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