out walking the parapet: all my puny sorrows by miriam toews

N

When I was a young mother, living in Caracas Venezuela, my in-laws came to visit.  We had a penthouse apartment which overlooked the Avila mountains and a new baby daughter, four months old.  One afternoon, I realized we'd left the baby asleep by herself in the living room, and suddenly I panicked. "Where's the baby?" I asked.

"Oh, she's out walking the parapet,"  my father in law replied calmly.  It was funny at the time - highlighting the unreasonable anxieties that accompany new motherhood. And yet, when I think about it now, I realize that this daughter - now in her early thirties, has always been a person who is likely to be out walking parapets.  That is, she  has always taken risks and flies very high. She also suffers lows. In some ways, she seems overqualified for life: brilliant, insightful and possessing emotional and psychological depths that go beyond the rest of us. In many ways she is our beacon, our high end.  But yet her ability to gaze unrelentingly into the abyss from her tremulous parapets, also makes her prone to despair.

She reminds me a little bit of Elfrieda in Miriam Toew's heartbreaking novel All My Puny Sorrows. Not that my daughter is suicidal like Elfrieda, but that she isn't afraid to visit the depths of human sorrow.  Every silver lining must have its dark cloud.

But on the opposite end of the spectrum live the perennial optimists among us - those whose lightness of touch keeps them immune to despair and helps them survive the same darkest hours.   This kind of person is typified in Lottie, the mother of Elfrieda and Yoli in this novel.

 Maybe you fit in to one of these categories yourself, or you might know others who do.  The title All My Puny Sorrows comes from a Coleridge poem, which reads in part:

I too a SISTER had, an only Sister —
She lov’d me dearly, and I doted on her!
To her I pour’d forth all my puny sorrows,
(As a sick Patient in a Nurse’s arms)
And of the heart those hidden maladies
That shrink asham'd from even Friendship's eye.
O! I have woke at midnight, and have wept,
Because SHE WAS NOT!

Yes, this is a novel about sisters, as well as a novel about two kinds of people.  Yoli is the narrator and mostly she writes about her brilliant sister Elf. But she also writes about her mother Lottie - the optimist, the courageous and dauntless survivor.

Much of the material in this book comes from real life experience.  Like the Von Reisen family in her novel, Miriam Toews grew up in a Canadian Mennonite community, and like Yolandi, Toews lived through and beyond family suicides.  This novel will break your heart with its honesty, its humor, its bravery and intelligence,  even as it nourishes you with its fearlessness.  It takes you to the depths but doesn't leave you there.

 Has there ever been a more charming, beguiling and exasperating character than Elfrieda Von Reisen? She's beautiful and a brilliant pianist who feels like she has a glass piano inside her which might break any moment.  Yoli her younger sister is a mess by comparison.  She has two children by two different men and is raising them alone and she's also struggling to make ends meet by writing a series of rodeo books. She has none of the glamor, money or security of her sister who has a wonderful husband at her side. Nic is not only emotionally intelligent but he has interests of his own and dotes on Elf. 

 So why does Elf want to end her life?

"Did Elf have a terminal illness?" Yoli wonders early in the novel.  "Was she cursed genetically from day one to want to die? was every seemingly happy moment from her past, every smile, every heartfelt hug and laugh and exuberant fist pump and triumph just a temporary detour from her innate longing for release and oblivion?"  

There isn't an answer.  Except that Elf feels things too deeply.  She wants to end her life because she cannot bear it.  Early in the book, she cant bring herself to celebrate Christmas with the family. Instead she stays in the bathroom banging her head against the wall while Yoli "wanted to see her weird eyes flash happiness while she told hilarious stories using the occasional French or Italian word ... I wanted to sit next to her and feel the heart she radiated the energy of a fearless leader, a girl who moved easily in the world, my older sister. "

One of the men in Yoli's life - who is also a musician and more in love with Elf than with Yoli - is not surprised to hear about Elf's suffering. Once he heard her  play in Prague.  And "when I listened to her play I felt I should not be there in the same room with her. There were hundreds of people but nobody left - it was a private pain," he says. " By private I mean to say unknowable.  Only the music knew and it held secrets so that her playing was a puzzle, a whisper, and people afterwards stood in the bar and drank and said nothing because they were complicit." 

I should also mention that this novel is wickedly funny.  The survivors!  The desperation!  The craziness of life  with all its puny setbacks comes across as exuberant and brave. For instance, at one point, while his wife Elf is in the ICU after a suicide attempt, Nic notices that his eyes seem always to be running clear liquid.

"You're crying Nic," Yoli tells him.  "That's what they call crying. But all the time, he asks.  I'm not even conscious of it then.  It's a new kind of crying I said for new times."

And then there's Lottie,  Elf and Yoli's amazing mother, an online Scrabble player who survives it all - who makes friends with everybody, who keeps on going no matter what - reading murder mysteries, following sports, ever the eternal optimist.  She has survived her husband's suicide, and her niece's suicide, and when her sister Tina is in the cardio unit after suffering a heart attack and  her daughter Elf is in the ICU  she remarks, "Everyone will survive eventually."

But let's be clear: it's not as though Elf is incapable of helping others to survive.  She helps Yoli survive a heartbreak early in the novel by sending her letters - a quote from a Paul Valery poem one word per letter "so that it took me months to figure out. Breath, dream, silence, invincible, calm, you will triumph."

And how about the way she chases off a sanctimonious Mennonite priest who visits her in the psych ward by doing a striptease to a Philip Larkin poem!

In the end this novel is a plea for understanding human nature. We have survival instincts,  but some of us also have instincts to end it all.  And if you love somebody who pleads with you to help them end their life, what are you supposed to do? Do you help them do it, or do you fight them  and become their enemy?

At one point Toews quotes Goethe:  "Suicide is an event of human nature which, whatever may be said and done with respect to it, demands the sympathy of every man , and in every epoch must be discussed anew."

Above all, in order to survive something we have to know what it is we are surviving. I've found this an interesting question to ask myself.  What am I surviving?

All My Puny Sorrows is a deeply compassionate, exuberant, funny and heartbreaking book about sisterhood, family and the difficult task of survival.

#miriamtoews #mypunysorrows #bookclubreadsisters

winesburg ohio - characters of a bygone community - VIDEO

William Faulkner called Sherwood Anderson "the father of my whole generation of writers." So why have I had Winesburg Ohio by Sherwood Anderson on my shelf for years and never been drawn to it?  I always felt I should read it.  It was highly recommended by Alan Cheuse when I did my MFA in Fiction at George Mason University.   Now, thanks to our Classic Book Discussion group I've finally read it,  and now I can see what they were going on about.  Because this is a book which excites you, not just as a reader but also as a writer.  As a writer you are blown away by the economy, the skill and the angle into the stories and you  can't wait to try and imitate them, have a go at the same technique.  Easier said than done for sure.

Anderson tells us in the opening pages, that "in the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as truth."  But, he continues, "The moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque, and the truth he embraced became a falsehood."

It is the false premises and resultant shortcomings and private tragedies that draw you into the inner world of each character.  Characters may sometimes appear in more than one story. In one they might be  the main character, only to pop up in the background of another story. For example, Dr Reefy, the main character in "Paper Pills"  writes fragments of thoughts on scraps of paper,  then balls them up in his pockets.  He appears again in "Death" the story I recorded above. They make up the fabric of an entire community, which is chiefly united in George Willard, the local newspaper reporter. 

Helen White runs through several of the stories. She's the banker's daughter and numerous young men are in love with or want to be in love with her.  Then there is Alice Hindman who after a brief love affair with Ned Currie, becomes obsessed with him to no avail, and eventually winds up "trying to force herself to face bravely the fact that many people must live and die alone, even in Winesburg."

There are many local crack-pots - Ebenezer Crowley and his weird son Elmer, Wash Williams who is so dirty even the whites of his eyes look soiled, and Mook the halfwit who when surprised will sometimes exclaim, "Well well, I'll be washed and ironed and starched!"

There's a lot about temptation in these stories- and private sexual or romantic attachments.  Reverend Curtis Hartman is tempted by the vision of Kate Swift the school teacher, as she lies on her bed reading and smoking.  He realizes later that she is a new "and more beautiful fervor of the Spirit.  That God "has appeared to me in the person of Kate Swift... an instrument of God, bearing the message of truth."  Kate appears in another story where she teaches the boy George Willard in school and urges him not to be  "a mere peddler of words.  The thing to learn is what people are thinking about not what they say."

 As I read,  I found that some of the stories blended together - and others utterly eluded me.  But I always felt myself excited by the brisk pacing, the way the truths these people lived by however flimsy - pulled each story forward, by the extraordinary economy, impetus and beauty of Anderson's language and by the rhythm of the sentences.  I got a full sense of a completely bygone world - by the preoccupations of a town based on agriculture, just at the outset of industrialization - a post civil war America and what it must actually have been like to live during these times.

I was reminded of Hemingway - because of the economy of language. But also of Alice Munro because the center of each story often seems elusive and because of that, all the more haunting.

toppled statues of ourselves - on reading john banville's the sea

What if being yourself means being a less interesting, less moral, less ethical and less sympathetic person than you'd prefer to be.  What if it means drastically lowering your standards and expectations? What if being you means being someone you don't particularly like or respect?

These questions aren't posed directly in John Banville's award winning novel The Sea but they are implicit and, for me, quite depressing.  There was maybe one, and one character only in this novel who was likeable.  The rest were bitter, pretentious, greedy or just plain cruel.  No wonder the protagonist Max Morden admits towards the end of the book that, "from earliest days I wanted to be someone else.  I was always a distinct no-one, one whose fiercest wish was to be an indistinct someone." He says that this is why he was drawn to Anna, the wife whose death he is mourning throughout the novel.

What, I wondered, could be an indistinct someone?  I guess he must mean a fuzzy, fabricated personality -one who appears to be better than they are, one who bears no scrutiny. Anna,  Max explains "was the fairground mirror in which all my distortions would be made straight."  Now that's a terrifying insight.

Max Morden is a middle aged art historian who allows everyone to imagine he is writing a great book on Pierre Bonnard.  In fact he's only finished one chapter, and none of his remaining notes add up to anything original.  Now that his wife has died he has decided to recover from grief by revisiting the deep past. So he takes a room in a holiday town where he used to go as a child - a room in the same house that was rented by the Grace family, who left an indelible impression on the young Max.  It was in this house that he first experienced sexual desire, "a rapturous lovesick grief" and in this town where he first encountered death- a tragedy from which he has never recovered, and which isn't explained til the end of the book.

Returning to this town which has changed very little in the intervening years, Max feels he has "at last arrived at the destination to where, all along, without knowing it I had been bound, and where I must stay, it being for now the only possible place, the only possible refuge for me."

But why is this a refuge? Why, on the heels of his wife's death must he relive such painful episodes from his childhood?  Could it be because childhood was the last time he was authentic, or felt anything deeply?

The past, and what the past means, and how a child's imagination allows him to invent or imagine a promising future - is central to the novel.  Banville writes about Max picturing his future self - "not so much anticipating the future as nostalgic for it, since what in my imaginings was to come was in reality already gone.  Was it actually the future I was looking forward to or something beyond the future?"

During his wife's illness, the past provides refuge - memories of their early courtship - because once she has received her terminal diagnosis they can no longer be honest with each other.   Leaving the doctor's office with bad news "we walked out into the day as if we were stepping on to a new planet, one where no one lived but us."

On the sentence level The Sea is  truly masterful. From the very first pages I was fully immersed in a world of childhood seaside holidays. Take this description of Max's first encounter with Myles Grace.  "A boy of my age was draped on the green gate, his arms hanging limply down from the top bar, propelling himself with one foot slowly back and forth in a quarter circle over the gravel...As I walked slowly past, and indeed I may even have paused, or faltered, rather, he stuck the toe of his plimsoll into the gravel to stop the swinging gate and looked at me with an expression of hostile enquiry.  It was the way we all looked at each other, we children, on first encounter..."   Several paragraphs later,  Banville seems to read my mind. "Plimsoll," he writes.  "Now there's a word one does not hear any more, or rarely, very rarely."

my cozy place to read

I've made this little book nook in my library/bedroom,  and last Sunday I sat reading The Sea and looking out of the window, with my greyhounds sleeping at my side.  It was a little slice of heaven, so why did I come out at the end of it feeling unsettled?

It's because the process of reading this novel was an act of unmasking. The protagonist, who from the beginning of the novel you trust and sympathize with, became a person capable of gratuitous cruelty, one without much depth or emotional intelligence. A person with no real present.  A person who was not living in the present.  It is the past for him which "beats inside me like a second heart."

And what a past it was.  The Grace family with whom he'd been so enthralled turn out to be quite unpleasant people.  Max's first sexual feelings are for Mrs Grace who for some unknown reason "was at once a wraith of my imagination and a woman of unavoidable flesh and blood, of fibre, and musk and milk."

Then there are the twins who are his own age - Chloe and her brother Myles "like two magnets but turned the wrong way, pulling and pushing."  The twins enjoy hurting each other.  Chloe is a nasty, cruel and capricious person and being in a room with Myles, we are told, "was like being in a room which someone had just violently left."

Finally, by the end of the novel when everything has unraveled, the past is revealed as not so much a refuge as a distraction from the miserable and intolerable present and the still more bleak looking future.

Am I glad I read this book? Well, I will say this.  I'm impressed with Banville's ability to craft beautiful sentences.  But the whole of this book, for me at least, did not add up to the sum of its parts.

#banvillethesea #theseanovel

character is fate in the mayor of casterbridge

An impetuous, headstrong man doubles down on his worst decisions.  By the time he regrets it,  it's much too late, so he makes up for his mistakes out of obligation. And so his life becomes a form of penance.

This is in essence the arc of Michael Henchard, the protagonist of Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge.  Henchard is fated and flawed but somehow  he's still sympathetic.  Maybe it's because we recognize his behavior - or might have met someone like him.   His forceful personality leads you to believe he is capable of greatness.  But instead he's a spectacular failure.  Why?  Because "the momentum of his character knew no patience."  What a brilliant  description of character is that!

The novel begins with a famously shocking scene: Henchard selling his young wife Susan (and their baby daughter) at a country fair.  He's drunk, of course -so it all starts off with a provocative drunken observation that men should be allowed to sell their wives when they tire of them.  But the joke gets carried too far and somebody steps forward. Susan accepts the man's offer and then disappears, along with their baby daughter Elizabeth Jane.

After this, Hardy wastes no time getting into the heart of the story.  Fast forward in Chapter 2, fifteen odd years later to the return of Susan and her grown daughter Elizabeth Jane, making their way to Casterbridge, where they discover that Henchard has moved up in the world and now become mayor.

Yes, suspension of disbelief is most definitely required. But one of the things that makes this novel so fascinating is the way in which Hardy switches up conditions and circumstances, playing them out with different results, depending on the characters.  Both Susan and Henchard's former mistress Lucetta pursue Henchard to Casterbridge, for example, and both try their luck at  holding him to his obligations, with different results.

Henchard subsequently wrongs one woman in order to honor the other. Then his employee, friend and rival Donald Farfrae does precisely the same sort of thing with Elizabeth Jane and Lucetta.

You sense a kind of fever building up - in the episode with a loose bull they encounter on a walk, for instance. Hardy suggests here that it doesn't matter who the man or woman happen to be in a given encounter. What matters is the high emotion at play,  which inclines the relationship to become sexually or romantically charged.

Impulse plays a major role in many of the plot twists.  Hechard sells his wife on impulse. Henchard and Farfrae become business associates on impulse. And Elizabeth Jane becomes engaged in Lucetta's household, also purely on impulse.

Meanwhile although Farfrae's temperament is the exact opposite of Henchard's, he experiences exactly the same kinds of opportunities and setbacks. Farfrae shows himself to be more admirable because of his morality and even temper. Thus he ends up trumping Henchard, inhabiting his home, marrying his mistress, winning the love of Elizabeth Jane and achieving professional success, while Henchard falls into emotional and financial ruin.

You find yourself wondering if Henchard will ever do the right thing and get rewarded for it.  The answer is - no, he never will.  He tries to do the right thing often enough, but since he does it out of obligation - he's never rewarded for his efforts. His life becomes a kind of penance for his impulsive and rash behavior.

The roles of the women in this novel are also fascinating.  For a start, look at Susan Henchard (Newson).  She's supposedly simple and naive, admitting that "foolishly I believed there was something solomn and binding in the bargain" when she was sold to Newson.  But is she really so simple?  After all she's clever enough to leave Newson when it seems prudent, and then to disguise the true identity of her daughter in order to protect her.  She also writes anonymous letters in an attempt to match make her daughter and Farfrae.

Elizabeth Jane in contrast to Henchard is circumspect and restrained - and in spite of her strong feelings for Farfrae she "corks up the turmoil of her feeling with grand control."  She is loving to Henchard when he least deserves it and always carries herself with dignity.  She reflects at one point that "What she had desired had not been granted her and that what had been granted her she had not desired."

To take it a step further, Elizabeth Jane loses Farfrae because she doesn't declare her love.  Lucetta's experience is precisely the opposite.  She declares her love for Henchard, makes a fool of herself,  and not only loses him as a result,  but ultimately loses everything else as well.  She's guilty only of wanting to control her fate. Her mistake is to have been too open with her feelings.

There's so much to admire and enjoy in this novel.  And let's not forget the wonderful local characters - which rival Shakespeare's rude mechanicals and village personalities.  Who can forget the  ghastly Furmity woman, Jopp or Abel Whittle  and his trousers - and the Peter's Finger pub where all the lowlifes hang out and plot the terrible "skimmity ride."   Village life and the life of Casterbridge  and the history buried in its hillsides is indelibly linked to the life of the town.

"Casterbridge announced old Rome in every street alley and precinct," Hardy writes.  "It looked Roman bespoke the art of Rome, concealed dead men of Rome. It was impossible to dig more than a foot or two deep about the town fields and gardens without coming upon some tall soldier or other of the Empire, who had lain there in his silent unobtrusive rest for a space of fifteen hundred years He was mostly found lying on his side, in an oval scoop of chalk..."

A place like this seems worlds away  -  centuries removed from our lives today. But yet the psychology of the characters couldn't feel more pertinent, more vivid or more fresh.
#mayorofcasterbridge #michaelhenchard #thomashardy

the fruit of sacrifice in alice mcdermott's the ninth hour

Some lives are sacrificed for a good cause and other lives are wasted for no particular reason  - and this is a novel where sacrifice and waste confront and respond to each other in many different ways.  It's a story about Catholic nuns and working class people in Brooklyn and it begins when a young man commits suicide.  His pregnant wife Annie is then taken in by The Little Sisters of the Poor.  She earns her keep by working in their laundry, washing and ironing the sister's habits and laundering the soiled sheets of the many sick who they care for. 

When her daughter Sally is born, Annie raises her with the help of the nuns. What would they do without Annie and the joy of this baby in their lives? Annie provides warmth and good humor and besides, the washing never ends.  Neither does her sacrifice. Bodily fluids, human filth and the stains of humanity are endlessly scrubbed out in the laundry.  The nuns are efficient and starched and their approach to getting through life and dealing with human weakness is  "Never waste your sympathy... never think for a minute that you will erase all suffering from the world with your charms."  At least this is what Sister Lucy tells Sally when they visit the invalided Mrs Costello. 

Mrs Costello is a particularly nasty patient, simpering, demanding and completely charmless. When she lost her leg to a septic infection she decided to use her injury as an excuse - while her husband Mr Costello, a kindly milkman  must look elsewhere for companionship.  He finds it in his friendship with Sally's mother Annie,  a warm and natural woman, who like him is also at risk of spending her life in penance  - for her husband's suicide.

Then it seems that Sally must also sacrifice  - as all good people do in this book -  by serving God and entering a convent in far away Chicago.  When she takes a train to begin this new life, the journey is described as a kind of purgatory - populated by difficult, unpleasant and dirty people who Sally is not up to saving.  For me these pages are just about the best writing in the book.

Other characters in the novel also make different kinds of sacrifices for the sake of the less deserving. There is Red Whelan who takes the place of his friend Michael Tierney in the Civil War and returns without an arm and a leg.  Michael is ever indebted, so that when his son falls in love with a working class girl he cannot give them his blessing. "Is this what Red Whelan threw away an arm and a leg for - so the fruit of his sacrifice can drag us back to the slums?"

Alice McDermott clearly has a deep fondness for her characters, especially for the nuns.  She has written them as fully realized, dedicated and interesting individuals. But is sacrifice always God's will?  Must everyone in contact with Mrs. Costello have the thankless task of caring for her, listening to her endless complaints while changing her nighties and sheets and emptying out her disgusting chamber pot?  And where is the reward? Only in the hereafter? Is Mr Costello supposed to live in a world without love? Is Sally's mother Annie also to live without love? And what about Sally herself?

"There is a hunger" the sisters explain.  But since it isn't a hunger that any of them have, they don't known what to do about it.  The hunger they encounter always takes an ugly form.  And death hovers over everything.  The passage of time and the way time behaves in the presence of death is movingly conveyed in this thoughtful and elegantly written novel.

#ninthhournovel #alicemcdermottninthhour

reading lady chatterley's lover

Games keeper!  Think about it!  I bet that's what most of us think when we think of the novel Lady Chatterley's Lover, we think of this cliche.  For example, I remember my friend Walter flirting with his handsome gardener and making silly references to D. H. Lawrence.   Making jokes to me about my relationship with my gardener.  Because frankly, it's a joke.  The name Lady Chatterley is code for amorous upper class woman on the prowl.   Hard to believe, then, that the novel was at the center of an important obscenity trial in 1960 - a trial that changed the course of literature.  What can this novel tell us about sex, about love, or about class today?

As it turns out, it has a lot to say.  About sex and domestic intimacy, about class discrepancy, post war grief and about industrialization,   That's what my Classic Book Discussion Group discovered when our librarian at Patrick Henry Library in Vienna Virginia recommended we read Lady Chatterley's Lover. 

 So, the novel might no longer shock us.  Yet what Lawrence calls "the sex thing" is teased out as a separate kind of intimacy and power to the companionship and domestic closeness offered by a marriage.  He also has a thing or two to say about the ruling class ... "You don't rule," Connie tells Clifford in one vicious argument, "you've only got more than your share of the money."

When Lawrence writes about heartbreaking changes in English landscape, about how the new England blots out the old, how industrial England blots out agricultural England, how the minor's cottages blot out pastoral villages, he might almost have been writing about the England of today - or at least about English perceptions of the changes in the England of today.

Class discrepancy and its surprising role in intimacy is a huge theme in this novel - not only in the relationship between Connie and her lover, the gamekeeper Mellors,  but also in the relationship between  Connie's crippled husband Clifford and his nurse Mrs Bolton.

Connie is drawn to Clifford Chatterley for his mind - but when he returns from war, paralyzed from the waist down, he is impotent.  Clifford has always been a man of the mind more than of the body, Then Ivy Bolton enters the picture as Clifford's nurse, and Connie relinquishes all her physical interactions with Clifford.  She allows Mrs. Bolton (who lost her husband in a mining disaster) to take on the physical care of her husband.  Their marital and physical intimacy is severed.  When shaving him, dressing him, moving him from wheelchair to bed, become Mrs Bolton's tasks, rather than Connie's, Connie loses all  remaining physical contact with her husband.

But here's the thing. Meanwhile, Mrs Bolton actually enjoys Clifford. As a member of the upper class, he is a novelty to her. She loves the way he asserts his needs. The fact that his body is in her charge, gives her new energy.  Class plays a big part in their interactions. She enjoys her insider access to the upper class.  Her intimacy with Clifford extends to when she comes in her dressing gown, her hair in a plait, to play chess with him and share biscuits and coffee with him into the nights when he cannot sleep.

Clifford, in turn, is energized by Mrs. Bolton's commentary on village life and the Tevershal Pits - the miner's work. It gives him new impetus in his work, and a sense of power. It gives him "a rush of new life."  There's no denying the erotic nature of this relationship. It might be sexless, but it's highly charged.  Connie even observes that Mrs Bolton must certainly be in love with Clifford, on some level.

Connie sees exactly what Clifford does for Mrs. Bolton - just as Mrs. Bolton is the first to suss out that Connie is having an affair with the games keeper. She sees Mellors waiting in the driveway, from Clifford's window,  like a "lovesick male dog."  But even before she sees him, Mrs. Bolton is sure that Connie has a lover.  Meanwhile, Clifford who is no longer tuned into Connie or her needs, ascribes the change in his wife's demeanor to a baby she encountered at afternoon tea with one of the neighbors. 

But the main course in this novel is certainly Connie's sexual awakening with the games keeper Oliver Mellors - as well as the ways she wakes him up sexually.   Before she meets Mellors there's a wonderful scene where Connie looks at her naked body in the mirror and sees it as reduced and unloved.  When she and Mellors make their connection, it is in spite of himself.  He thought he was alone.  He even wanted to be alone.  Lawrence writes of the "bitter privacy of a man" who thought he had done with it all.  "Done with it all?"  Connie asks.  "What?" and Mellors says "Life."


He has a sense of foreboding.  Mellors feels he has opened them both up but also believes that his heart will protect them for a while.  Even though as a reader you want Connie to have her months of passion - and you want Mellors to be opened up to life, the sense of foreboding hangs over their relationship.

For  D. H. Lawrence there seems to be only one true sexual intimacy - that of the simultaneous orgasm.  The clitoris, in Lawrence's mind, is almost equated with witchery. He speaks of the clitoris as a "beak" - It's a bit shocking when Mellors describes his wife, who he has come to despise, like a whore or a hag, as she tries to bring herself to clitoral orgasm. I have to say at this point in my reading, I was like No.This guy on some level has a hatred of female sexual autonomy and he is not the man for our girl Connie!

 Yet at the same time, Lawrence has Lady Chatterley enjoy anal intercourse with Mellors.  This is all a okay.  Connie says she wants to have a child with someone she wants in her bowels.  She speaks of the man as a phallus bearer as a temple to be torn to pieces and how the "depths of her bowels and womb... sang the song of adoration."


Okay.  Fine. Make of all this what you will.

But for me, the central scene of the book - the scene where everything really comes together, is the one where Clifford is going for a walk with Connie through his estate - she is walking and he is wheeling in his chair.  Then the engine jams on his wheelchair - and Mellors, the games keeper comes to help him out.  The metaphor as the scene transpires is palpable - the sexual power and the physical power juxtaposed with  class struggle - all of it comes into play.  The chair tramples the bluebells as Clifford insists on trying to make the engine work.  "Will you get off her," Clifford screams at Mellors at one stage- meaning  off his chair.  Then the brake jams.  He has no brake. Clifford is "yellow with anger" and by the time he finally asks Mellors to help push the chair, the brake is completely jammed.

 It's a little bit sad to think of D. H. Lawrence, who was himself impotent, describing sex in so much detail, when it clearly meant so much to him.  And yet, he writes at one point  about sex: "God who had created man must have had a sinister sense of humor, creating him a reasonable being yet forcing him to take this ridiculous posture driving him blind craving for this ridiculous performance"

Ridiculous or not - it drives our passions forward.

#ladychatterley #bookclubreadladychatterley

new american voices are crucial to our culture

Authors Eugenia Kim, Angie Kim and Reyna Grande

We shared such a powerful and moving evening at Fall for the Book Festival - for the New American Voices Award Ceremony.  First we heard from the judges, themselves immigrant writers - Reyna Grande - author of The Distance Between Us, and E.C. Osondu,  author of This House Is Not For Sale. Grande spoke about her place in American culture, her feelings of being intimidated, of not belonging no matter the success she'd achieved, of being mistaken at a literary event, for example, for the hired help,  of feelings she had navigating invisibility and, in spite of all this, how she claimed her space in the world by picking up a pen.

E. C. Osondu

As we all know this comes at a time when the status of immigrants is ever more precarious, when it is more important than ever to claim this country's heritage as a nation made great by immigrants.  So what a joy  it was to hear from Angie Kim - her novel Miracle Creek, framed as a courtroom thriller, a book which unpacks the experience of being a child of immigrants,  and of her father's experience of feeling reduced to the status of a child who could not speak the language or express himself with his customary sophistication.

At times like this I find myself reflecting that I too am an immigrant - that when I arrived in Boston, although I spoke the language, adjustment to American culture was deeply unsettling to my sense of self. A feeling of disconnect and of being "other"  has followed me all my life.  It is a sense that resurfaced when my husband and I  joined the American Foreign Service. I once again found myself living in foreign cultures as an alien - as an outsider.  I am well aware that my experience was cushioned.  I did not have to struggle financially.  I did not face racism.

And yet. And yet. And yet.

The painful experience of cultural adjustment, of never quite adjusting, of always remaining an outsider, of always being considered by others to be OTHER, has been an abiding aspect of my life.

I would not frame this as entirely negative, however.  It is otherness in literature which draws and compels me, also otherness in friendship and in love.  My closest friends, and the men I have loved tend to be iconoclasts, to feel themselves as "other" rather than happily swimming with the mainstream. So then, I wonder how much more intensely was this experience felt by the writers we heard from this evening?

We heard from Eugenia Kim, and from Melissa Rivero - author of The Affairs of the Falcons.  Rivero is an immigrant from Peru, who arrived in this country as an undocumented toddler. Her novel describes what it meant to come to terms with her status - always under the surface of who she was - she, who has become the mother of two, a lawyer - and now an award winning novelist.

I believe all of us came away from the evening with hearts full of gratitude and admiration. I'm excited to read their important books and discuss them with my friends and fellow readers.

                                                                               

Melissa Rivero who won the award this evening

wife, writer, editor

''Everyone needs a wife; even wives need wives," Meg Wolitzer says in her novel... The Wife.  So too, does every writer needs an editor.  But where does the writer leave off and the editor begin? And what if the editor also becomes the edited - not for the better, but as a less celebrated, more shrouded version of who she might have been without that writer in her life?

When you read a lot, books tend to converse with each other in your head. Right now in mine The Wife by Meg Wolitzer is conversing with Erica Jong's Fear of Flying - both of which I read for different book clubs.


"Wives tend, they hover," Wolitzer writes. "Their ears are twin sensitive instruments, satellites picking up the slightest scrap of dissatisfaction. Wives bring broth, we bring paper clips, we bring ourselves and our pliant, warm bodies.  We know just what to say to the men who for some reason have a great deal of trouble taking consistent care of themselves or anyone else."

Her novel addresses the fallout of this function of being a wife - in the lives of Joe and Joan Castleman.  It opens on a plane to Helsinki, where they are flying so that Joe Castleman can receive the Helsinki Prize for Fiction. The novel is narrated by Joan, who has decided she's going to leave him, and as the story unfolds we grow to understand just how much she's had to do with making Joe into the acclaimed writer he is.

She meets him as a talented writing student of Joe's at Smith College.  They begin an affair which blossoms into marriage and then into other collaborations.  She stops writing her own work, gets an editing job, raises his children, disregards his infidelities and makes him who he is in the eyes of the world.

I became a wife (for the second time) in the 1980s, so some of the  things that concern a wife in those far off decades happened to me as well:  the folding down of my own career in favor of my husband's.  Over the years I've reflected with surprise on how I ( or we) never even considered the possibility that I might continue working at the New Yorker magazine when my husband was offered a job as a US Foreign Service Officer.  I've pondered this when watching my daughter and daughter-in-law conducting themselves and weighing their options.  Both have lived in separate countries from their partners on occasion, and pursued their own career ambitions.  I admire them for it.  Why didn't it occur to me to do the same?  Instead, I thought -well, I'm a woman; his career is more important to his self esteem than mine is to me -and me - well, I can have children - I can diversify!

It all worked out in its own way, I guess.  I didn't publish as much as I would have liked - as I left my tribe in the writing world to join a different tribe.  I learned some languages, traveled and raised my children.  Now I'm the age of Joan Castleman in The Wife, and doing my own thing at last.  You might say that together with Joe,  Joan also has an interesting and rewarding life - but it wasn't one where she got the same recognition or accolades as her husband.

In fact, early in the book she decides that bowing out is the sensible path - when she meets a famous novelist -  Elaine Mozell, who takes her on one side and tells her "Don't do it.... Don't think you can get their attention," she tells Joan .".. The men who write the reviews, who run the publishing houses, who edit the papers, the magazines, who decide who gets to be taken seriously, who gets put up on a pedestal for the rest of their lives.  Who gets to be King Shit.... I guess you could call it a conspiracy to keep the women's voices hushed and tiny and the men's voices loud," she says.

This brings me back to Erica Jong's Fear of Flying. She writes about how women writers are marginalized and  "confined to the ghetto of popular culture" - and when I read Fear of Flying last month I realized that up until now I had done this to  Erica Jong too. She deserved to be considered more seriously than she is.  This novel has stood the test of time far far better than, say, John Updike, whose Rabbit Run I wanted to hurl across the room for its misogyny and self satisfaction.

Meg Wolitzer is funny and insightful when she writes about this particular generation of male writers - the Updike generation.  I laughed out loud on several occasions, reading about "Butternut Peak" writer's summer conference - a take on Bread Loaf  and "all the narcissism and unpleasantness let loose among the scrub pines." Also the untalented but beautiful Merry Cheslin who Joe has an affair with at the conference. Joan Castleman breaks down in front of some of the other wives over this affair and then wonders why the talentless but beautiful Merry Cheslin got to her so much.  She asks herself, "what if talent wasn't simply meaningless. But was actually a liability? Did he like her more because she was a bad writer? Did it make him feel safe sliding along the body of a woman who would never be a great challenge to him? Yes, it did."  I guess this would be the kind of occasion where a "wife" is not what you want - even if you may need one.  You want to be seen as a self-made man - not as one edited and shaped by a wife who knows all your flaws and foibles!

There's so much incidental observation that resonates in this novel: Joan's envy of the woman who lives alone in a manless world and runs a book club;  her take on the would-be biographer of Joe Castleman - Nathaniel Bone, a sort of Rick Moody type whose real subject is "not Joe's short story at all but Nathaniel Bone's intelligence";  about the successful feminist and new kind of woman writer Valerian Qaanaag,  "Better to stay among the dinosaurs like Joe and Lev and the others," Joan Castleman feels ."Better to be miserable and feel cheated than to welcome this new breed that I didn't understand and for whom I had no affection."

And what about how Joan's daughters had their father's love but not his attention - "which was something else entirely"; about their son David and his troubles, and how  this son absorbed on a visceral level all that was wrong in his parents' marriage and was gas-lighted because of it.  So so good.  Written with such a light touch, but oh so deep and insightful.

#megwolitzerwife #editorwife

bloomland is an extraordinary debut

As a book seller and book reviewer, I'm among the lucky ones who receives piles of galleys for free.  It's almost as if books are breeding in my house. They just keep showing up - through the mail, via publishing reps, from writer friends and so forth.  And while I always intend to read the books I bring home, before I know it, I'm all backed up and don't have time to crack them all. It could be I'm struggling through to the end of something else which has a deadline.  Deadlines are good for motivation but they do sometimes squeeze out other books which look just as promising.

So then along came this novel- sent to me by an independent press - Dzanc  - whose titles have interested me before. I put it in one of the piles and there it sat for a week or so, and then one afternoon, in the middle of reading something else, I picked it up thinking I'd just get a little flavor of it. Then I began to read more deeply and before I knew it, I could not stop.

extraordinary debut novel by John Englehardt

The first thing I noticed was something that, in the hands of a less skilled writer, might  have been contrived.  That is, the author John Englehardt has chosen to write in 2nd person, a tricky voice to handle.  It turns out to have been a brilliant choice. Because the story involves several disaffected people and culminates in a mass shooting, it needs to be handled with care, with an imposed distance but also with absolute truth, if it's going to avoid the pitfalls of sentimentality and sensationalism.  

Englehardt's writing is pitch perfect.  I stopped and marveled at times, and pondered what I was reading,  and as I read some surprising and interesting questions emerged.  Ordinary lives are interrupted by a dramatic, tragic and unnecessary shooting. But what was the journey of those lives before the shooting happened?  How in the wake of a shooting can you get back to the genuine, to the mundane,  because "you're constantly re-learning that to dig up a memory with nostalgia is to erase it."  What happens when a marriage grows stale but you can't get out (and no - it isn't the shooter's life we're talking about here).  What happens to people who have run through their marriage, when rejecting a partner "is like rejecting yourself - that the two of you have gone so far down a road together that no one else could possibly understand who you are."    

I'd only got to page 37 but I was deep in these questions about an ordinary marriage.  Speaker Eddie goes with his wife Casey to a club called the Riot Room where a band called Brutal Push "plays what sounds like a slow motion funeral procession. "   The song ends and Eddie observes, "you try to remember that the reason you came here was to show how solicitous you could be. But you realize what's scary about this place is not that she prefers it to you, but that there's a good reason why she likes it here. ...She has to be bothered by the fact that your fights are like earthworms growing new heads after getting torn apart.  And maybe she's closer to finding out why than you will ever be. .... She is waiting in the wraith-like smoke for a deeper understanding that is separate from you.  She wants to discern the exact reason why sound can carry so much that it becomes deafening, why love can mature into a void."

Wow.

I hardly put this novel down until I had finished, and when I finished,  I read the final, stunning paragraph several times over.  Then I just sort of sat there, trying to let it sink in and settle.  Bloomland stayed with me for days.  Now I want to read it again.

In this story of a mass shooting at a rural university, Englehardt not only gets into the heads of community members, but into the head of the shooter himself, again via the same masterful use of  2nd person.  He gets behind the trauma of a guy who knows that "if you're going to feel sad or scared you must do it in a secret place that even you cannot enter"   and he gets into a community in mourning, even though it's practically impossible  to  "come together" as a community.  because "it ends up isolating those closest to the tragedy only uniting those on the outside who - for some God forsaken reason - are trying to become part of the club."

At 200 pages, Bloomland isn't long, but it's a profound and deeply rewarding book.  I read it months ago, and held off writing about it until now since I wanted my words to help the book get traction. So here it is, folks. This fantastic book comes out in just a few weeks so get yourself off to a bookstore and pick up a copy!

just another pile of books I hope to get around to soon~


#bloomland  #johnenglehardt #debutfiction 

searching for freedom - on reading fear of flying

Would you judge this book by its cover?

When a librarian suggested Fear of Flying by Erica Jong for our Classic Book Discussion group, I was curious to read it again, but also, to be honest,  I was skeptical.  Sure, it sold millions of copies, and was shocking and groundbreaking when it came out in 1973.  But did that make it a classic?   I remembered that Erica Jong used the word cunt a lot in her novel, and admitted to finding it difficult to square her hunger for a male body with feminism.   I also remembered a colleague at the New Yorker, (where I was working when I finally read Fear of Flying in the mid 1980s) saying "Poor Dr. Jong!"  That's because Dr Wing in Fear of Flying was based on Erica Jong's husband.   Do you remember that she coined the term "zipless fuck" which is referenced - surely more for a male audience than for a female one - in the cover picture above? I guess I have thought of Erica Jong as writing for her times.  She says in the novel that we do that to all women writers - we "confine them to the ghetto of popular culture."

But now I've read it again, after many decades, and I didn't remember how good it is!   Could that really have to do with the cover?  Maybe it's because it was such a huge bestseller.  Also the patriarchy spoke up so loudly in its defense that it drowned out female voices I would have liked to hear from more.  Henry Miller just loved Fear of Flying.  As did John Updike.  Having those two behind her, was almost enough to put me off for good.

 But to be fair, Erica Jong had nothing to do with the (admittedly hugely successful) marketing efforts behind this book.  In fact, the book was rebranded after coming out to very little fanfare as literary fiction, with this - for my taste - more interesting cover:

 I've discovered I'm not alone in my perceptions.  I mentioned Fear of Flying to several colleagues at the bookstore - serious readers like me -  who all expressed surprise that I found it to be as much about writing and literature as it is about sex;  more about freedom than sex, per se;  that it's funny, exhilarating, intelligent and insightful and most significantly, stands the test of time.  In Isadora Wing,  women will find a character more easy to identify with than, say, the women in Lisa Taddeo's much touted new book Three Women.*

 The narrator of Fear of Flying, Isadora Wing, is a poet married to psychoanalyst Bennett Wing.  Bennett is a good lover, he has all the mechanics down, but he's totally devoid of emotion.  Isadora feels alone with him. Each orgasm she has with him  "seemed to be made of ice".  Then, at a conference in Vienna which she attends with Bennett, meaning to write an article about it, Isadora falls for Adrian, another psychoanalyst who talks to her, engages her and most importantly, makes her laugh. Even though he can't always get it up, she doesn't care because she's fallen madly in love with him.  Meanwhile, he of course, refuses to say that he loves her.  "How hypocritical to go upstairs with a man you don't want to fuck, leave the one you do sitting there alone, and then, in a state of great excitement fuck the one you don't want to fuck while pretending he's the one you do. That's called fidelity.  That's called civilization and its discontents," Jong writes. 

So Isadora and Adrian drive around Vienna together, getting lost, finding places where they can have sex, laughing at (and with) each other, while Adrian psychoanalyzes her.  He tells her that doctors  like poets, are terrified of death. Doctors hate death, which is why they go into medicine. They also talk about their past relationships. Of one of his lovers Adrian says "she made me feel good - so of course I mistrusted her.  And my wife made me feel guilty so of course I married her.  I was like you.  I didn't trust pleasure or my own impulses.  It frightened the hell out of me to be happy and when I got scared, I got married.  Just like you, love."

Isadora recounts her joyless sexual promiscuity as a student in Italy, and her friendship with another girl there who she needed as a sounding board, in order to enjoy and discuss together their sexual encounters.  She writes about her adolescent fantasies, and her first husband, whose eccentricity and strangeness was precisely what attracted her to him - until he went completely crazy, that is.

 She writes about her early marriage to Bennett, and their move to Heidelberg where he was working as a doctor on the army base, and she was learning to write. She writes about her Jewish background and how  "Gradually I began to realize that none of the subjects I wrote poems about engaged my deepest feelings, that there was a great chasm between what I cared about and what I wrote about.  Why? What was I afraid of? Myself, most of all, it seemed."

She writes about her relationship with her mother and about "the women writers, the women painters - most of them were shy, shrinking, schizoid. Timid in their lives and brave only in their art.  Emily Dickinson, the Brontes, Virginia Woolf, Carson McCullers ... Flannery O'Connor raising peacocks and living with her mother. Sylvia Plath sticking her head into an oven of myth. Georgia O'Keeffe alone in the desert, apparently a survivor. What a group!"

She writes about her publication experience.  Once published, "I had to learn to cope with my own fear of success for one thing and that was almost harder to live with than the fear of failure."

Isadora is looking for freedom: Artistic, emotional, sexual and psychological freedom.  She wonders why freedom looks like desperation.  Finally and most poignantly, she writes about becoming strong - and how it drives the men in her life away.

She writes about the hunters and the exhibitionists who she's afraid will feel insulted if she rebuffs them - and the men who look at her as if they know what she wants until "it suddenly occurred to me that perhaps 90 percent of the men who displayed [this attitude]were really concealing impotence."

Finally she gets to the crux of it all - that is, what happens to women who are truly strong and know what they want. "Suddenly I knew what I had done wrong with Adrian - and why he had left me.  I had broken the basic rule.  I had pursued him...  For the first time in my life I live out a fantasy. I pursue a man I madly desire, and what happens? He goes limp as a waterlogged noodle and refuses me.  ...They wanted their women wanton. They wanted their women wild.  Now women were finally learning to be wanton and wild and what happened? The men wilted!"

I wish this didn't ring true.  But it does.  Never mind trying to square your need for a male body with your feminism.  Try squaring how strong and fulfilled you feel as a woman with correlative male rejection.   In the end, Isadora finds herself alone, and when she is alone, I felt like I was her.  Yes, she winds up going to Bennett's hotel room and running herself a bath in his absence.  You wonder if she'll stay with him or if she'll leave for good.  But it's Isadora alone that you find yourself wanting to be.  She's intelligent and funny, real and brave and even after decades, she's super empowering.

Getting back to  Erica Jong's liberal use of the word cunt.  Quite independently from reading this book - at a dinner party a couple of weeks ago, two friends  were talking about the words cunt and pussy.  One said that for women of her generation (women of Erica Jong's generation, in fact) the word pussy made her uncomfortable.  Cunt, she said, was fine - because it was strong.  Maybe I feel differently. I think I hold the vagina in more esteem than the word cunt suggests.  But there again, perhaps being a free and fully realized woman isn't for pussies at all.  Maybe it's actually for cunts.

* Could be generational, of course, but I read Three Women at the suggestion of a fellow (much younger) bookseller. And felt  in reading it, like I came from another planet.  My  young colleague evidently devoured the book and zipped right through it.  But I found it mildly depressing.  What these women want from intimacy seems so different from what I want.  And what I want always includes a mental, if not intellectual connection, in addition of course, to a sexual/emotional connection. 

long answers need long time in richard powers' overstory

Towards the end of The Overstory, Neelay Mehta, who we follow from misfit childhood into successful video game designer adulthood, asks his staff, "What do all good stories do? They kill you a little. They turn you into something you weren't."

The Overstory will do that to you.  It isn't your usual linear narrative. There isn't a simple plot.  But you will be different when you finish. Your sense of time will change. You'll see that  the people most adjusted to societal norms are also less evolved, if not delusional.  In the words of  Patricia Westerford, a scientist and arborist in the novel, "other creatures, bigger, slower, older, more durable - call the shots,  make the weather, feed creation and create the air."  When you finish reading this book, you'll never see trees in the same way again.

But it isn't easy going.  You won't zip through it.  Reading an epic takes commitment. Several people told me they got bogged down in the middle, as did I. There are so many characters and narrative threads which are hard to keep straight.  But over 500 pages they weave together, branch out and intersect.  They work like the underground root system of the trees which are central to the story. "Forests mend and shape themselves through subterranean synapses," Powers writes. "And in shaping themselves, they shape too, the tens of thousands of other linked creatures that form it from within. Maybe it's useful to think of forests as enormous spreading branching underground supertrees."

 The characters are quirky and unique.  They suffer near death and physical handicap: infertility, deafness, electrocution, bombing, stroke.  Some of them are on the spectrum.  But because of this they are  alert to a different sense of time, and more in tune to nature.

The book opens with the Hoel family who over several generations photograph a Chestnut tree on their farm.  Put all together the hundreds of pictures reveal the slow, purposeful growth of the tree and its long dignified story.   Then there's Olivia Vandergriff, who is promiscuous and superficial until she is electrocuted by a lamp in her bedroom.  She comes out of this near death experience able to hear voices - her spirit guides.  She becomes a leader in an important environmental movement.

We learn how trees communicate with each other. We learn with scientist Patricia Westerford, who is almost deaf, how to listen to trees.  Trees send warning to each other which human beings can't hear.  "Harm was never imminent enough.  Imminent at the speed of people is too late."
 

All the characters - Nick, Mimi, Neelay, Patricia, Olivia, Douglas and others meet up as activists in the Pacific Northwest, to protest deforestation. Together with Nick Hoel,  Olivia lives for a year on a platform in a giant redwood to stop the loggers from bringing it down.  It's transporting. For me, this is the heart and soul of the book.

But do the activists succeed in protecting the trees?  You already know the answer. "People have no idea what time is," says Nick. "They think it's a line, spinning out from three seconds behind them, then vanishing just as fast into the three seconds of fog just ahead.  They can't see that time is one spreading ring wrapped around another, outward and outward until the thinnest skin of Now depends for its being on the enormous mass of everything that has already died."  Ultimately the activists scatter.

"Long answers need long time," Powers writes. "And long time is exactly what's vanishing."  The novel is a serious warning.  This book is not optimistic.  It's epic and prophetic.

But when we've thoroughly ruined the planet for ourselves and human beings can no longer survive here,  the trees will come back.  They will outlast and survive us because they are greater than we are.

#theoverstory #environmentalwarning #treesoverstory

look how happy I'm making you - stories by polly rosenwaike

This afternoon at Politics and Prose bookstore I introduced a beautiful event for Elizabeth Geoghegan's collection of stories eightball - and Polly Rosenwaike's collection Look How Happy I'm Making You.  I have already blogged about Elizabeth's book -and about our friendship going back to my years in Rome, so I wanted to give a shout out for Polly's book too.

Hers is a moving and original collection of stories centered around questions of motherhood.  The stories are laid out pretty much chronologically, along the journey of becoming a mother - ending with stories about early motherhood. For me the most compelling stories deal with the question of when motherhood begins -and what kicks off the maternal instinct.  She explores a variety of early pregnancy experiences, especially the relationship potential mothers have to that time where, in her words, the fetus is "preoccupied with the big ontological stuff: to be or not to be; but at any moment could slip out in this world as clotted blood and fine tissue."

The quotation comes from what, in my view, is the most intimate and well crafted story of the collection "Period, Ellipsis, Full Stop." Here she juxtaposes a character's miscarriage with the editing work she is doing for a client who wants to debate every edit she makes in his work.  One of the flaws in his writing is that he keeps putting ellipses into his stories as a way of pointing towards a climactic moment he isn't capable of actually writing out.  His amateurish stories are written "as if you could set out to be something and get it right the first time, as if the whole of life wasn't about trying again."

I love what this says about the writing process - and also of course about the process of becoming a mother or a child.  I was particularly moved by the way her stories explore so thoroughly that uncertain space, both mentally and physically, in early pregnancy, pre-abortion, pre-miscarriage and conception as well as pre-motherhood and post motherhood.  When you think about it, it's a strange but very real place which almost all women experience one way or another, but I don't think it's ever been explored in quite this way.

Elizabeth and Polly busy signing books

dead men on holiday

On reading Go, Went, Gone by Jenny Erpenpeck.

Refugees cross borders looking for safety in countries that don't want them. It's a critical issue on a global scale right now.  That's why Jenny Erpenbeck's Go, Went, Gone is such an important book.  It's a novel about refugees who have made their way from war torn countries on the African continent to Italy and then to Berlin,  where in the story, a German retiree named Richard finds himself caught up in their lives.  

When the Berlin Wall came down it was a miracle in the lives of all East Germans, including Richard himself, and it led to unexpected prosperity. And so, Richard reasons, "if this prosperity couldn't be attributed to their own personal merit then by the same token the refugees weren't to blame for their reduced circumstances." 

Later in the novel Richard wonders, "have people forgotten in Berlin of all places that a border isn't just measured by an opponent's stature but in fact creates him?"

The Africans who Richard finds himself involved with are, in the words of Eugen Levin-  like "dead men on holiday."  Yes they've made it from Africa into Europe without being killed in civil war or drowning on the way to Europe, but in a sense, it's just a matter of happenstance because "everyone of the African refugees here...is simultaneously alive and dead."

Having found their way to Germany, they find they can't work or even (ultimately) remain in Germany since according to the rules they can only claim political asylum in the country where they first set foot.  Which is Italy.

 But because they can't find work in Italy, they come to Germany - and now they are shuttled from one refugee center to another, unable to work, unable to make headway, unable to connect to the society, but instead desperately mired in an endless convoluted bureaucracy.  "The more highly developed a society is," Erpenbeck observes, "the more its written laws come to replace common sense." 

Thus these men, who do have skills and education, but whose homes and lives have been destroyed, are stripped of their personhood.  They're reduced to nothing. At the outset of his involvement with these men, Richard prepares questions he'd like to ask them. He manages to talk with them (mostly in Italian).  But all the questions he wants to ask are actually beside the point, since the men are stuck in the terrible moments when their boat capsized and their children were drowned before their eyes. They exist in a holding pattern, traumatized by memories of murdered loved ones in their homelands, as well as others lost in their escape.

Some of them wish to cut away their memories.  But "a life in which an empty present is occupied by a memory that one cannot endure, in which the future refuses to show itself must be extremely taxing, Richard thinks, since this is a life without a shoreline, as it were."

While I was reading, I recalled the many African refugees of Rome, where I lived for four years.  You'd see them lining the bridges over the Tiber, spreading blankets which displayed knock off designer handbags for sale.  I remembered one conversation I had with an African trinket seller on the docks in Naples, when I was taking a ferry to Ischia.

He told me he had sometimes worked as a fisherman, but there was no work for him now.  He had no visa or papers and so he sold wooden key chains, beaded purses and beaded bracelets for a living. "But there are many rip off artists here," he told me in Italian. "Not a good place.  Keep your bag inside your coat," he advised me. "People will rob you all over."

I asked how much he made each day? "Some days ten," he said. "Other days twenty or five.  This is not easy." 

There was also a Rwandan refugee I befriended when we lived in Brussels for four years. He came door to door, selling a magazine about African wildlife.   We had many conversations on numerous occasions. He spoke French.  I learned all about his wife and family and how they  had escaped the genocide. He had seen it all.  But all I could do was chat on the doorstep now and again, and give him bags of clothing. 

I remembered too other refugees who have crossed my all too privileged path-  students I taught at NOVA. One came from Sierra Leone. I learned he had walked a thousand miles across the desert during the civil war and somehow made it to political asylum in the United States where he was studying,  in the hopes of becoming a nurse. He hoped to get his daughter out of Sierra Leone, because this was during the Ebola outbreak, but he didn't know how he was going to achieve this.

His name was Moses and he came to class early every day and sat in the front row.  His work was always meticulous and thoughtful.  Then one day he asked me to explain how he could attach a document to an email.  I learned he had only known how to use a computer for two years.   

But he made it through somehow.  He got his nursing credential.  But not without tremendous struggle.  At one stage in the middle of his studies he had tuberculosis of the spine which could have paralyzed him had it not been discovered and treated.  I visited him in hospital. Things looked pretty dire but somehow I managed to contact some of his family members in Florida and help arrange for him to get transferred out of Northern Virginia.  We may try to help people - but somehow the help we offer is never quite enough.

One of the things illuminated in Jenny Erpenpeck's novel is the impossibility of true communication. 

 "To understand what a person means or says," she writes, "it's basically necessary to already know what that person means or is saying.  So is every successful dialogue just an act of recognition? And is understanding not a path, but a condition?"

Later she writes, "In just the same way as the listener always understands more than just words, the act of listening always contains the questions: what should you understand ? What do you want to understand? What will you never understand but want to have confirmed?" 

It's impossibly difficult  for the men in Go, Went, Gone to learn the German language, because they don't know what's going to happen to them next or what it is ultimately for. There are too many ghosts in the room -  there are ghosts all around.  As for our protagonist Richard there are the ghosts of the Holocaust.  And he wonders what questions would lead him to the land of beautiful answers.

Maybe such a land does not exist.  In the end, this novel raises more question than it answers.  Nevertheless, the questions are important to consider.  What is to become of these people? What can be done for the traumatized and lost, those who have lost everything, including their sense of being human.

The meals Richard used to have by himself were comprised of two slices of bread - one topped with cheese, the other with ham.  In the end of the novel, he gives up his knife and fork and private dish and stands at the kitchen counter and scoops up the food together, from the communal pot of African stew and couscous, with all the other Africans in his household.  The richness of this life, and the way in the end these men have opened him up to his own memories, personal failings and heartaches demonstrates the value of embracing a wider community.  But even such  beautiful connections as these are stopgaps on an impossible journey. 

And yet the alternative to reaching across borders and making individual connections is too dreadful to contemplate.  One of the refugees, Osarobo. who Richard tries to help, ultimately rejects his kindness.  Although this is not spelled out, it looks as if he is complicit in a robbery of Richard's home.  Richard tries to contact him afterwards but Osarobo avoids him and disappears from his life. Perhaps Osarobo is too traumatized to be helped.  Even as Richard continues to reach out "he feels that the Osarobo he knows is now flying out into the universe, flying somewhere where there are no longer any rules, where you don't have to take anyone else into consideration but in return you are left forever, completely and irrevocably alone."

on reading julie orringer's flight portfolio

Julie Orringer with Katherine Noel - taken at last nights event

In the middle of Julie Orringer's ambitious new novel The Flight Portfolio one of the characters recounts a German proverb. "It goes like this. Who's most important, the farmer who feeds the cow, the cow who makes the milk, or the girl who milks the cow? None of them.  The most important is the boy who carries the milk to the market.  One wrong step and the work of all the others is lost in an instant."

The proverb demonstrates the crucial role that Varian Fry played during Nazi occupied France. Fry is the protagonist of this historical novel, and in 1940 he spearheaded a rescue operation to get imperiled artists and writers out of France.  It involved first verifying who the importance artists were; then obtaining passports and visas, be they forged or legitimate.  In some cases the artists had to be hidden before they found safe passage to the United States.  The work was done without much cooperation from the United States government, with the exception of some heroic efforts on the part of Hiram Bingham, a vice consul who against State Department guidelines issued hundreds of visas.

You can imagine too, the moral questions besetting such a program. With a limited number of visas on hand, who was deemed worth the opportunity of escape?  In fact, who was worthy of survival?  And what about the question of potential?  There are so many difficult questions.

The novel runs about 550 pages. When you have other reading projects and obligations (which I do) there has to be something great about a book of this complexity and scope that keeps you coming back.  I was immediately drawn into the narrative with the opening sequence where Varian Fry visits the Chagalls.  He must impress upon Chagall the crucial importance of leaving France.  His life is at stake.  But Chagall believes his reputation will protect him. The scene plunges you immediately into the difficulty of Fry's mission.

Over the next several hundred pages we meet many artists and writers of the time, including a lot of surrealists.  There are wonderful scenes where surrealist games are played - all based on fact.  They took up residence at a gorgeous Marseille villa called Air Bel - where they were able briefly to live a different life and escape the horrors of war.  We meet such people as  Hannah Arendt, Max Ernst, Andre Breton and Andre Gide.  Other important figures of the time, like Peggy Guggenheim and Eleanor Roosevelt also make appearances in the book.

But this is historical fiction, and as such it imagines fictional characters too.  Among those is Elliott Grant, an imagined Harvard classmate of Varian Fry who shows up in Marseille with a special request:  to enable the passage out of France of a brilliant young physicist who is the son of a very close friend.  The inclusion of this fictional character lets Orringer open up further provocative questions about race, sexual preference and artistic accomplishment.  How have they influenced our assessments of who and what is deemed worth opportunity and survival.  And yes, as well as being the story of Varian Fry’s courageous rescue operation, this novel is also a love story.

Some critics have taken issue with this.  Writing in the New York Times Cynthia Ostik questions what she refers to as "a knot of intertwined characters, who together come to dominate, even to override, and finally to invade the historical Fry."  But last night at Politics and Prose where I was honored to introduce Julie Orringer's book talk, she explained her reasoning.  After poring over twenty something boxes of memos, letters, memoir drafts and diaries in the Varian Fry archive for ten years, she made sure all historical facts were accurately portrayed.  But at the same time, there was absolutely no doubt in her mind, after reading between the lines, that Varian Fry was gay.  

By the way, the flight portfolio which gives the novel its title, was a portfolio of donated lithographs by artists of the day,  collected with the intention of exhibiting them in the United States, in order to gain support for the cause and demonstrate what was at risk.

This novel is long, there's no question about it. Cynthia Ostik called it "movie tone make-believe" And to be honest in the middle you do get the sense that one more revision would have made the book that much better.  Perhaps it was a revision too far for an author who had been immersed in the complexities of this story for a decade.  So yes, some of the dialog begins to read like a film script, with a lot of exposition, and not so much inner life. Some scenes beg for actors to breathe life and heart into them.

Having said this, the final chapters brought it all together again.  Oh, the love lost.  And the lost lives - lives forfeited for no better reason than that others were spared instead. Also, the dreadful sense that in spite of the countless heroic rescue efforts accomplished, there might always be more that didn't happen.  Underlying this, is Varian's personal heartache from which you sense he may never recover. For me, this made Fry's nobility, Fry's actual person more vivid, rather than less so.  Very personal emotional struggles certainly lie behind great heroic public deeds. 

By the way, during the q&a portion of last night's event one audience member stood up to say that as a girl in Connecticut she was a play mate of Varian Fry's daughter.  When he died suddenly at 59, and everyone read his obituary, they were astonished at the life this man had led during the war.

Some of the things Julie Orringer revealed in her talk last night added still new dimensions to this already complex tour de force of a book. A recording of the talk will be available on the Politics and Prose youtube channel in a few weeks time. I encourage you to listen - and of course to read this incredible book.

#julieorringer #flightportfolio #varianfry