August 3, 2007
Summer books
Will quite shortly be now-rereading The Summer Book by Tove Janssen, which I bought in 2003 when I lived in England, solely because the edition Sort Of Books brought out then was absolutely gorgeous. The bright blue of the photograph on the cover, the photos on the endpages, even the typeface was perfect. I do remember reading this novel in the manky bathtub of my ramshackle terrace house on Silverdale Road, but I regret that I’ve forgotten everything within it. Surely there is more to this book than its cover, and I am excited to rediscover just that. I also think it will make a fine companion to my recently-completed To the Lighthouse. And once that’s done, just to flip the solstice 180 degrees, I am going to read Vendela Vida’s Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name.
I think it’s best to plan ahead.
July 31, 2007
What the Dead Know by Laura Lippman
Laura Lippman’s novel What the Dead Know came recommended by Deanna and Kate for good reason, because the book was fantastic. Please see photo below of me on the dock with a beer, and the book, which just about sums it up. What the Dead Know was an absolute pleasure to take along on a weekend away.
Two teenage sisters disappear from suburban Baltimore in 1975, and a dazed woman emerging from a car accident thirty years later confesses to being one of them. Police detectives must prove that this Jane Doe is truly one of the missing Bethany sisters, but the pieces of the puzzle refuse to add up, roads lead to dead ends, and it’s a meandering path taken toward solution. But oh, such a compelling one.
Here is popular fiction at its finest, well-written, well-storied, taking every advantage of prose. I love that this book gave me the chance to recognize one of my latest new words “postprandial” in print. That characters are bookish, there are scattered literary references. Multiple points of view are convincing, and the story so well-developed that I couldn’t put it down until it was finished, until the last piece had fit. Afterwards I was pleased to realize that time so enjoyed could also feel well spent, and that this feeling didn’t even have to do with the paradise where I’d spent it.
July 27, 2007
April in Paris by Michael Wallner
Michael Wallner’s first novel April in Paris (translated from German by John Cullen) was fascinating to read having recently finished The Portrait of a Lady. Not that Wallner’s scope could be considered Jamesian by any means, but Roth, his protagonist, reminded me of Isabel Archer. This in his youth, in his worldiness-acquired-by-library, in his belief that he could “walk between the lines”, not “take up a position.” That he wants to be in the world, but not of it. Which is always a dangerous game, but particularly if you’re a German soldier in occupied Paris.
Roth’s work translating confessions for the Gestapo exposes him to the reality of the Third Reich, making him question his war in a way his fellow soliders might not be inclined to do. Seeking an escape, Roth sneaks away in civilian clothes whilst off-duty, assuming the persona of a Frenchman he calls “Antoine”. Matters become complicated when Antoine falls in love with the daughter of a bookseller, and she turn out to be working for the Resistance. As best he can, with luck and guile, Roth gets away with his double-life for a while, until the plot becomes too thick, and he is suspected of involvement with the bombing of a club attended by German officers. From this point Roth is no longer in control of his story, and the character he becomes through subsequent events is certainly not one of his choosing.
In this life, as a superior explains to him, “No one decides what’s going to happen to him.” Roth’s attempt to defy this from the outset becomes his downfall. Like Isabel Archer, Roth is terribly young. As readers we know nothing about his past, not even his first name. His is a tabula rasa; his self is inchoate. He thinks of himself in the third person, imagines how he looks from the outside, and thinks of “Antoine” as a character from a book. Unable to grasp the consequences of not playing by the rules in his society, Roth is tricked by the unreality of his every day into thinking nothing is real at all.
April in Paris is packed with action and suspense, but there are multiple dimensions to this narrative. The poetic language and musical references attribute it a certain melody. And I did love this story’s bookishness, naturally. Here is a story in the very most storied sense, start to finish, with an ending that is brilliantly invested with hope.
July 26, 2007
Like life itself
In literary happenings, Booklust passes on word of the newDouglas Coupland Exhibit of Penguin Collages– I won’t miss it. And summer is truly here, because out comes The Atlantic Fiction Issue. Now just-finishing April in Paris— review up tomorrow. Also stay tuned for an Animal Vegetable Miracle update. And indeed, Laurie Colwin’s A Big Storm Knocked It Over cured everything what ailed me. “It was magical… that unexpected, magnificent, beautiful release, like the unexpected joy that swept you away, like life itself.”
July 23, 2007
Things fall apart
Joan Didion is not best read, I find, when one’s recent grasp of good sense has been tenuous. Or perhaps she is best read in such a state, but then the reader is not so great to be around after. As I should know, having spent the last day with me. Neuroticism is contagious, but then Didion’s writing is so absolutely fine-picked and lovely, it seems a shame to let it go to waste. And so I’ve been rereading Slouching Toward Bethlehem, and have been immersed in that world of thirty years ago where “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.” It seems it’s same as it ever was, and I don’t know if such a constant should be reassuring or otherwise. And I am thinking differently about “On Keeping a Notebook” than I did, and “remembering the me that used to be” seems less important that it used to. And all the California bits, which seem more pressing having read Where I was From.
(“You see I still have the scenes, but I could no longer perceive myself among those present, no longer could even improvise the dialogue.”)
Next up I will reread A Big Storm Knocked It Over, which, hopefully, will put me back in my mind.
July 19, 2007
Animal Vegetable Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver
I’ve got no qualms about saying that Animal Vegetable Miracle is one of the best books I’ve ever read about science and nature. I’ve only ever read two other books as good, and they were Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and so a triumverate now, of these books which have shown me how little I know about the world. But they’ve also invested that blank space of my ignorance with such wonder, and the very beginning of knowledge.
Animal Vegetable Miracle is not so much a lifestyle guide. Novelist Barbara Kingsolver (who has a graduate degree in biology, for the record) recognizes that most families do not have the means to do what hers did: to spend a year of self-sufficiency, growing all their food on their farm. No, she is not saying to do as they did, rather her message is “Here is what we did, and all that we learned.” And so the reader learns in turn– about the vegetannual (seen here). I never knew how early greens like lettuce come up in the growing season, or why. I didn’t know why green peppers come into season before the red ones. With the same ignorance Kingsolver notes at the beginning of her book, I never realized that potatoes grow with stems and leaves. I was aware that tomatoes in the winter weren’t the best thing, but I’d never thought too much about it.
I gleaned practical tips from this book– to prevent rotting in the soil, stick a paperplate underneath my watermelons (and indeed we’ve got another one coming in in the garden!). The book contains seasonal recipes, instructions about canning and preserving, a helpful bibliography and list of resources. Alongside Kingsolver’s beautiful prose, her husband and daughter have contributed articles on areas of their own expertise. And such is the story of a year in a family, though it spans more than a year, certainly. It takes three years before an asparagus plant is ready to eat after all. Planting must be carefully planned well in advance to allow for enough harvest to see them through the winter. For people with all the means that they have, Kingsolver’s family still finds that sustenance to be a full time job, out of reach for most of us. But then, writes her husband Steven L. Hopp: “If every US citizen ate just one meal a week (any meal) composed of locally and organically raised meats and produce, we could reduce our country’s oil consumption by over 1.1 million barrels every week.” That’s small steps, and for most people very possible.
However infinitely educational, didacticism is not at the forefront of Animal Vegetable Miracle. The story (and it is a story) is by turns touching, hilarious, spiritual and rabble-rousing. How lucky when brilliant writers have the best stories to tell. It was a pleasure to read, and I’d urge it upon you as something so terribly important.
July 12, 2007
Salt Rain by Sarah Armstrong
There are some truly lovely elements at work here in Salt Rain, Sarah Armstrong’s first novel. Her prose is strong without trying, and the premise is compelling. Place features largely in this narrative, Armstrong creating a powerful sense of atmosphere in her depiction of the Australian rain forest, with the rain, the heat, the endless cycle I quoted in the entry previous. When 14 year-old Allie’s mother Mae apparently drowns in Sydney Harbour, Allie is taken to live with her Aunt Julia, an eccentric tree planter who claims to be giving her land back to the forest. Vines come into the house through her windows, and the rain falls, the floods come. I got the sense of nature as adversary like I’d only read before in Canadian literature. Or rather that nature is not so much adversarial as gigantic so that human drama is minute in comparison. And Armstrong’s story does suffer when she tries to correct this imbalance, stretching her story as broadly as her backdrop. Reaching back decades, spanning geographies, and several personal histories. In such a short novel with multiple points of view alternating between chapters in a subjective third-person narration, we don’t get the chance to delve into one character adequately, let alone to explore the innumerable stories which branch out from each of their separate experiences. So much must be glossed over, details imparted for the sake of themselves, and the story skims its surfaces. There are suggestions that more is going on in the depths, but we’re too busy to be taken there. Insufficiently invested then, the big twist feels facile. Which is disappointing, really, because Armstrong’s writing left me with such a powerful sense of this book, I wished the story itself was better explored.
July 11, 2007
Wholly visible and reliable
What is it when pathetic fallacy functions in reading? Because at the moment I feel like I’m reading Salt Rain in just the right climate: “the raindrops making an endless circuit from earth to clouds, the same water falling again and again for decades.” 80% humidity is probably as close to the Australian rain forest as Toronto ever gets. It’s a funny thing.
So far Salt Rain is a pretty good story, but then you’ve got to feel sorry for any book that has to follow Henry James. Such an unfair pitting, but the narrative voice feels so slight in comparison. Which came to mind last night when I was reading James Wood’s review of Edward P. Jones’ Aunt Hagar’s Children in The London Review of Books. Writes Wood:
These days, God-like authorial omniscience is permitted only if God is a sweet ghost, the kind with whom the residents can peaceably coexist. This is especially true in most contemporary short stories, where the narrator may be wildly unreliable (first person) or reliably invisible (third person), but not wholly visible and reliable. Few younger contemporary writers risk the kind of biblical interference that Muriel Spark hazards, or that V.S. Naipaul practices in A House for Mr. Biswas, in which the narrative eschatologically leaps ahead to inform us of how the characters will end their lives or casually blinks away years at a time: ‘In all, Mr. Biswas lived six years at The Chase, years so squashed by their own boredom and futility that they could be comprehended in one glance.’ Comprehended by whom?
And now, post-James, I am craving omniscience. And have set myself a little challenge: the next story I begin will have a narrator who is not a sweet ghost at all.
(Update: Oh, yes, I looked it up. “eschatology [esk‐ă‐tol‐ŏji], the theological study or artistic representation of the end of the world.”)
July 9, 2007
Completely a fool
Reading a classic every month takes up so much reading time and reading effort, but oh the payoff. I adored The Portrait of a Lady, which I hardly remembered from my first reading seven years ago. Oh, the mastery. And that Henrietta Stackpole was redeemed in the end; it pleased me that my younger self was not completely a fool. It was interesting, by the way, to see how self-reflexively I used to read my books– the lines underlined. It was as though I used to read seeking myself (“Yes yes yes! That’s meeee!” my notes appear to shriek. “That’s just how it is!!”). Any line that summed up my experience, my struggles, my pain. I once read a book where a character had the same name as a boy I loved, and I underlined every single instance of that name. How ridiculous. And so we’ve come full circle, I suppose. It seems that my younger self was indeed completely a fool.
Now reading a new novel–Salt Rain (from Australia!) by Sarah Armstrong. And so the alternating rereading begins, and next I will get to We Need to Talk About Kevin.
July 2, 2007
The Maytrees by Annie Dillard
One paragraph near the end of Annie Dillard’s new novel The Maytrees seems to embody Dillardness, in my opinion. “Lou wondered where his information would go when he died. Would filaments of learning plant patterns on earth? Would his brain train the sinking plankton to know their way around the seafloor from here to Stellwagen Bank? Her brain would deliquesce too, and with it all she had learned topside. Which was not much, she considered, nor anywhere near worked out. Bacteria would unhook her painstakingly linked neurons and fling them over their shoulders and carry them home to chew up for their horrific babies.”
There’s nothing missing, I tell you: vocabulary I’ve got to learn first (deliquesce means “to melt away or to disappear as if by melting”); syntax I have to twist my head to get around; an organic link between learned information (from books of course) and the natural world; grotesque images of fecundity; the very fact of wondering. Annie Dillard so plants her books in the world, and The Maytrees is no exception. Though this is the first novel I’ve read by her (and this is her second novel), it is impossible to disconnect it from her oeuvre.
In her book The Writing Life Annie Dillard writes the wisest thing I’ve ever read– that “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives”. And so lives are spent in The Maytrees, by days. Toby and Lou Maytree live in Provincetown near the beach, prone to the elements, the sea, the storms, the dunes. Idyllic is their life: she paints, he writes, they have a son. “Twice a day behind their house the tide boarded the sand. Four times a year the seasons flopped over. Clams live like this, but without so much reading as the Maytrees.” And so goes their love story, except that Annie Dillard is not sentimental. As she saw the darkness of creation in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, so too does she acknowledge the pain of love. After fourteen years of marriage, the Maytrees live apart for twenty years, to be reunited by tragic and complicated circumstances. So much of love is about forgiveness.
Like Martin Levin in this Saturday’s paper, my full disclosure necessitates acknowledging that I am a big fan of Annie Dillard. I am not sure that the average reader unaware of her work could pick up The Maytrees and understand it outside of the context of from whence it came. The erudition, bibliophilia, that her characters are people just as much as the dunes are. This is a difficult book, full of so innumerable references I didn’t understand, words I’ve yet to learn, sentences I had to read again and again to get their images in my head. Oh, but once I had. And that which is out of my grasp has me reaching, which I appreciate. There is so much beauty here.
Dillard is a challenging and exciting writer, and I am so pleased to see that The Maytrees is as good as that which came before.
