October 28, 2007
Sunday Tea
I’m quite proud of the party we held this afternoon, which was a very well-attended tea party with dear and lovely friends. Many of you might know I’ve got a thing for tea and scones, and it was my desire to share my passion with the world. And so this morning I whipped up eight batches of dough which baked throughout the afternoon. The kettle ever-brewing and the smell of scones in the air. I’d baked two cakes in case anybody came who didn’t like scones, but there was no such person. I’d managed to find Devonshire cream at the grocery store, defrosted the strawberry jam I made in June, and I said I would buy the flowers myself. The scones– we had pumpkin scones (with pumpkin butter), banana scones, blueberry and plain– were coming out of the oven all afternoon. I made too many, which was the world’s best tragedy. Our house was full of brilliant people and their brilliant conversation, and I did so enjoy myself. I also managed to spend a day eating nothing but scones, which is nothing short of a dream come true.
October 28, 2007
City Limits
I was born to a woman with a casserole reflex. Kicking in upon funerals, births, or any general time of need, and so it has always been my inclination to be neighbourly. I was raised on television which prized neighbourliness as the surest way to heaven, and I don’t know any other way to be, but recent events have tested my limits.
Or even not-so-recent– this has been coming on for a long time. When we lived in England my neighbourliness was conspicuous in a nation full of people who try to mind their own business. In my row of terrace houses, neighbourliness comprised mainly of twitching lace curtains. Sure we could hear our neighbours making love or peeing, but one didn’t say hello. My husband-the-native tried to warn me the day I decided to help the new neighbours move in: they were unloading their truck and it was raining, and I thought two more bodies would get the job done faster. I didn’t listen and dragged him over with me, offered to help, the offer was accepted and in we carried their van full of crap. But no one spoke to us, or even introduced themselves; when the truck was empty, I said, “Well, I guess we’ll be going” and someone answered, “Off with you then,” and that was the last I ever saw of those people.
Upon our return to Canada, things haven’t gone much better. You might remember that I recently made muffins for the family of my dead neighbour who hadn’t actually died. Well last night something happened that was even more awkward. We have new neighbours down below us– a middle-aged Spanish couple. They have control of our thermostat, so I thought it would be best if we made friends with them. We bought them a plant, and knocked on their door. It took awhile for the man of the house to answer, and once he had it was clear that he was naked. Completely naked, and very very old. He also spoke little English. “Welcome,” we said, and held out the plant. To receive the plant while continuing to hide his naked self behind the door was a difficult maneuver, but he just about managed. At the very least he was smiling. He took the plant, said thank you, and shut the door back up again.
So I’ve had it, really. It’s not so much the lack of reciprocation that bothers me, but rather the social awkwardness that has inevitably ensued from these gestures. Neighbourliness shouldn’t make you want to die, and mine perpetually does, and so I’m through with it. I’m through with the undead nakedness, and I’m not going to take it anymore.
October 27, 2007
The Septembers of Shiraz by Dalia Sofer
No doubt I let the physical beauty of Dalia Sofer’s novel The Septembers of Shiraz pervade my impression of the story, but also for the very first time I found myself longing to call up a book designer. (Her name is Claire Vaccaro, according to the copyright page). The same way you might want to ring an author whose work you’ve just enjoyed, I wanted to tell her, “Yes– that indigo. If a story ever had a colour… Just vivid enough, and somehow homespun, not exotic, or foreign. Just the way that Sofer paints Iran.” I would have raised the issue of the endpapers: their delicacy, subtlety, and the very poetry of their pattern– so much like Sofer’s gentle prose. I wanted to tell Claire Vaccaro that she’d read the very same book as I had, and praise her for multiplying its beauty exponentially.
Dalia Sofer’s first novel The Septembers of Shiraz takes place in Iran in the early 1980s, during those unsure and chaotic days just after the revolution and in the midst of the Iran/Iraq war. The novel begins with the sudden arrest and imprisonment of Isaac Amin, whose only crimes appear to be that he is a Jewish businessman who had lived well under the Shah. During the year that follows his arrest, Isaac and his family exist in a suspended time, the future unsure. They are forced to reevaluate their values, future plans, and their sense of themselves in a world once familiar turned completely upside-down.
Isaac lingers in prison, unsure of what each day will bring. Sadistic guards play their mind games, he is tortured and the threat of execution is omnipresent. Isaac is urged again and again to confess, but to a crime he could not answer to even if he knew what it was. His wife Farnaz has had no word from him, unsure whether Isaac is alive or dead, and her efforts to help him only demonstrate her powerlessness within the new regime. Neglected in light of her parents’ problems and as confused as anyone by this game in which all the rules seemed to have changed, daughter Shirin becomes embroiled a mess too big for her to handle. And far away across the sea their son Parviz, studying at university in New York City, confronts the hard fact of his loneliness, and the distance between him and his family now during this time of need.
The Septembers of Shiraz is Sofer’s first novel, and it is the sort of first novel that I like best. It is not masterful: the plot is flimsy in places, dialogue is rampant with exposition. But then I think mastery is a heavy burden for a young writer to bear. I much prefer promise, and Sofer’s work just explodes with it. With moments in which truth and beauty marry: “The human body is like that. It needs a constant flow of nourishment, air, and love, to survive. Unlike currency these things can’t be accumulated. At any given moment, either you have them or you don’t.” Who we are and where we belong, and where do we go when we don’t anymore? The sympathy with which family ties are drawn, and that the family ties complicated– when Isaac is taken, Farnaz and he had not truly connected in years. Such complications give the story its dimensionality. That real life goes on outside, all the while one family is in turmoil. The burdens and expectations of revolution, of history, and fallen empires.
The Septembers of Shiraz is worthy of its physical beauty, and no doubt served as that beauty’s inspiration. Dalia Sofer has created a work that is quietly extraordinary and quite deserving of a cover you can tell that by.
October 27, 2007
Books in the Bath
My new post “Encounters with Books: In the Bath” is now up at the Descant Blog.
October 26, 2007
Lighting a Fire
Maud Newton’s interview with Kate Christensen contained only good bits, and I wish I could quote it all here. So many fascinating thoughts about books, writing, about women writing, and it was only a short interview anyway.
I will share with you just one more part I particularly liked.
Kate Christensen on her first book’s reception: “I felt a bit like an underdog/loser with a thwarted ego and an axe to grind in one of my own novels, and in that sense it was ironic, fitting, and really, the best thing that could have happened to me. Sure, it pissed me off at first, because few things are more infuriating than being underestimated, but it also lit a fire under my ass, so to speak, and taught me a few valuable Zennish lessons about writing: Let It Go (you can’t control what people make of your work); Keep Moving Forward Like a Shark (all you can do is write more books); and Ride the Ocean Tides and Stay Your Course (your internal compass, not a glowing or scathing review, is the one authority to be heeded and obeyed).”
October 26, 2007
Now gazing
Now gazing at the gorgeous endpapers of Dalia Sofer’s novel The Septembers of Shiraz. Touches such as these: ribbons, embossing, endpapers, good binding– once so common, to encounter them now is quite extraordinary. Highlighting, I believe, that what lies inside is special, and this book truly is. It came recommended by Deanna, and secondarily through a review by Claire Messud (who I’ve come to respect exponentially). My own review is to follow upon finish, but in the meantime, I am enjoying this, the story of a family’s experience just after the revolution in Iran. The son’s story in particulous is resonating, and showing a side of immigration that I’ve previously noted being omitted from American novels. The loneliness– “And his jokes, when translated, are no longer funny.” That one simple line broke my heart, with all its implications, the tenderness and the longing. Like being cut off from one’s own soul, I suppose.
October 25, 2007
Point Form
Anansi‘s 40th Birthday is amusingly recapped at the Descant blog.
A new Mitford book is out today– a collection of letters between the sisters, edited by Charlotte Mosely, which I can’t wait for. Remember how much I loved Decca’s? On here for how “no one will ever write letters like this again”.
Kate Christensen, whose first novel I enjoyed last month upon introduction by Maud Newton, is interviewed by said Newton. Of the bits I loved best: “In my late teens and early 20s, when I was developing my idea of how I wanted to write, I glutted myself on twentieth-century English novelists. It seemed to me that, en masse, Drabble, Pym, Spark, Mantel, and Wesley, as well as quite a few equally brilliant Englishmen, had signed a British-Writer Pact agreeing to foreswear heavy-handedness, egotistical earnestness, and didacticism and to embrace instead black humor, deft social insights, wit, lightness, and a float-like-a butterfly sting-like-a-bee verbal dexterity. I wanted to sign that pact, join their gang and live in London and drink in their pub.”
I used to enjoy Maud Newton’s Friday Blogger Stephany Aulenback, and so I was happy to find out she was blogging again. And even happier when I saw she’d published an interview with Sara O’Leary. She is the author of When You Were Small, which is one of the most beautiful children’s books I’ve ever seen.
October 25, 2007
The Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perrotta
In Tom Perrotta’s new novel The Abstinence Teacher, Ruth Ramsay is asked if her daughter’s soccer coach is cute. “‘What difference does it make?'” she answers. ‘”He’s a drunk married Christian.'” To which her friend responds with, “‘Nobody’s perfect'”.
And indeed “nobody’s perfect” would be a fitting epigram for most of Perotta’s characters, Ruth Ramsay in particular. She is divorced and longing, struggling with her adolescent daughters, and facing trouble in her job as sex-ed teacher at the local high school. The year before her comment about orl sex (that “some people enjoy it”) had sparked an outcry by a fundamentalist Christian group, resulting in Ruth now being required to teach an “abstinence education” program. And so she is none too impressed when she catches her daughter involved in a group prayer at her soccer game, led by her coach, the aforementioned imperfect Tim Mason.
The novel moves between Tim and Ruth’s points of view, demonstrating the oddly ambivalent attraction developing between them. Tim is just as struggling as Ruth is, a reformed drug addict who was saved by Jesus, but lost his wife and daughter along the way. He tries to live in a way that would make his God proud, but temptation keeps finding him at every turn, and he can’t help questioning his faith. Both he and Ruth deal with their mutual attraction with distraction, and these distractions become the story. Tim trying to stay on the straight-and-narrow, Ruth’s attempt to rekindle an old flame. What happens when Ruth can’t bear the propaganda, and advises her class to look up Planned Parenthood’s website? How will Tim respond to his pastor’s urging to continue leading the soccer team in prayer, even though he’s not altogether comfortable with the idea and it may well drive him apart from his own daughter?
This is the stuff of suburban soap-opera, American satire, and Perrotta’s Election and Little Children have already established him as a master of these forms. The Abstinence Teacher is written with its broader implications in mind (namely the growing power of America’s religious right) but still focuses on the small, the details, on the roundedness of his characters. Perrotta does not resort to stereotypes in this story where it would have been easy to, and he draws no firm lines of good and evil. “Nobody’s perfect”, nobody at all. And though this story’s conclusion is perhaps not one as satisfying as its thunderous momentum truly deserves, the distractions along the way are altogether worth the while.
October 24, 2007
How positively picklish!
Picklish, and exciting. Thanks to my dear husband for the celebratory image. And to the millions and millions of loyal pickling fans– how would I ever would-be pickle without you?
October 23, 2007
I vow
Lying there with her head on his chest. “I vow to never forget the Robin’s Rest,” she said. “Or the tartan of its bedspreads.”
