimpse (as a story may be a long look, a growing contemplation) into what never stops moving, never ceases to express for itself something of our common feeling. Every feeling waits upon its gesture. Then when it does come, how unpredictable it turns out to be. (foreword 7-8)

I am continually astounded by her words. And I only wish I could have met her during her life. As a founding member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, she has been many times in my hometown, but I never had the chance to encounter her there. Maybe one day, I'll make it to her hometown and try to "meet" her there. And maybe you can meet her - and the impressive subjects of her photographs - through One Time, One Place or the more expansive collection of her work published in 1989, or perhaps in the Paris Review interview from volume II.

I must say I was thoroughly unimpressed with her interviewer. In fact, it was quite a distraction for me because I was growing angry with her increasingly inane questions. For example, the published interview opens, "You wrote somewhere that we should still tolerate Jane Austen's kind of family novel. Is Austen a kindred spirit?" I do not have the original text of the essay being referred to here, but based on Ms. Welty's response, I'm thinking this question was terribly misguided. Here's the polite, but biting, return:

Tolerate? I should just think so! I love and admire all she does, and profoundly, but I don't read her or anyone else for "kindredness." 

And then a few questions later, when she asks, "Do you ever return to Virginia Woolf"? I actually wrote in the margin: "Is this interviewer an idiot?" That Ms. Welty does not resort to such name-calling or dripping sarcasm as I likely would have is a testimony to her grace. But enough complaining. This post has already gone on too long. Here's one passage from the interview that I am so glad to have. Welty is responding to a question about the oral tradition in the south:

I think it accounts for the pleasure people take in a story told. It's a treasure I helped myself to. I took it for my ways and means, and that's proper and justified: Our people talk that way. They learn and teach and think and enjoy that way. (124)

Yes, Ms. Welty! That's it exactly.

  

TPR Challenge #16 - All of Us by Raymond Carver

Raymond Carver's collected poems, All of Us, was not actually published by Raymond Carver.  His widow, poet Tess Gallagher, is responsible for the collection that is comprised of Carver's previously published collections: Fires, Where Water Comes Together With Other Water, Ultramarine, and A New Path to the Waterfall.  There are also several poems culled from previous posthumous collections of his unpublished writings, so it represents all of Carver's poetic output before his death in 1988.

Though I read and loved Carver's famous collection of short stories What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, I had never read any of his poetry.  I'm not tackling the whole collection; rather I'm just dipping into it periodically and many times coming up empty.  I don't mean the poems are empty; they just don't speak to me.  But the beauty of this collection - or really any collection - is that when I dip in and find one that sings to me, it reminds me of the power of just one poem.  Every celebrated writer has written mediocre poems, average stories, decent novels, and those same poems and stories might read as gigantic successes to another reader.  We bring so much of ourselves to our reading, and I believe this relationship between text and reader is a strength and not a weakness of the form.

My favorite of those great ones is called "The House behind This One," and it is a haunting description of a woman arriving at the house of a dying man.  I love the first lines of it:

The afternoon was already dark and unnatural.
When this old woman appeared in the field,
in the rain, carrying a bridle.

There's no real reason this poem means something more to me than the others, no obvious emotional attachments or connecting points.  I just like the way he built the image and used the words.

Perhaps one of his most famous poems is the one inscribed on his tombstone called "Late Fragment":

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

A beautiful benediction, don't you think?

Carver is represented in volume three of The Paris Review Interviews, so I can return to my ongoing project to read through these amazing interviews.  Conducted in 1983, the publication year of Carver's first collection of poetry, the interview starts with some of Carver's background and early motivations to write before moving on to such standard fare as the drinking, the writing process, the literary influences.  My favorite parts were sort of snuck in on other questions, like this about his father reading Zane Grey westerns:

It seemed a very private act in a house and family that were not given to privacy. I realized that he had this private side to him, something I didn't understand or know anything about, but something that found expression through this occasional reading. (218)

Though we bloggers make a very public conversation out of our private acts of reading, they still feel private to me, and I like this acknowledgment of that privacy.  I also really like this idea of audience:

Any writer worth his salt writes as well and as truly as he can and hopes for as large and perceptive a readership as possible.  So you write as well as you can and hope for good readers. (233)

But perhaps the most important thing I took from this interview was his high recommendation for John Gardner's book On Becoming a Novelist.  He also talks about On Moral Fiction, and considering I like Grendel so very much, I think I will have to look into both. 

TPR Challenge #15 - Toni Morrison

Apparently, I'm taking August off, and I'm okay with that.  However, between slogging through Les Miserables, I squeezed in my due-today library copy of Toni Morrison's latest: Home.

Full disclosure: I am an unabashed foamingmouth fan of Morrison's work.  Song of Solomon ranks as one of my favorite books ever.  I've only read about half her titles, but I've not yet been disappointed.  She is magical.  This hilarious tweet from Jeff at The Reading Ape and BookRiot pretty much sums it up: I went to check out Apple's "Genius Bar" and, alas, it did not consist of Toni Morrison drinking alone.

Unfortunately, this book had a similar level of alas.  There were flashes of Morrison-Brilliance, and they were enough to sustain my reading, but the book felt unfinished, and I was sad at how much was left unsaid.  More on that in a moment.  What's it about?  Frank Money is a recently-returned Veteran of the Korean War.  He is understandably still dealing with the trauma of the war and his jarring return to a still-segregated and still-cruel America.  When he learns his sister is in some sort of desperate trouble, he returns to Georgia to rescue her.  More on that in a moment.

The jacket copy says "he discovers a profound courage he had thought he could never possess again."  I'm not exactly sure what profound courage this statement refers to unless it is the courage it took for him to quietly but insistently tell a difficult truth in his story.  Though I liked the spare writing of that section, it contributed to a less-than-climactic feeling, less profound courage than quiet strength.  The jacket copy also says it is a story of "an apparently defeated man finding his manhood - and his home."  As usual, I take issue with the jacket copy (and in this case, with the author's framing decision) because this book did not strike me as being about Frank Money more than about the women in his life.  His sister, Cee, and his girlfriend, Lily, and even his step-grandmother, Lenore, are characters that drive the narrative for me, especially in regard to that concept of home.  Certainly, I was way less impressed with Frank's found manhood than with some of the things the women of this book endured and accomplished.

But what about the stuff left unsaid and the rescue, you ask?  By placing Frank at the center of the narrative, these amazingly nuanced women are pushed to the periphery, their stories merely sketched in where they should have been more developed.  Both Lily and Cee are pushed to a determined independence from any man, but both exist in the story solely because of their attachment to Frank.  That structural decision makes them dependent and seems to run counter to what their characters are trying to accomplish.  Also, when Frank arrives triumphantly to rescue Cee from Dr. Scott, she is not even conscious.  He sweeps in and carries her out, but the real rescue occurs at the hands of Miss Ethal Fordham and the other women of Lotus, GA who provide her with all kinds of healing.  Yes, Frank brought her to them, but they did all the saving.  Finally, the critical damage done to Cee is left completely unexplored.  We are given enough hints to know what happened, but we are not allowed access to Cee's experience during that time.  It is a vast, blank space in the narrative.

Morrison's interview in The Paris Review Interviews, Volume II was conducted back in 1993.  In it, she reveals something about this blank space in a narrative:

The difficulty for me in writing - among the difficulties - is to write language that can work quietly on a page for a reader who doesn't hear anything.  Now for that, one has to work very carefully with what is in between the words.  What is not said.  Which is measure, which is rhythm, and so on.  So, it is what you don't write that frequently gives what you do write its power. (361)

A beautiful example of the intentional crafting of her work.  The whole interview is gorgeous and illuminating, so even though this novel isn't my favorite, I'm still convinced she is among the best we will ever know.  Here are my favorite bits from the interview:

Regarding her writing space:

I end up with this space [she indicates a small square spot on her desk] everywhere I am, and I can't beat my way out of it.  I am reminded of that tiny desk that Emily Dickinson wrote on and I chuckle when I think, Sweet thing, there she was.  But that is all any of us have: just this small space... (359)

On Faulkner's ability to write about race without writing about race:

 Do you know how hard it is to withhold that kind of information but hinting, pointing all of the time?  And then to reveal it in order to say that it is not the point anyway?  It is technically just astonishing. (372)

On being asked by Bill Moyers when she would write about white people:

 I just said, Well maybe one day . . . but I couldn't say to him, you know, you can only ask that question from the center.  The center of the world!  I mean he's a white male.  He's asking a marginal person when are you going to get to the center, when are you going to write about white people.  I can't say, Bill, why are you asking me that question?  Or, As long as that question seems reasonable is as long as I won't, can't.  The point is that he is patronizing; he's saying, You write well enough; you could come on into the center if you wanted to.  You don't have to stay out there on the margins.  And I'm saying, Yeah, well, I'm gonna stay out here on the margin, and let the center look for me. (389)

Hell, yeah, Ms. Morrison.  Hell, yeah.

*this post is part of my ongoing, neverending, long-neglected TPR Challenge.  See here for more information.  Also, I misnumbered the last couple, so this post gets the number right even though it appears I have skipped #14.

TPR Challenge #13 - Orhan Pamuk's Snow

Unbelievable.  For approximately a year, I've been singing the praises of this Paris Review interviews project (dubbed the TPR Challenge) - it has introduced me to new authors (hello, Paul Auster!) and reunited me with old favorites (God bless you, Elizabeth Bishop) and generally advanced my reading in a beautiful way.

Then, along came Orhan Pamuk and Snow. Snow was July's pick for The Wolves online reading group.  See This Book and I Could Be Friends and Evening All Afternoon for some additional thoughts.  My first post on the book acknowledged my slow progress and general lack of enthusiasm but held out some morsel of hope for the end.  Then, when the end failed to add much to the experience, I clung to the shred of hope that the TPR interview would enlighten me and make me see the book and its author through new eyes.  Unfortunately, it did not.  The interview was actually more boring than the book.  The book at least had the new external information to process - the religious and political conflicts, the uncertainty and drama of the "coup", the tenuous relationship with reality that both Ka and the narrator, Orhan, maintain.  The interview was unabashed navel-gazing on the part of the author and left a decidedly sour taste in my mouth. 

Because I am almost always unable to set aside these underwhelming books, I look for the few tidbits that I can say make the experience worth having, and there are a few.  I was surprised to find this astute statement almost three hundred pages in:

"Mankind's greatest error," continued the young Kurd, "the biggest deception of the past thousand years is this: to confound poverty with stupidity. ... People might feel sorry for a man who's fallen on hard times, but when an entire nation is poor, the rest of the world assumes that all its people must be brainless, lazy, dirty, clumsy fools." (275-276)

What a gorgeous assessment and indictment of so many of our attitudes.  Substitute "an entire nation" with any of the minority racial or ethnic groups in America, and it works just as well as a domestic observation.

The interview offered this bit about the discipline of writing:

When I'm traveling, and not alone at my desk, after a while I get depressed.  I'm happy when I'm alone in a room and inventing.  More than a commitment to the art or to the craft, which I am devoted to, it is a commitment to being alone in a room.  ... I need solitary hours at a desk with good paper and a fountain pen like some people need a pill for their health.  I am committed to these rituals. (395-396)

Disturbingly, the interview also revealed that Pamuk thought Snow was funny.

When people say it's bleak, I ask them Isn't it funny?  I think there is a lot of humor in it.  At least that was my intention. (395)

I don't recall the humor, Pamuk.  Sorry 'bout that.  Reader error, I'm sure.  And I'm sure this relative failure of a TPR read is only because it was unlucky #13.  Let's hope 14 puts us back on track.

TPR Challenge #12 - Ernest Hemingway

Though he is best-known for novels such as A Farewell to Arms and The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway made his career through the early short stories he composed mostly while living abroad.  Paris was especially important to him during the 20s when he was among that most famed of expatriate crews comprising none other than Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Henry Miller, Anais Nin, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.  Nice company to keep, don't you think?

Hemingway went on to explore Spain, Cuba, and of course, Key West before his early demise in 1961.  But it is Paris that is celebrated in A Moveable Feast; it is Paris that launched his career; and it is Paris that causes him to be an especially appropriate figure for this year's Paris in July celebration.  See, he is also one of the first interviews collected in the Paris Review interviews set that is driving my TPR Challenge, a particular focus of this July.  Unfortunately, this amazing story collection is taking me so long to read that I may get to nothing else and miss Paris in July altogether if I don't get something going, so I read the interview and am posting today even though I still have about 1/3 of the collection still to read.  Forgive me?

The stories in this collection, most of which are new to me, span from 1921 to 1938 (the time of this collection's first publication), and they are markedly Hemingway.  Being familiar but not studiously intimate with his work, I can identify characters, themes, and voice that ring true in the novels.  There are only a few stories that strike me as decidedly immature ("Up From Michigan" was the first and is one of my least favorites); most seem remarkably consistent to the Hemingway that we know and appreciate.  Like his sentences, his stories are usually quite short.  And appropriate to his respect for the painter, they often appear little more than sketches, rough drawings or outlines to capture a moment or an exchange.  I was surprised to find how much I like that snapshot technique.  It is impressive in how complete each small image is, and it seems, perhaps irrationally, to make the collection more cohesive rather than more fragmented.  Each tiny shard contributes something unique and vital to the whole collection, and unlike my reading of most story collections, I want to read these quickly in succession rather than feeling I must provide a proper break between each story.

Not surprising, though, was how entertaining and informative the interview was.  Conducted by George Plimpton in 1958, the interview reveals his discipline (he stood while writing, often for 5-6 hours a day), his oddly private nature, and his great mind.  I took several tidbits away from the interview:

On avoiding too much scrutiny of one's writing -

though there is one part of writing that is solid and you do it no harm by talking about it, the other is fragile, and if you talk about it, the structure cracks and you have nothing (37).

On reading -

I'm always reading books - as many as there are.  I ration myself on them so that I'll always be in supply (47).

On politics in writing -

All you can be sure about in a political-minded writer is that if his work should last you will have to skip the politics when you read it (59).

And on the function of creative writing -

From things that have happened and from things that exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality.  That is why you write and for no other reason that you know of.  But what about all the reasons that no one knows? (61)

 To conclude, I offer you this passage from "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" on Paris:

There never was another part of Paris that he loved like that, the sprawling trees, the old white plastered houses painted brown below, the long green of the autobus in that round square, the purple flower dye upon the paving, the sudden drop down the hill of the rue Cardinal Lemoine to the Rives, and the other way the narrow crowded world of the rue Mouffetard.  The street that ran up toward the Pantheon and the other that he always took with the bicycle, the only asphalted street in all that quarter, smooth under the tires, with the high narrow houses and the cheap tall hotel where Paul Verlaine had died.  There were only two rooms in the apartments where they lived and he had a room on the top floor of that hotel that cost him sixty francs a month where he did his writing, and from it he could see the roofs and chimney pots and all the hills of Paris. (70)

I love how uncharacteristically long (but appropriate to the character and context of the story) these sentences are.  And of course, I love the lived intimacy with which these details are recorded and transmitted.  This is the way I want to experience Paris one day.  For now, I will content myself with Hemingway.

TPR Challenge #12 - T. S. Eliot

“The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.”  

This quote, taken from Eliot's essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent," reflects so much of what Eliot grappled with in his life and his writing, especially Four Quartets (see here for my thoughts on this work).  The ideas of influences, novelty, and individual poetic voice play well with what later became a focus on the intersection of the temporal with the eternal.  The Paris Review interview was conducted by poet Donald Hall in 1959, a mere six years prior to Eliot's death.  By this time, Eliot had completed the bulk of his life's work and was aware of his age and cautious about his potential irrelevance.  The interview was not among my favorites so far, but it did provide a few interesting points, including Hall's opening statement: "Perhaps I can begin at the beginning."  Hall is, of course, referring to Eliot's youth in St. Louis, but it seems to me such a loaded statement to put to a man who once wrote:

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning. ("Little Gidding" 214-215)

Actually, throughout the interview, I got the impression that Hall was not much of an interviewer.  He alternately asks loaded questions (essentially answering them himself, which Eliot calls him on at one point) and facile questions such as "How does the writing of a play differ from the writing of poems?" or "I wonder if you could give advice to a young poet about what disciplines or attitudes he might cultivate to improve his art."   Both are legitimate concepts, but Hall didn't ask the questions in such a way as to garner a strong response.

A few of Eliot's comments struck me as thought-provoking or inspiring: "I don't think that one can be a bilingual poet. . . . I think one language must be the one you express yourself in, in poetry, and you've got to give up the other for that purpose" (72). Regular Rumination's post today was from poet Rhina P. Espaillat, a bilingual poet who uses both languages in the poem Lu posted.  Despite this lovely example, I think I tend to agree with Eliot, but I'm not sure.  Your thoughts?

I also loved Eliot's reflections on his early work:

 In The Waste Land, I wasn't even bothering whether I understood what I was saying. (79)

and in response to whether the Four Quartets was his best work:

Yes, and I'd like to feel that they get better as they go on.  The second is better than the first, the third is better than the second, and the fourth is the best of all.  At any rate, that's the way I flatter myself. (79)

and finally, on considering his work part of the tradition of American literature:

Yes, but I couldn't put it any more definitely than that, you see.  It wouldn't be what it is, and I imagine it wouldn't be so good; putting it as modestly as I can, it wouldn't be what it is if I'd been born in England, and it wouldn't be what it is if I'd stayed in America.  It's a combination of things.  But in its sources, in its emotional springs, it comes from America. (85)

Like the Munro interview, which I didn't prefer because it came later in a practiced career, tinged somehow by the reality of celebrity, this interview seems guarded.  There are undeniably funny moments and some moments of honest reflection, but overall, it felt like a Thing To Do as a famous poet rather than a legitimate and intimate conversation.

The Lost Generation Classics Circuit: T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets

I am excited to be participating in my first Classics Circuit Tour, this one focusing on the Lost Generation of American Literature.  Go here to see the full schedule of posts and to get your fill of Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Cummings, and Stein (among others). 

I had considered two works for this tour: Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot and True at First Light by Ernest Hemingway.  I decided on the Eliot, mostly in the interest of time, but I plan to get to the Hemingway soon as part of my ongoing TPR Challenge.  The Eliot is also part of that Challenge, so I will post a companion piece tomorrow to tie in the TPR bits.  But today, I will focus only on the gorgeous, mellifluous, discordant, confounding, and inspiring Four Quartets.

Eliot is, of course, most widely known for his long poem "The Waste Land," and on my list of Things I Must Do Soon is to reread it and try to wrap my head around it more than I did in college.  My faithful Norton Anthology (well, one of them) tells me that Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, but his work is collected in the English Literature volume as well as the American.  He lived most of his life in England, and his writing was born of this life and place, but he is still an American, born of "New England stock" (a phrase found in my English Norton but not in the American). My Norton (the American this time) also informs me that the Greek epigraphs at the opening of the piece are from Heraclitus, possibly translated:

But although the Word is common to all, the majority of people live as though they had each an understanding peculiarly his own.

and

The way up and the way down are one and the same.

You may be aware that Four Quartets was composed after Eliot's conversion to Christianity, and these poems appear to be Eliot working with his new (or newly-considered) understanding of the intersection between the temporal world and the eternal.  In fact, the phrase "the intersection of the timeless moment" occurs in varying fashions in several spots throughout the series.  Death, life, past, future, time, eternity, memory, movement, degeneration, and renewal are thematic territory Eliot traverses here, and there are so many transcendent moments that I can't come close to recounting them all.  Here's one, the reason I first wanted to read this work, actually:

Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
only through time time is conquered. ("Burnt Norton" 82-89)

This bit comes at the close of the second section in the first poem, and it represents a constant occupation of the series, this idea of time and timelessness both negating and requiring each other.  I have to admit to liking "Burnt Norton" the best still, but all four (also "East Coker," The Dry Salvages," and "Little Gidding") are stunning examples of word play and image craft.  For example, the first line of "East Coker" is "In my beginning is my end."  The last words of that section?  "In my beginning."  Such wit somehow married beautifully with a weighty consideration of supernatural things.  Or the first lines of "The Dry Salvages": "I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river / Is a strong brown god -- sullen, untamed and intractable."  I love the strong, declarative statement and the humanizing/deification of the river. 

Each of the poems follows a similar pattern, each contains five sections, and each moves through different elements of faith and searching and identity.  The five sections thing threw me off at first because I assumed the "Quartets" title meant there would be four sections in each of the four poems.  Instead, I found that the use of quartet refers to the bringing together of multiple voices or ideas (as in the four instruments of a string quartet) to create a unified whole.  The poetic sections would resemble, then, the movements of a musical composition and should not be considered the instrumentation.  Thus, we should presume that Eliot had a specific four elements in mind to be brought together in these poems.  My list above reflects a good many more than four, so obviously, the application of this idea is not overt.  It did occur to me that Eliot's use of or reflection upon the four seasons of the year might contribute to this designation, but I am merely speculating at this point.  I don't feel comfortable insisting upon a rigid interpretation of the four elements that make up the quartets.

What I do feel comfortable with, however, is continuing to appreciate these poems.  I am so glad the Classics Circuit Tour brought this great work to the forefront of my attention, and I will look forward to hearing these words resonate with me for a long time.  I leave you with a chunk from the last section of the last poem, "Little Gidding":

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.  And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph. (lines 214-225)

Would that I could ever reach such a "complete consort" as that described and demonstrated in Four Quartets.

A Dripping Jawful of Marl (TPR #11 redux)

Elizabeth Bishop.  I've been reading Elizabeth Bishop since early December.  Perhaps I will keep reading Elizabeth Bishop until late November.  But today, finally, today, I felt I could adequately begin again this post on the amazing and beautiful words of Elizabeth Bishop.

I had worried, you see.  I had not been enjoying my time with her even as I knew I loved her writing.  What was happening?  So, I stopped reading and decided not to write about her for a bit.  I felt I owed her at least that.  And whatever it is that time does, it has once again done it with me.  I sat this morning with Bishop's The Complete Poems and fell in love all over again.  See, Bishop's prose was at times interesting, but more often tiresome, and I couldn't wrap my mind around that lack.  I used to teach "The Farmer's Children," and I love it still, but many of her prose pieces were utterly forgettable to me.  Once I thumbed back through The Collected Prose, though, I was reminded of how thought-provoking and delicately fragmented "In the Village" is.  According to the introduction by publisher Robert Giroux, Bishop did not like "The Farmer's Children," probably for its maudlin quality, and "In the Village" is considered by some to be her "best" prose effort.  Her story is almost autobiographical as it recounts the experience of a child dealing with a mother's mental illness, the very thing Bishop experienced until age five when her mother was permanently institutionalized.  This story has such a poetic sensibility; consider the following passages:

The dressmaker was crawling around and around on her knees eating pins as Nebuchadnezzar had crawled eating grass.  The wallpaper glinted and the elm trees outside hung heavy and green, and the straw matting smelled like the ghost of hay. (252)

In the blacksmith's shop things hang up in the shadows and shadows hang up in the things, and there are black and glistening piles of dust in each corner.  A tub of night-black water stands by the forge.  The horseshoes sail through the dark like bloody little moons and follow each other like bloody little moons to drown in the black water, hissing, protesting. (253)

There is the observant power of the poet in those descriptions and much to admire and savor.  So, I'm glad to have encountered Bishop's collected prose, though I am still convinced it was not her prime medium.

I also listened to a podcast interview with Helen Vendler regarding the friendship and correspondence between Bishop and Robert Lowell.  Vendler provided a lovely complement to the letters between the two (found in their entirety in Words in Air) that I sampled in One Art (her selected letters published by Giroux).  I did not read this collection in full (it is over 600 pages in length), but enjoyed dipping into it for little flavors at different times.  I am thinking I'd like to have Words in Air, so I can have more leisure to continue this practice.  Like Bishop, I love letters.  I love to reread old letters (those I've received and those I've written), and I love what letters tell us about an author, balancing the intimacy of the journal with the veiled openness of publication.  Here, I offer only one of many examples of the treasures to be found in these correspondences:

And one thing more - what on earth do you mean when you say my perceptions are "almost impossible for a woman's"?  "Now what the hell," as you said to me, "you know that's meaningless."  And if you really do mean anything by it, I imagine it would make me very angry.  Is there some glandular reason which prevents a woman from having good perceptions, or what? (12)

No.  Apparently, you need one more:

What I meant about Shakespeare: it was he who gave that beautiful, slightly sad lilt to the sonnet form, the impressiveness of first lines and the importance and finality of last lines - an atmosphere easy to crawl into without really having the right to be there, and a pillow for any number of weary ideas. (13)

But enough of that business. The poems are what we came here for.  It is what she came here for.  The collection I read spans 30 years, but it stops at 1969.  Though she died in 1979, she was productive in those final years, so the true "complete" poems is the one that is subtitled 1927-1979.  And because of this lack, my collection doesn't have one of the finest poems of its kind: "One Art."  You can read it here, and you should.  It is a villanelle, and though I am not typically a fan of the strict forms, I find this poem to be astonishingly good in the way it uses that rigid form to say something so transparent, so seeking, so provocative.  It is so fine.

In the collection I hold, there are many such instances of finery.  From "The Map": 

These peninsulas take the water between thumb and finger                                                                       like women feeling for the smoothness of yard-goods.

Or from "A Cold Spring": 

and the blurred redbud stood
beside it, motionless, but almost more
like movement than any placeable color.

And the poem from which I take my post's title: "The Bight"

Some of the little white boats are still piled up
against each other, or lie on their sides, stove in,
and not yet salvaged, if they ever will be, from the last bad storm,
like torn-open, unanswered letters.
The bight is littered with old correspondences.
Click. Click. Goes the dredge,
and brings up a dripping jawful of marl.

Bishop was a perfectionist.  She would work a poem until she felt certain it was what it needed to be, and as a result, she was not a highly prolific writer.  But her patience provided some lasting evidence of the necessity of observation, the sadness of lyric, and the power of the unexpected word.  I'm glad I finally returned to her work and returned to my senses.

TPR Challenge #11 (ish) - Elizabeth Bishop

If you've been paying attention, you'll know I've been in a reading bog.  Really, I've been in a work bog that has curtailed my reading time drastically, but I've also been rather stuck in what reading I have been doing.  I have mentioned before that I am a one-book woman.  I know that behavior is rather anomalous in this book-blogging world, but it is true for me.  I am also STILL rather reluctant to leave a book unfinished.  I've tried (and improved somewhat), but I just can't abandon with ease.  So, I've been taking my measly reading scraps and trying to sustain myself on things that are not totally enjoyable.  Little surprise that I feel a little anemic and wasted.

The something that started the bog-gedness is TPR Challenge #11 - Elizabeth Bishop.  In December and January, I read The Complete Prose, some of The Complete Poems, and the TPR interview (volume 2), but I still didn't feel ready to write anything thoughtful about it.  So, I have actually put this project on hold for awhile and have been pursuing supposedly more interesting reading matter.  I plan to return to Bishop (and soon!), but I'm not making any promises.  In the meantime, I took down The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz with a certainty of purpose about me: I was going to make sure I enjoyed the next book I read.  I had been gushed at over this book by various trusted souls (NOT the girl down the street who thinks I would just LOVE Shopaholic and Baby if you know what I mean), and I selected it knowing it was a ringer.

And I don't like it.

Is there something wrong with me?  This feels like when you're young and you know you're supposed to like this guy, he's just perfect for you, and all signs point to happily-ever-after until you realize you don't actually have a thing for him at all.  It really makes you wonder if something is wrong.  And I'm wondering.  I'm reassured somewhat by the passion I still experience reading the short stories I teach and the excitement I feel over my kids getting to experience Vonnegut's Player Piano.  But I still can't help but wonder why I'm not enjoying any of the books I read.  Is it becoming too much of a job?  I don't feel that blogging has changed the way I read at all, but could it be affecting my enjoyment? 

The thing about The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is that I don't think all signs pointed to happily-ever-after for me if I'd known more about it in advance.  So maybe it was just bad luck.  Maybe if I'd encountered it in an otherwise fruitful reading time, I wouldn't have seen it as some portent of doom.  Maybe if I'd known how much of it was Spanish or fragmented or otherwise not careful language, I would have recognized it as not a great fit for me.  But I didn't, so I'm left wondering.

I'm not finished yet, though, so I'm holding out judgment and a full post until that time.  Maybe it will end up meaning something more to me in the end.  Or maybe I'll just have to try even harder to find the next book that will shake me out of my reading doldrums.  I know it's out there.  I just have to find it.

What I Did Over Christmas Vacation

Well, it is later . . . just not later the same day.  I survived the winter weather outing (and even plan to go back outside today even though it is currently 21 degrees.  I'm telling you, friends: I did not sign up for this. 

But back to the theme.  The required summary of events occurring in my absence.  The stuff that has kept me from this space.  And the reading I've accomplished along the way.  I will confess before beginning that I have been in an odd reading and blogging slump.  More to follow.

1.  Immediately after Christmas, I finished the book for young people Beyond the Station Lies the Sea by German author, Jutta Richter.  Shown here is the German cover from her website.  I read the translation by Anna Brailovsky published by Milkweed.  I was drawn to this book because of the lovely cover art as well as the blurbs on the back about her recently acclaimed The Cat, which I have not read.  Upon further examination, I have found that all her books are beautiful.  Click here to go to her website list of publications.  Gorgeous.  The book, which follows Cosmos and Niner on a fantastical journey with wonderful characterization, was good.  I would easily recommend it to an older reader (some of the themes are a bit mature) who is looking for a thoughtful but relatively quick read.  I'm perhaps most interested in the relative unknown of this highly renowned European author.  My friend, a media specialist with TONS of knowledge on kid lit AND lives and works currently in Europe had not even heard of her.  I am not pointing the finger at my friend; rather, I'm just commenting on how difficult it is to "cross the pond," especially in the smaller and rather glutted children's literature field.  But I do my part here to say: check out this author.  She seems to be a unique and intelligent writer doing good things in YA lit.

2.  I've also been chipping away at Elizabeth Bishop as part of my TPR Challenge.  And I have to admit something almost sacrilegious:  I am not enjoying it.  How could this be?  I love Elizabeth Bishop!  And to be fair, I am still really enjoying the poems when I take the minutes to read a few.  But I am not the type to just sit and read poem after poem after poem at one sitting.  So to fill in the gaps, I've also been reading her collected prose.  Since I love "The Farmer's Children," (which Bishop did not like, apparently), I was looking forward to really enjoying this other side of her writing; however, I haven't been engaged.  Her "The U.S.A. School of Writing" is rather hilarious, but none of the others in this first section of memoir pieces have done much for me.  I'm looking forward to getting into the stories that make up the second section.  I also read the TPR interview and was not impressed.  It doesn't surprise me that she later worried about sounding flighty or unthinking.  It just wasn't a very forceful interview.  Perhaps I will revisit it when I finish the prose collection and do a proper write-up.


3.  As part of a big work project, I had to do a significant literature review on best practices in the teaching of critical thinking last week.  So, I have been smothering in journal articles and education texts, and I've been loving it.  It has been so long since I've done thoughtful research and writing.  That is the biggest reason for my absence, really:  I've been spending my words in other spaces.  And it has been good.

4.  While perusing the stacks as part of the aforementioned research, I came across a book that just called my name: The Life of the Mind: On the Joys and Travails of Thinking by James V. Schall.  I've been reading it as bedtime reading (ha!), and though it is not as well-written as I want it to be (Schall does not maintain a consistent enough focus or thread of thinking for my liking), it has provided some interesting food for thought.  In particular, I love his explanation of the medieval curriculum being divided into two sections: the trivium and the quadrivium.  The trivium refers to three roads (of thinking) converging in a person, and it is made up of the teaching of grammar, rhetoric, and logic.  As this is my particular field of teaching and learning, I loved seeing the historical connections of these three elements.  The quadrivium (four roads) is comprised of arithmetic (number in itself), geometry (number in space), music (number in time), and astronomy (number in space and time).  Again, as a musician who has always viewed the study of music theory as a mathematical practice, I loved the connection and explanation of these discrete units. 

And that's it.  I'll try to gain greater focus soon.  And to get back in blogging shape.  But I ain't making any promises.  Pinky or otherwise.

TPR Challenge #10 - Paul Auster

In Sunset Park, publisher Morris Heller makes the following remark:

Writers should never talk to journalists.  The interview is a debased literary form that serves no purpose except to simplify that which should never be simplified. (271)

Since we know authors will often put themselves or their opinions into their books, (just moments before, Heller said "in spite of the idiot culture that surrounds them, books still count, and the work they are doing is important work, essential work.")  I wonder if this quote about interviews has any connection to Auster himself and if so, how he felt about his interview with The Paris Review.  Was it given begrudgingly?

In the interview, Auster is asked about a story in his The Red Notebook collection where he recounts the experience of his 14-year-old self walking in the woods with friends when one of the friends is suddenly and fatally struck by lightening.  He says it was the first time he encountered "the bewildering instability of things" (319), and I believe this concept applies beautifully to his Sunset Park.  Though it is ostensibly a book about people more than events, I was continually on edge for those people; I could feel their tenuous connection to this world, as if they would, at any moment, simply drift away or contrastingly, be violently cut away. It was that bewildering instability that kept me so engaged.

The plot focuses on Miles Heller, son of the aforementioned Morris.  He "disappeared" after his third year of college and has been wandering rather aimlessly in the 7 years since.  The remaining cast of characters (each with startling, discrete stories) emerge as they are pulled into Miles' orbit; they become satellites, revolving in their own way with him as their core.  The story begins in Florida, where Miles is working as a "trash-out" guy in foreclosed homes.  It migrates to New York when Miles is forced to leave Florida and decides to join his friend Bing (and housemates Alice and Ellen) squatting in a foreclosed house in the Sunset Park neighborhood.  The chapters alternate characters, and each person offers something unique to the story, but there is not one element, not one character (not even Miles) who I got attached to.  Instead, I was drawn in by the story itself and by the storytelling. 

Undoubtedly, Auster is a gifted writer.  See this bit about the Florida sun if you do not believe:

It is a Machiavellian sun in his opinion, a hypocritical sun, and the light it generates does not illuminate things but obscures them - blinding you with its constant, overbright effulgences, pounding on you with its blasts of vaporous humidity, destabilizing you with its miragelike reflections and shimmering with waves of nothingness. (7)

While in Florida, Miles falls deeply in love with Pilar, a young woman not yet 18.  The book goes to great pains to make sure we do not think anything wrong with this union; it shows Miles' respect for her, his protection of her, and insists upon the Truth of their Love.  Despite its best efforts, however, I did take issue with this element of the story. Though I believe that Miles believes in his love for her, I don't have to approve of the way the relationship functions.  I don't like the paternalistic protection he extends over her; Miles acknowledges it as somehow inappropriate yet accepts it as the right thing to do, as though we too should accept it.  But I do not.  A union based on such a unbalance of power is certain to struggle if not actually implode at some point.  The fact that Miles has issues with violence (never towards the girl) also causes me to pause.  But perhaps most interestingly is that while many of the other satellites in Miles' atmosphere get a chapter, Pilar does not.  She has no voice, no story, other than that which directly affects Miles.  She is wholly admired by all who encounter her, but she does not have a presence that makes her real.  She exists in the shadows, and I disagree with the message that sends readers about Miles, about marriage, and about people really. 

After reading the interview, I remained intrigued with Auster's body of work, so I picked up his The Invention of Solitude from the library.  It is a thin book from an earlier time in his career (after the bulk of the poetry and translation work, before the novels) that functions officially as a memoir but reads like a novel.  Auster (in the interview) calls it the "foundation of all my work."  The writing is perhaps even more powerful here than in Sunset Park.  Here's the opening paragraph:

One day there is life.  A man, for example, in the best of health, not even old, with no history of illness.  Everything is as it was, as it will always be.  He goes from one day to the next, minding his own business, dreaming only of the life that lies before him.  And then, suddenly, it happens there is death.  A man lets out a little sigh, he slumps down in his chair, and it is death.  The suddennness of it leaves no room for thought, gives the mind no chance to seek out a word that might comfort it.  We are left with nothing but death, the irreducible fact of our own mortality.  Death after a long illness we can accept with resignation.  Even accidental death we can ascribe to fate.  But for a man to die of no apparent cause, for a man to die simply because he is a man, brings us so close to the invisible boundary between life and death that we no longer know which side we are on.  Life becomes death, and it is as if this death has owned this life all along.  Death without warning.  Which is to say: life stops.  And it can stop at any moment. (5)

I have read hardly more than the first few pages, but I am taken by his candor and the fresh way he writes of a difficult time (immediately after the death of his father) and an impossible subject.  I am impressed.

The interviewer asked Auster how often the autobiographical occurs in his novels, and I found his response curious.  He says basically that he does include elements from his life, but "far less than you might think."  Then, they go on for several back-and-forths bringing to light some of those elements.  More interesting to me though is how much of the interview material showed up in Sunset Park.  He talks about being a baseball player and a huge fan of the game; Miles is the same.  He talks about aging and the difficulties of the effect of "the accumulation of losses" upon a person; Morris makes a very similar comment regarding his wife, Willa.  He questions the way we represent ourselves in media and society; Bing makes some similar observations.  I bring up these correlations not to make a liar out of Auster but to point out how writers can never know when a piece of their future work is going to start germinating in their minds.  This interview occurred in 2003, 7 years prior to the publication of Sunset Park.  But there are the seeds of those story elements right there in the interview, exposed for all to see.  Basically, I'm saying the human brain is pretty danged awesome. 

I will leave you with two final thoughts:
1.  Auster claims "I rarely speak directly through my characters. They might resemble me at times, or borrow aspects of my life, but I tend to think of them as autonomous beings with their own opinions and their own ways of expressing themselves."  You are free to use this assertion to answer my opening question as you wish.
2.  Did you Lydia Davis fans know she was Auster's first wife?  And that he is now married to Siri Hustvedt?

Double digits on the TPR Challenge total!  I am almost 1/6th of the way there, and I have yet to be disappointed.  Up next, Elizabeth Bishop.

Babylon in a Jar and TPR Challenge Next Steps

I finished Andrew Hudgins' Babylon in a Jar this morning.  It has always interested me that I love to read poetry, and I write poetry almost exclusively, but I do not read it nearly as fervently or frequently as I do fiction.  It is odd to realize that I would credit no poet as being my favorite writer but poet is the only writing title that applies to me at present.  Anyhow, my insertion of poetry into most of my days has been much like the practice of a daily devotion for the Christian: it has made me think about poetry, poetics, and my own poems more each day just as daily reading the Bible draws the believer's ears and eyes to Christ in a more intentional manner.

This collection is divided into two sections, and I must admit that I preferred the first to the second.  The poems had greater presence for me in the first half, a contrast especially noted in the (I presume) intentional mirroring of the two "Ashes" poems.  The first is the 4th poem in section 1, and I loved it.  It has a narrative, conversational flow, an intriguing page presence, and an ending that leads to significant rumination.  Its counterpart in the second section (also the 4th poem in this set) feels too conventional.  It is a story I've heard before, an unpleasant scattering of ashes, and I didn't feel it offered a new angle on the bigger issue.  It stayed too self-absorbed, too interested in the actual events of wind and ash and cough to stand aside itself and cast a thoughtful gaze. 

The second section did offer me two great animal poems, a tremendous feat when you realize how difficult it is to render a domestic pet poetically without descending into schmaltzy sentimentalism.  Hudgins does it well in "Ball," where he captures the pure animal spirit of a retriever simply retrieving.  And in "Hammer and Scourge," he uses a Beowulf-like epic tone to allow us into the mind of a cat.  It is fine indeed.  Others in the section were too reliant on ancient history or imagery that did not speak to me, mostly due to my own ignorance.  Despite a somewhat lackluster conclusion, I must acknowledge that Hudgins' skill as a craftperson, an artisan are considerable, and I'm glad to have encountered this collection at this time in my reading life and my writing career.

In other corners of my reading universe, I have been reading Room by Emma Donoghue, which has intrigued me since its release.  I am loving it.  Love. Ing. It.  Whereas the Grossman had all sorts of GREAT EXPECTATIONS to live up to and then was only sort of painstakingly enjoyable, this one is a screaming success.  I have torn through it, partially because of the easy pace and interesting plot and partially because it was too emotionally difficult to linger over the first section.  I will look forward to posting a full report soon.

I've been thinking lately about where to go next with the TPR Challenge.  Salman Rushdie just released his Luka and the Fire of Life, and though I am anxious to read it, I'm not really interested in buying a new book right now.  I think I will ask Elizabeth Bishop to be my next poetry companion, and I already have Toni Morrison's A Mercy.  I also can get my hands on a library copy of Paul Auster's Sunset Park.  I will undoubtedly scatter in a few non-TPRs as well, so I think I will consider this my year-end plan.  The Bishop will get started when I return to campus and be ongoing for awhile.  I've just placed a hold on the Auster, which is still "in process" at our library, so as soon as that comes available, I'll get started.  Then, I'll finish the year with the Morrison.  Then, in January, I'll make a more detailed list of what is to come.  What do you think?

TPR Challenge #9 - David Grossman

Truly, I didn't expect this TPR Challenge thing to bear so much fruit.  When I undertook to read the 64 interviews with some notable companion piece by the interviewee, I expected to have some disappointments.  They may still come, but so far, the whole experience has been more about surprising discoveries, new perspectives, and a greater sense of engagement with the work and the writer. 

My acute awareness of all things David Grossman sprang up only after seeing him in this collection; this post chronicles my transformation from ingenue to stalker and shows how long ago I began to think about To the End of the Land.  I read that New Yorker piece on him, and I think I fell a little bit in love with him before even reading the book.  And though my reading of it lingered and languished for over a month, I have really enjoyed walking this path with Ora and Avram, even as I was confounded and confused by them. 

In the book, Ora decides to walk the Israel Trail while her son Ofer is serving in the IDF.  His mandatory service was complete, and he was supposed to accompany Ora on this walk as a celebration of his release.  Instead, he chooses to reenlist, and she undertakes this walk in an effort to will his continued safety.  Her thinking is if I am not at home to receive the news of his death, he simply cannot die.  She takes with her Avram, a former lover and her husband Ilan's dearest friend, and as they journey together, we learn about Ora's family and Avram's relationship with it, about motherhood and brotherhood, and about the impossibilities of war.  Like Ora, Grossman was exercising his own brand of paternal protection during the writing of this book.  He wrote the bulk of it while his middle son Uri was completing his mandatory tour of duty in the IDF, and he felt that his act of writing could save his son from harm.  It did not work for Grossman; Uri was killed in battle before the book was completed.  Grossman explains in the New Yorker article that his son's death shattered them and made him fear the book could not be saved.  But Grossman's friend writer Amos Oz responded, "The book will save you."  Though it was unable to protect Uri, perhaps the book was able to protect Grossman from further damage.  Perhaps it allowed him to heal and hurt all at the same time.

As this was a library book, I didn't underline or annotate, but I actually didn't feel the urge to do so too often.  When I did, I recorded some favorite passages in a reading journal, and with a writer like Grossman, you soon appreciate the ability to just bracket out a long passage.  Because they are all long passages.  The first I wrote down is one gorgeous sentence that meanders but makes a fantastic point.  In it, Ora is discussing her Arab "friend" and driver, Sami:

Yet still, when Sami used his Arabesque Hebrew to undermine the long-winded, indignant, greedy pretenses of both Jews and Arabs, when he skewered the leaders of both peoples on a sharp Arab saying that often aroused from the depths of her memory the equivalent idiom in her father's Yiddish, she sometimes experienced a subtle latency, as if in the course of talking with him she suddenly discovered that the end, the end of the whole big story, must be good, and good it would be, if only because the clumsy, round-faced man sitting beside her was able to preserve within his fleshly thickness a flame of delicate irony, and mainly because he still managed to be himself within all this. (55)

Sami is a fascinating character, and I missed him once Ora began her walk.  In fact, one of the few critiques I can muster about this book is how the ending is so completely unresolved.  It's not that I expected a tidy homecoming; I know with certainty there could be none.  However, I hoped we would be able to see something of her return to her former life.  I wanted to know if Sami had managed to remain himself, but though she thinks of him briefly at a few moments during the walk, he is abandoned in the end with no further consideration.  I think the ending had to be so unresolved because Grossman himself was still so swathed in grief that he couldn't or wouldn't imagine for Ora a way out of that place of fear and anger and uncertainty.  He couldn't make her pain as tangible as his.

I was pleased to find two convincing birth stories here.  Ora recounts the birth of both her sons during the hike, and the details, though interesting, are of mostly externalized elements.

I yelled for Ilan, and he came in and just picked me up the way I was, and put me down on a bed in the corridor, and shouted for a nurse.  Together they pushed me, running, to the large delivery room, which by the way was where I had Adam (in the same room!), and three more pushes, he was out! (242)

Besides Ora's yell, all the action is either Ilan's, the nurse's, or passive (three more pushes).  Ora is not an active participant in this birth.  She describes it as though she were observing from a distance, as though Ofer birthed himself.  This tone is consistent with her role in much of the rest of the novel.  She is a mouthpiece, a teller of other peoples' stories, and even when she is involved in the action of the story, her part is muted, partitioned, and circumvented by the voices of the men in her life.  In the moments just before she went into labor, Ilan had been telling her a difficult story and almost raping her at the same time.  We hear Ilan's story as Ora tells it to Avram, but we read it from the omniscient narrator's point of view.  Ora is an actor in the story she is telling.  As Ilan finishes his story, we get the following narration:

His muscles relaxed.  His head plunged onto her neck, heavy as a rock.  His fingers slowly disengaged from her body and lay open in front of her face.  She did not move.  He slid out of her.  A moment went by, and then another.  He breathed heavily.  His face was up against her and he lay in an utterly helpless huddle.  A spasm when through her body. (513)

Ora is telling the story, but this is not Ora's voice.  In fact, for her supposedly incessant chatter at Avram, we rarely hear her speak.  Instead, we get the omniscient narrator's version of events, which means we can trust the facts but won't really know Ora as intimately as we perhaps should.

In the TPR interview, Grossman comments on his Be My Knife, which is apparently an epistolary novel that was originally comprised of letters between a man and a woman.  He recounts how he one day decided to remove all the woman's letters, to allow only the man's words to be read:

It was complicated because she was the engine behind the whole plot.  She creates him in a way, so it deeply upset me to take her out. (416)

Though he acknowledges her centrality to the story, he still chooses to take her out.  With Ora, she is the most present of physical beings, but her thoughts and opinions are often drowned out by all the men around her.

As usual, the interview provides a few thoughtful morsels of writing advice or truths to guide a would-be writer.  I especially liked his anecdote about tucking his son in on the solstice and explaining it would be the longest night of the year.  In the morning, his son ran in bursting with relief that the night had at last ended.

Can you imagine what landscapes he had wandered through all night?  Because he did not take it for granted that the sun would ever rise again.  When I write, I try to bring myself to this point.  I want to be betrayed, to be taken to a dangerous place that jars the basic presumptions I have about myself, my family, my country. (430)

I like his bravery here, his willingness to allow the story to take him somewhere unexpected.  I appreciate this kind of journey as a reader as well.  And though I'm not sure his To the End of the World took me to that point of betrayal, of change-making, I'm equally not sure if I will ever stop asking questions of it and probing my memory of it for answers.