what we talk about when we talk about bookshops

It was our first book discussion of the year  on a snowy January afternoon.  Maybe so many showed up because of the government shut down, one suggested. The museums were closed, and those with furloughed spouses needed some reason to get out of the house!  But whatever the case, there we all were - almost twenty of us sitting round a table in the library, a center of community, and we were all there to discuss Penelope Fitzgerald's The Bookshop.

Protagonist Florence Green is a widow whose imagination has been kindled by a vacant historical building called The Old House.  Having inherited money, she sets about opening a bookshop. "She was not much talked about, not even in Hardborough,"  Fitzgerald tells us, "where everyone could be seen coming over the wide distances and everything seen was discussed. She made small seasonal changes in what she wore.  Everybody knew her winter coat, which was the kind that might just be made to last another year." 

But the bookshop project is doomed from the start. The storage room is damp and cannot be used for books and the Old House is haunted by poltergeists. Then a moneyed arts patron in town explains that she's had her eye on the place for years, intending to turn the Old House into an Art Center.  And while other neighbors wish Florence well, they would really rather have a lending library.

There are very few solid customers. There's the scout who comes in every day after school to read another chapter of I Flew with the Fuher... "he marked the place with a string weighted down with a boiled sweet."  A local painter shows up with his watercolors one day, hoping to exhibit them there, and of course there's Christine Gipping, a ten year old girl who comes in to help.

So many eccentric descriptions in The Bookshop made me laugh out loud.  Christine - for instance, who forms a special bond with Florence, had broken her two front teeth "during the previous winter in rather a strange manner, when the washing on the line froze hard, and she was caught a blow in the face with an icy vest."  Christine has no interest in books at all. She has been sent to help rather than her older sister, since "now the evenings were getting longer her older sister would be up in the bracken with Charlie Cutts."

The establishment of the bookshop is central to Florence's story, but books and reading play a very small part.  It doesn't appear that Florence herself reads much, although at one point she orders two hundred and fifty copies of Lolita and arranges them in a pyramid in the front of the store. Neither does she have a head for marketing or for keeping her accounts straight.  So why, you wonder, did she want so much to open a bookshop?

That's when we realized in our discussion, that when we talk about books and bookshops, we are often really talking about community.  "To leave a mark of any kind was exhilarating,"  Florence reflects at one stage, while walking on the beach.  She is hoping to be seen in some way - to be recognized and part of a community. 

Our book discussion groups which take place every month in the library are a living example of this sort of community.  We can talk about anything when we tie it to the books we read together.  I also work at a bookstore in DC - Politics and Prose. The community forged there is invaluable in Washington - especially during these turbulent political times.  Book events each evening provide an intellectual sanctuary.  But those events are more about getting people into the store than about selling books.  And during the snowy days, the store becomes a destination to get you out of the house.  Where else can you open so many conversations with strangers, by asking what they've been reading?  But without the business sense to back it up, such a community would not be possible.

Florence's battle in The Bookshop is a battle to establish community.  It also reveals class tensions between the affluent people in town who want to establish an Art Center and the local working class people who don't have money to spend on books.  In the end, Florence's enterprise is defeated "but defeat is less unwelcome when you are tired," she reflects sadly.

Penelope Fitzgerald's light touch, and her insight into human nature, seems to make defeat more bearable,  as it does in another of her novels Offshore - where a bohemian family try in vain to live on a dilapidated houseboat.  Fitzgerald's characters have imagination, they are iconoclasts, but they lack practicality and money sense.  Their vision almost, not quite, makes things work. Fitzgerald made her subject their struggles against inevitable failure.  And they have such heart. They companion me and although I don't know why, they give me hope for humanity.

poetry and activisim in the life of carolyn forche

She was a young poet and translator teaching in California.  Sometimes, as she worked, she found it a challenge to distinguish between literal and figurative language in the Spanish language poems she translated. As her friend Claribel Algeria observed, she couldn't seem to understand the conditions from which the poems arose.

But all this changed when Leonel Gomez Vides, a human rights activist and cousin of Claribel, showed up on Carolyn's doorstep with his two young daughters.  He asked her if she was just going to keep writing poetry about herself for the rest of her life.

And so an education began, as laid out in Carolyn Forche's searing memoir What You Have Heard Is True. Leonel was to provide history lessons at her kitchen table, showing her what she had not seen before: Salvadoran history and the inconsistencies in American Foreign Policy,  including in the mysterious death of an American who had traveled to El Salvador under the name of Ronald Richardson. 

Several months later, Carolyn visited Leonel in El Salvador where he “removed the blindfold, and ordered me to open my eyes.”  

He took her to hospitals lacking rudimentary supplies,  dropped her off in remote mountain villages, while going on missions of his own.  Sometimes she wished she hadn't come.  But she wrote her impressions in notebooks, slept on pallets in the huts of the campesinos,  and washed with local women at a spigot of icy water.   She encountered a world where Bible study was enough to get you killed, your body dismembered and scattered to the dogs; where villages were decimated, their inhabitants brutalized in unthinkable ways.

Carolyn writes about a prison/sugar cane farm  that Leonel took her to - instructing her to visit an inmate there and write exactly what she saw.  And what she saw changed her forever.  “The woman who went into the prison in Ahuachapan left herself behind in a barrio called la fosa – the grave. ”

It was at this point in my reading that I had to put the book down - and text Carolyn directly.  But yet I didn't know what to say.  I was so deeply moved by what I'd read,  but the words that came to me seemed empty.  In the end, I sent a namaste. 

What You Have Heard Is True is the account of a young woman's journey from a poet who loved language to a human rights activist who used language to change people's hearts and minds.  The title of the memoir comes from Carolyn's frequently anthologized poem The Colonel. - written following one of her visits to the home of a high ranking military official with Leonel.  It traces her journey through the publication of her collection The Country Between Us and the assassination of Archbishop Óscar Arnulfo Romero, whose last interview Carolyn herself recorded.

Along the way, Carolyn was sometimes given scraps of poetry, written by young poets in El Salvador. They asked her to translate their work while protecting their identities.  "I never saw the young poets again," she writes. "I don't know what happened to them.  If they survived or are among the dead.  Shortly thereafter I wouldn't want to know who people really were or where they lived, where they were going or who their friends were.  After that night I kept poetry mostly to myself."

Except she didn't keep it to herself.  She went on to identify a new genre of poetry and to publish anthologies of this work:  Against Forgetting and Poetry of Witness - the work of poets who cry out from the soul in extremity, at times of persecution.

 I am grateful to have had the privilege of taking classes with Carolyn when I earned my MFA at George Mason University.  Prior to this,  I lived with my husband on the other side of her story -  on the side of the American government, not in El Salvador, but in Argentina.  My husband Ben joined the US Foreign Service in 1985.  We began our service with two years in Venezuela and three in Argentina. Naturally we also have friends in the diplomatic community who served in El Salvador - and let me just say here that they, like us, entered the Foreign Service with the desire to do good for the world but not always knowing how to go about it.

Having said that, I should also add that my husband ran a library in Buenos Aires and ran a program that brought American lawyers to demonstrate the oral tradition of American law and to conduct mock trials and find a way towards answering some important questions. 

In Argentina in the 1980s, I met people who had lost loved ones in the Argentine Dirty War. I taught students at a university there and on one particularly memorable occasion found myself in a difficult spot, when I asked if any of them had attended an Amnesty International  concert for Human Rights which I had gone to.  A rift opened up. My students fell on both sides of the issue - and I realized when I learned this, that in fact, I understood next to nothing about what their country had gone through.

What You Have Heard Is True is a powerful, painful and very brave book.  In writing it, Carolyn has honored those who lost their lives: forgotten ones, and notable ones  but always, always loved ones.   She will be speaking at Politics and Prose on March 20, and I will be honored to introduce her.

moon tiger spirals of memory

 Moon Tiger.  What an evocative title for a novel set in Egypt during the Second World War.  But it's  only deep in the heart of this book, in a love scene between protagonist Claudia and British army officer Tom, that we learn what moon tiger is.  Turns out a moon tiger is a mosquito repellent burning in a spiral, and gradually turning to ash.  When we discover this, we realize that this spiral corresponds to the overlapping memories in Claudia's life,  as she has recounted them in the novel.  She is with her lover Tom only briefly. But he is at the heart of her personal narrative, and we as readers understand this, even as nobody in her life understands.

Is personal history mostly a narrative carried in your head, independent of time and space?  Is destiny just what you make of it?   Claudia is an unconventional historian. In fact, chronology annoys her.  The novel unfolds as she is dying, as she reviews her life in a tumble of thoughts and disconnected associations. There are several voices, different narratives and many streams of thought in this remarkably spare novel.  But reading it feels like experiencing a whole life, a "myriad of Claudias".

There's Claudia's complicated relationship with her brother Gordon, to whom she measures every subsequent man in her life. There's her relationship with daughter Lisa,  a disappointment because, as we learn in other narratives,  Lisa hides her complexity from her mother as much as her mother hides her complexity from Lisa. Then there's Claudia's husband Jasper: "lover, sparing partner, father of her child."

The central section of the novel is set in Egypt - with her lover Tom in Claudia's narrative of her own life - and her losses connected to him.  Thus a difficult, overbearing and contentious personality becomes for the reader a lovable person with heartaches and complexity.

Then there's Claudia's relationship with Laslow - a Hungarian refugee who she takes on much later and who accepts her as she accepts him. Their relationship comes at the end of the book, and it's so  different to the one she has with her daughter.    "Laslow had always allowed his soul to hang out like coat tails and Gordon (her brother)  found this uncongenial.  He did not object to people having souls but preferred them tucked out of sight where they ought to be."

In the end, we find Claudia reading the diary of her lost lover. She has grown old without him.  He died so many years before so she left him in a different time and space.  Tom writes in the diary of the immediacy of life during the war, but  Claudia reflects, "Eventually we contemplate this apart. Years apart we are no longer in the same story...You are left behind in another place and other time....you are in some ways unreachable."

Oh, the inner lives we carry and then let go!  All those inner narratives! They're very different from the lives others conceive for us.  Things that are important to us, are unimportant to others.  Things we care about may matter not one bit, even to those who are closest in our lives.

It's as if we all are islands.  But as Penelope Lively writes, "we all act as hinges, fortuitous links between other people."