May 30, 2008
Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen
I was the less-than ideal reader for Rivka Galchen’s first novel Atmospheric Disturbances, unequipped with referential tools necessary to place this book within its proper context. I’ve never read Borges, I don’t even know how to say “Borges”. And though I know how to say Pynchon, I’ve never read him either. I also only found out what “postmodernism” was three years ago, and sometimes I’m still not sure (though I take solace in the fact that you’re probably not sure either).
And so the beginning of Atmospheric Disturbances was a bit tough on me, Galchen’s narrator Dr. Leo Liebenstein, a psychiatrist, speaking exactly the way you’d think that the world’s driest psychiatrist might. A driest psychiatrist under psychosis, for that matter. When he becomes convinced his wife Rema has been replaced by a simulacrum, the ensuing narrative has nothing of the lightness I might have expected from such a premise. Instead, for complicated reasons, Leo comes to suspect a meteorologist called Tzvi Gal-Chen is at the heart of this matter, and begins to explore Gal-Chen’s work. Which doesn’t make for easy reading, you might imagine, particularly as it is unclear whether Leo’s own connections make sense, and so we are left to decipher and draw our own conclusions.
The book wasn’t easy, but about 80 pages in, it became clear to me that the effort was worth it. And that Rivka Galchen was actually playing, in innumerable ways and most postmodernly. Leo’s singular perspective an achievement, unflinching and impossible. We learn about him slowly, in bits and pieces from the world around him, as his own point of view reveals not much from “the consensus view of reality”. Leo was probably never considered normal, but in his current state of mind, reality has twisted itself into a nightmare. Which, considering what a nightmare reality can be as straight as arrows, ensures layer upon layer of complexity.
For me the payoff was that each of these layers revealed something essential, important and surprising. Often something beautiful too, and at its very heart, this novel is a love song. From Galchen to her late father, who is the actual Tzvi Gal-Chan and, as Galchen says in her interview with BGB this novel was an excuse for her to write his name down over and over. I love that, and lines she blurs between fact and fiction, in a way that is analogous to Leo’s whole perspective.
Love too, between Leo and Rema. This premise, of her supposed body snatching far more than just a premise, because when Leo looks at the simulacrum, he doesn’t recognize his wife because of this woman’s crows feet, her few extra pounds. That the person we fall in love with gets lost over time, and we have to find ways to fall in love over and over again, even the sanest of us, and how much is that ever possible?
Of course Atmospheric Disturbances works not just in the theoretical, also encompassing elements of mystery and adventure. The plot pushes forward, puzzling in multitudinous ways, but thoroughly engaging and delightful.
May 30, 2008
The Unattestable
“As I consider our modern lives, I feel that, due to the growing uncertainty of the world, people anxiously want to believe themselves on top of things, in control. Especially in the United States just now, at the height of world power, there is an impulse to settle on what is attestable, to pronounce and explain; to exclude mystery, imagination, the intuitive powers of individual existence. What about the inattestable, that informs all that matters to us? What about the accidental nature of our life? The salient events of private life are always tinged with the accidental. If I hadn’t gone to a party that Muriel Spark gave down the road here in the Beaux Arts Hotel, I would never have met Francis Steegmuller.” –Shirley Hazzard, The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers
May 30, 2008
Police on my back
As you know, here at Pickle Me This I make a point of writing responses to my reading, celebrating any little bit of fun I might get up to, as well as tracking incidents of the po-lice busting down my door in the middle of the night. Well, in this specific circumstance, when I say “busting down”, I mean “knocking at” but it was forceful, unrelenting. In a dozy stupid, I got out of bed and went downstairs to see what was going on, and was quite terrified to see two men standing by my door. As my door is around the back of the house and upstairs, you have to crawl under a fence and shimmy up a drain pipe to get there, we don’t get a lot of passer-bys, particularly whilst we’re sleeping.
I felt a little bit relieved when I made out that the two men were officers in uniform though, which only shows how dozy I was, because police in the middle of the night is rarely good news. Except (thankfully) in this specific circumstance, of course, because it just so happened that the police were there with an arrest warrant for Will Smith. Will Smith! How exciting. Unfortunately, however, Will Smith doesn’t live in my apartment, nor the neighbours’ down below, and so the poor police were going to all that trouble for nothing. They were quite nice about it though, polite and everything, and they didn’t even make fun of my hair.
When I got back to bed however (and my husband had been roused by this point, I must mention), the implications of what could have been weighed in heavily, and I was more awake than I’d been the whole day before, pounding heart and staring at the ceiling for ages.
But yes, it really was good news, the police busting down my door on a warrant. Because I’ve now had the experience of having the police busting down/knocking on my door on a warrant. How cool is that? I feel sort of like Lethal Bizzle, back when he had to hide in that shed. Or like Alison Janney in Drop Dead Gorgeous, and I’m just sorry I didn’t think to utter her wonderful line: “Oh Christ, are we on COPS again?”
May 30, 2008
Avocado Scones
Not content to have had the pleasure of two (2) raspberry scones on separate occasions yesterday, I was determined to bake a batch of scones tonight. But not just any, no. For weeks I’ve been wanting to bake avocado scones, sure that two of my most beloved foods couldn’t help but have a wonderful marriage. Got the recipe here, and the results were extraordinary. The best scone I’ve ever had in my life, and let’s just say, I’ve had a few. The avocado flavour was barely there, but everyone’s favourite fatty fruit (but the good fat) had left its mark in a green tinge, and such unbelievable moistness. The perfect savoury accompaniment to my dinner tonight, which was a rice salad, with feta, roast red pepper, chickpeas and dill. And then for lunch tomorrow! There’s so much to look forward to.
May 29, 2008
Is it not too late to become a New Romantic?
My remarkable bookish encounters of late:
- With Once by Rebecca Rosenblum, upon seeing it now available for preorder at amazon.
- With Victory by Joseph Conrad, upon reading (in The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers) that Joan Didion always rereads it before starting a new novel, and then says Shirley Hazzard, “[it] travels with me.” So I got it out of the library, and soon I shall read it soon.
- With Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen, which I just finished reading today, and isn’t it serendipitous that Baby Got Books has been interviewing said author? Part 1 today, and Part 2 follows tomorrow.
- With the unlikely trio of The Confessions of Phoebe Tyler by Ruth Warrick, 2001 Canadian Slavonic Papers, and Economics in a Canadian Setting by Mark Inman, piled and abandoned on a park bench outside Varsity Stadium.
May 27, 2008
Revolution is a Daily Task
“Even now you will hear, from female critics as well as male, a regular complaint, a bleat – and I call it a bleat as one who, like Gray, knows nothing of sheep farming – that even today women writers play safe with small, domestic novels. They have forgotten that grand truth we learned, or relearned, at the close of the 20th century: the personal is political. The domestic novel need not be small, or tame. Homes are very unsafe places to linger. The crime statistics will tell you the streets are safer. Everything, even warfare, happens first in the kitchen, in the nursery, in the cradle, and no one grows up without a coup d’état against the powers that be; revolution is a daily task, a common story, the narrative that drives all others.” –Hilary Mantel, “Author, author”
May 27, 2008
Links for Today
Links for today: we’ve got Emily Perkins’ Novel About My Wife racking up great reviews in The Guardian and in The Toronto Star. (Read my review, and interview. An aside: very exciting, my copy of Perkins’ first book Not Her Real Name arrived in the post today.) Somewhat dissimilarly bookish, how to make a hardback into a handbag (via The Pop Triad) and I’m going to do it! Baby Got Books celebrates the death of the death of online criticism. Mrs. Dalloway Digested is funny. Hilary Mantel remembers 30 years of Virago. Lizzie Skurnick rereads The Girl with the Silver Eyes.
And one of the many highlights of my weekend was reading the actual printed Guardian Review, particularly Zadie Smith on Middlemarch. Citing Henry James’ 1873 review: “It sets a limit,” he wrote, “to the development of the old-fashioned English novel.” Writes Smith, “It’s strange to see wise Henry reading like a dogmatic young man, with a young man’s certainty of what elements, in our lives, will prove the most significant.”
May 26, 2008
Stunt by Claudia Dey
I’ve approached Claudia Dey’s novel Stunt so differently from the other books I read, and this has been the case from the very start. Because I must confess that I didn’t actually ever intend to read it. For though I admired it from afar, I like my realism, thank you very much. I didn’t really care to read about tightrope walkers, postcards from outer space and strange-named girls who age in a night. Until I heard Claudia Dey read from her novel, at the Fiery First Fiction fete just a few weeks back. And it occurred to me that my presuppositions were all wrong, and probably yours are too, because I don’t know that I’ve read encountered a book like this before.
Dey read from the beginning of her novel at the reading, and I was immediately entranced by her narrator’s perspective. So solidly fixed inside the head of this small strange person, noting her neighbour, “Mrs. Next Door”: “She matches her lawn ornaments. She walks like she is figure skating. She carries a first-aid kit. She is always calling out the time. Bath time. Suppertime. Homework time. She is the cuckoo bird of mothers…”
This narrator is Eugenia Ledoux, devoted daughter of Sheb Wooly Ledoux who disappears one night leaving a note that says, “gone to save the world/… sorry/ yours/ sheb wooly ledoux/ asshole”. He’s addressed it to her mother, to her sister, but Eugenia’s name isn’t there, and so clearly, she believes, he meant to take her with him. She’s waiting for him to come for her. Find me is her whisper.
And then, of course, her mother disappears, Eugenia and her sister double their ages in one night, Next-Door’s house burns down and there begins a perpetual lawn sale. Eugenia runs away to a houseboat on Ward’s Island, following clues towards her father’s whereabouts, which are contained in a library book, the unauthorized autobiography of a tightrope walker.
Naturally. I was explaining the plot today, and everyone looked confused, and somebody sought a label for it– “magical realism”? But no, not really, though there is magic magic and realism in abundance (all the detritus of the earth) but it’s not the right template. I really have no idea what to compare this to, but I can say that it works. That I think of the tightrope, hovering miles into the air, but how taut it is, how strong and sure. The strength and sureness key– you might call this book a bit of whimsy, but never has whimsy been so controlled, so calculated. The language is so fundamental. Every word, every sentence, every symbol in this book means something, and even the ones that don’t.
My approach to Stunt was different in that I couldn’t break the spell. I couldn’t make notes in the margins, think too much about connections, because I was reading. I couldn’t break this novel down into parts, because it would ruin everything, for now at least. No doubt the parts are essential, but right now the whole seems so complete.
May 25, 2008
Life in a Tree
It pleases me to no end that this is the view from my door. Made all the more significant by the fact that I live right in the middle of a very large and busy city, but out here on our deck, we could be anywhere. We bought a table and chairs yesterday, and this morning I was sitting out with a cup of tea and a paper, listening to birdsong and drinking up the sun. We’ve been barbequing regularly for the last month, but last evening was first when it was warm enough to be outside. The last two weekends have been full of friends, fun and potato salad, and luckily, it seems, time enough for everything.
May 25, 2008
The Wait is Over
“The earliest recipes for this vegetable are about 2500 years old, written in ancient Greek and Egyptian hieroglyphics, suggesting Mediterranean as the plant’s homeland. The Caesars took their asparagus passion to extravagant lengths, chartering ships to scour the empire for the best spears and bring them back to Rome. Asparagus even inspired the earliest frozen food industry, in the first century, when Roman charioteers would hustle fresh asparagus from the Tiber River Valley up into the Alps and keep it buried there in snow for six months, so it could be served with a big ta-daa at the autumnal Feast of Epicurus. So we are not the first to go to ridiculous lengths to eat foods out of season.” — Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle
Last summer it was well-documented when three events coincided to change our lives. The first was the garden, our first, and through some miracle it grew, bearing melons, tomatoes, lettuce and cucumber. Second was our local farmer’s market, which we started attending at the end of July, and these visits brought us yellow tomatoes, blue potatoes, abundant squash and extraordinary cheese. And third was that we both read Animal Vegetable Miracle, an extraordinary story, from which we learned about seasons, how we’re connected to them and to the earth through the variety of things we eat. Because we’d really had no idea before, and coming to understand was the most amazing (and delicious) education. I’d missed twenty-seven asparagus seasons by that point, and so I swore I’d never miss another.
Ontario asparagus appeared in our grocery store last week, and we’ve been eating it by the bundle. Looking especially forward to the local farmers market here in our new neighbourhood starting up in less than two weeks, so we’ll be able to catch the end of the asparagus crop there.
And then we’ll follow the culinary season, as we’re learning to do, feasting on the vegitannual. I’m rereading Animal Vegetable Miracle too, but taking it slow, following its seasons as they mirror our own. We’ve also got a garden here at our new house, albeit in pots–the plants of which some failed to survive a run-in with squirrelly types sometime last night. Such are the challenges though, and how pleased we are to face them. Here at our house we’re looking forward to a delicious summer ahead.
Below, check out the pie I baked last weekend, made with the localest of rhubarbs. And do note that we’re going to see Barbara Kingsolver on Tuesday, reading at This is Not a Reading Series. I think that tickets are still available.
