Category Archives: Book I’ll Forget I Read

December 2, 2011 · 4:10 pm

Everything is Illuminated: Brilliant.

     So Jonathan Safran Foer sounds like a prat on the radio. He sounds like a self-assured genius, who is maybe also judging you for eating meat. And so I put off reading Everything is Illuminated because I thought it might be infused with self-righteousness or self-congratulatory brilliance. But after finishing the novel I no longer care what Safran Foer sounds like on the radio, or whether he is arrogant and self-congratulatory. I don’t care because the book is brilliant. And so I’ve been (again) reminded that books are not their authors, and while Safran Foer probably is a prat, that’s no reason not to read (and love) his book.

What do I love about it? Let me describe the ways:

Character voice: While the characters themselves appeal to me in the way all brilliant characters do – in their unpredictable, yet believable, reactions; in their failings; in their changes over the course of the novel; in their revelation of something about me – the voices of the characters in this novel are staggering. I don’t simply mean Sasha’s (genius) voice as a translator come to English that reverberates (I’m not sure if that’s the technical word for it, but whatever it is when you’re still hearing the voice hours later), I mean the kind of distinct clarity of a singular character: when grandfather is speaking the diction, the meter, the pacing could only belong to him. The characters are each unique and complex, but they are made exponentially more so by the lilt and precision of their voices.

Form: Postmodern play with form can be annoying. There are occasions, I think, when adding blank pages, or runonsentences, or cacophonous ellipses (if ever there was an oxymoron….) are nothing but authors trying to show that they too have read Paul Auster, William Faulkner, and Kafka, and that they too recognize the dismemberment of form can parallel the collapse in certain truths. But here! But here! Oh but here formal play does not distract, does not serve as formal play for the sake of formal play. Here the introduction of unusual and unexpected formal elements provoke, they punch, they do something to meaning that makes the words mean MORE. And that’s it, I think. That instead of the postmodern ennui, here the formal disintegration is meant to emphasize just how acutely we feel, just how poignant love and loss can be and are, just how sincerely feelings are emphatically FELT. The form makes you feel  – perhaps, and individually, disoriented or annoyed or awed – in order to remind you that living is an exercise in feeling.

Plot: Neither too saccharine or too cold, the simplicity and elegance of this story is brilliant. Unfolding over protracted time, but an isolated location, the plot weaves in ways that both surprise and satisfy. A cliched expression on my part, but nevertheless true.

And then, and then! The questions this novel raises around responsibility to others are devastating. It points a finger at all of us for being selfish, for not being capable of truly understanding the other (in such exact Butlerian terms that I’m tempted to see who wrote their work first), for acting out of cowardice, for acting out of grand delusions of self-importance. It accuses each of us of a piracy of spirit and then says, but you are human, this is the only way you could be, and so perhaps, in this predetermination, you are forgiven.

So yeah, I liked this one.

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November 27, 2011 · 9:15 pm

The Anatomy of a Moment: Delightful (and dense) (like so much good cake)

                         So P. suggested that N.’s suggestion of Javier Cercas’ Anatomy of a Moment might have been an instance of 10-10-12 sabotage. Here I am, seven books from the end, and N. suggests at 450 page (dense) history of the 1981 failed Spanish coup. And I, ever the sucker for recommendations from those I trust, took the bait. Almost two weeks later I’ve finished the thing, so glad I read it, so glad for the recommendation, but not entirely without suspicion. Were these two weeks meant to be gobbled up in order to thwart my success in 10-10-12? Was N. in cahoots with others? Did reading a book detailing the myriad of motivations for taking down a leader leave me deeply suspicious of everyone around me and feed in to my paranoia that other people care less about this reading project than I do? Maybe.

That said, I’m glad I didn’t exchange Anatomy of a Moment for another, much shorter, much more accessible book, in the interests of a speedy read. Because this book needed to be dense, and does so very well in the layering of character, plot sequence, motivation and thematic interest. What, who, and how, does pure politics operate? What investments do public figures have in their legacy? What separates the historical from the fictional (not a question I’m indifferent to!)? For what ought we to blame the leaders of the coup? Anything? What counts as loyalty? What/Are there limits to the function of (the) image in politics?

The book opens and closes with the consideration of Adolofo Suarez’s decision (was it a decision?) not to cower under his seat when the leaders of the coup entered the Spanish Cortes on February 23 1981. Why, Cercas, asks does he remain in his seat? From here, the book widens its scope to consider why General Mellado and Santiago Carrillo also remain in their seats. And then from there, widens further to consider the likely suspects for orchestrating and supporting the coup, and what motivated them. This organizational decision – to focus on characters rather than a chronological sequence – was at first a little disorienting. I felt, perhaps, that I lacked enough basic Spanish history to make sense of the scenes – not knowing enough about Franco, or missing enough of a grounding in Communist history – but as the book unfolds by way of intensive character (and institutions, too, I suppose) studies, these historical threads come together and the disorientation dissolves.

That Cercas initially planned this book as a novel makes these organizational choices somehow read as more appropriate, or less surprising, then had the book set itself out as a traditional history. Maybe that’s my historical fiction bias speaking, but I did appreciate his attention to character, and his willingness to include some absolutely jaw-droppingly gorgeous metaphors and descriptions. And to speculate on psychology. And to allow for the moments that cannot be known by history, but to nevertheless pose the most probable cause/effect. As a good novelist (and good historian!) will do. I think. Here’s one of my more favourite passages, that gives a sense of this kind of poetic of history writing:

“Sometimes you can be loyal to the present only by betraying the past. Sometimes treason is more difficult than loyalty. Sometimes loyalty is a form of courage, but other times it is a form of cowardice. Sometimes loyalty is a form of betrayal and betrayal is a form of loyalty. Maybe we don’t know exactly what loyalty is or what betrayal is. We have an ethics of loyalty, but we don’t have an ethics of betrayal. We need an ethics of betrayal. The hero of retreat is a hero of betrayal” (237).

(Also: what might this ethics of betrayal be? I want to have that conversation.)

Finally, I didn’t believe N. when he told me I was reading a translation. Anne McLean has does a simply tremendous job with the translation. Granted I don’t know Spanish to compare it with, but I do know that this book has an exquisite tone and voice, so in my mind, she’s done very well.

If you’re at all interested in the boundaries of history and fiction, or Spanish history, or the great men of history, or the visual in history, or the outcome of individual acts of rebellion then get yourself a copy of Anatomy of a Moment. (I do stress OR here, any one of those interests would be more then enough to justify reading this book. Or none of those interests. It’s really just worth a read.)

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November 15, 2011 · 1:03 pm

The Awakening: Crushing

      Kate Chopin’s novel begins with a stifled married woman, Edna, who, over the course of the novel, comes to embrace her sexual desires for sexy men (rather than her stodgy husband) and to demand the legitimacy of her female voice. In the closing pages of the novel she says to her would-be lover “I suppose this is what you would call unwomanly, but I have got into a habit of expressing myself. It doesn’t matter to me, and you may think me unwomanly if you like” (175-76). These demands to do and say what she feels and wants divorce Edna from her contemporaries, as her female peers advise her that she’ll be mistaken (!) for a hussy, and male companions either cannot fathom the change (her husband), seek to manipulate her autonomy for their advantage (the creepy Arobin) or cannot stomach a woman who knows what she wants (her ‘soul mate’ Robert). A crushing portrait then of a woman awakening not only, or even principally (though it is for this reason that the book was banned), to her sexual desires, but more to the realization that she can have wants independent of her husband, she can have a voice that says what she thinks. Crushing because no one in her life accepts or even entertains the change in her, she is alternately thought of as deranged or sadistic.

Or at least, this is temporarily the case.

SPOILER: Crushing too because the book ends with a catty female friend telling her – on the catty friend’s deathbed no less! – to “think of her children.” As if in this remonstrance she might succeed in dulling and silencing the Edna’s increasingly authoritative voice and self-confidence. Well in this case this “as if” is accurate. With the recollection of her children, and the abandonment of her feeble lover, Robert, who cannot abide a woman who takes sexual initiative, she drowns herself. And what could be a more appropriate, more poignant ending, then this symbolic drowning out of a lone voice, the crushing of a nascent independence.

I didn’t realize until writing this entry that the book was written in 1899. The tone and diction – “countenance” makes a frequent appearance – suggested this period, but I would have willingly entertained a publication date of 1973 or 2011, such are the resonances with the continued effort on the part of marginalized voices to have their desires heard. I’d not go so far as to suggest (at all) that all women continue to eke out a voice or a self-determine sexuality, rather, I appreciate the model of a character who recognizes her/his desire and also recognizes an insurmountable distance between that desire and the mores of his/her time and place.

All this comes with the inherent assumption (and what an assumption) that individual desires and voices are worth airing and are, irreproachably, paramount. That I grieve the death of Edna testifies to my bias in favour of individualism and my distrust of discourses that regulate the body and the voice, but all the same, at some point, doesn’t someone have to think of the children?

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November 10, 2011 · 5:32 pm

Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret: Unexpected

             I think after years of hearing about how I should read Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret and years of loving Judy Blume, the book itself could only ever disappoint me just a little bit. I mean, I’d already decided that it was THE book for young adult women, even though I didn’t know anything about it.

So yes. I was a little disappointed. I appreciated that the book took on menstruation like it wasn’t something to be horrified by (even though bodies are represented in the text as something alien, independent any maybe out to get you), and made me wish I’d read that part when I was a younger person. Though perhaps that unabashed celebration made the book read as a bit false? (or is it just the case that I was always a little horrified by what my body did/does?) The scene of Margaret buying her first bra with her mother is perfect. The humiliation and excitement are done so well. Ask me about my first bra sometime and I’ll tell you a story.

The God bits are fine. Young girl tries to work out religion. Though Margaret doesn’t ask any actually interesting questions about religion, it’s neat that she embarks on the little journey to find out whether religion is something she wants in her life: a kind of self-reflective questioning we might all do well to practice more of.

So why then disappointed? Because it was somehow *smaller* in scope then I’d imagined. It’s really a disappointment that has to do with inflated expectation and not at all the fault of the book. So those defenders of Judy Blume, relax. Blame me.

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