Category Archives: Prize Winner

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 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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October 30, 2011 · 2:40 pm

City of Glass: the Mystery of Self

                 A few pages into Paul Auster’s City of Glass I realized I’d read the book before. Except this realization proved false, as I soon worked out that I’d read the first few chapters before, but never the whole thing. From this uncanny beginning of recognizing what I thought ought to be unfamiliar, the book proceeded to confirm my initial suspicions: this is a book I’ve read before, but forgotten, as all books are those we have read before, but forgotten – as all people are those we’ve already met. And ourselves? We are perhaps people of convenience, decision makers of circumstance, individuals without a tether: kite strings caught in a hurricane.

The narrative follows Daniel Quinn Paul Auster William Wilson Henry Dark Paul Stillman a character as he wanders the city trying to work out the mystery – or the potential for a mystery – of who is (or might be) (or will be) out to harm Stillman and moreover who is (or might be) (or will be) Daniel Quinn. The plot itself is brief and focused, principally the actions of Quinn, but peppered with thoughtful conversations with other characters that meditate on authorship, credibility and the continuity of self.

A passage to clarify this kind of embedded musing (that masterfully does not annoy as some quasi-philosophical ramblings do, but does not go unnoticed as a passage on Who We Are): “Was ‘fate’ really the word he wanted to use? It seemed like such a ponderous and old-fashioned choice. And yet, as he probed more deeply into it, he discovered that was precisely what he meant to say. Or, if not precisely, it came closer than any other term he could think of. Fate in the sense of what was, of what happened to be. It was something like the word ‘it’ in the phrase ‘it is raining’ or ‘it is night.’ What that ‘it’ referred to Quinn had never known. A generalized condition of things as they were, perhaps; the state of is-ness that was the ground on which the happenings of the world took place” (207-8).

This passage well captures the tone of the book – somewhere between detached third person omniscient (a suitable choice given the premise that the events are being reported by a third person who has stumbled on Quinn’s account recorded in a red notebook) and minimalist. The passage also highlights the preoccupation in the narrative with the parallel opacity of language and selves. In this sense Auster (reasonably we might think) connects the post-structuralist boo-ra-ha-ha about the permanence of language, the (supposed) crisis in epistemology and extends this to the condition of individuals as patchwork pieces continually reconstituted.

The book was written in 1985. An important date only if you’re concerned that these ideas are old hat. Not so, I think. I’m sure there too many narratives written that ask the same questions: who are we? why do stories matter? how can we know anything? anything about ourselves? But Auster’s text is simply masterful in asking these questions as genuine concerns. The narrative wants no answers, it argues against the possibility of answers, instead it contents itself with being as the New York Times Book Review says on the back cover “for all those who seek the truth behind the fictions they read and the fictions they live.” And why shouldn’t I end with the NYTimes? Their words are mine, too.

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