Tag Archives: reading

March 17, 2015 · 5:29 pm

An Unnecessary Woman: Books Break Barriers (and other reflections on why we read)

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is in the middle of its annual “Canada Reads” competition to pick a book all Canadians should read. This year the contest focuses on books that break barriers. Sure, I think, encourage people to read books that might challenge their assumptions and invite an alternative perspective. Except I sort of think this invitation to burst or break (such violent language for such a gentle activity: or is it?) is what all fiction is about, what all reading is for: the space to inhabit perspectives in ways that make you examine (if not *break*) those assumptions you hold that keep others at a distance, or to simply (simply?) travel an unknown story as more than a tourist, but less than a local.

Certainly Rabih Alameddine’s An Unnecessary Woman explores how reading creates this space of exploration. In a powerful passage on the nature of evil, our narrator foregrounds the responsibility that comes with reading, noting “We all try to explain away the Holocaust, Abu Ghraib or the Sabra Massacre by denying that we could ever do anything so horrible. The committers of those crimes are evil, other, bad apples; something in the German or American psyche makes their people susceptible to following orders, drinking the grape Kool-Aid, killing indiscriminately. You believe that you’re the one person who wouldn’t have delivered the electric shocks in the Milgram experiment because those who did must have been emotionally abused by their parents, or had domineering fathers, or were dumped by their spouses. Anything that makes them different from you. When I read a book, I try my best, not always successfully, to let the wall crumble just a bit, the barricade that separates me from the book. I try to be involved” (100 – emphasis added). Yep, that’s it (for me), that’s why I read (or one of the big reasons).

More than an opportunity for introverted exploration, however, the book posits that reading might be enough to make a meaningful life. Our first person protagonist, Aaliya, is a divorcee in Beirut. Deemed “unnecessary” by her family, she takes a job in a bookshop and spends her life reading during the day and translating – from translations – one book a year into Arabic.

[An aside: Beirut is cast as a complex character in the novel, seen as “the Elizabeth Taylor of cities: insane, beautiful, tacky, falling apart, aging, and forever drama laden. She’ll also marry any infatuated suitor who promises to make her life more comfortable, no matter how inappropriate he is” (88). An aside to the aside: you get a sense from these sentences of the beauty of the writing, right?]

Her work of reading and translating attempts a response to the existential question of what makes a life meaningful and worth living. We get glimpses at different points in the novel of others for whom this question has not been satisfactorily resolved: suicides, isolation, destruction. Those, too, for whom the task of making meaning – through the creation of art or parenting, for instance – is insufficient to satisfy the existential question (cue more suicide). For Aaliya the response of reading and translating, while salutary, is, likewise, insufficient. She thinks “Nothing in my life is working. Giants of literature, philosophy and the arts have influenced my life, but what have I done with this life? I remain a speck in a tumultuous universe that has little concern for me. I am no more than dust, a mote – dust to dust. I am a blade of grass upon which the stormtrooper’s boot stomps” (159).

The conflict of the book – such as it is – focuses around this question: how can we individually make meaning of our lives? How might reading and stories help us in this pursuit? (Perhaps its as Aaliya suggests in one of her bleaker moments that “In order to live, I have to blind myself to my infinitesimal dimensions in this infinite universe” (277).)  So while there is this quasi-conflict, one complaint I have with the book is that it’s more a meditation on the beauty, power and influence of reading than it is a complete narrative on its own. Sure there’s a narrative arc, conflict and character development, but these elements seem a secondary interest to the purpose of exploring the magic of words. So I’d give the strong caveat that while I encourage you to read this one for its masterful meditation on the importance of reading and of story, I’d begin reading with lowered expectations for a nuanced or intrinsically satisfying narrative.

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June 5, 2014 · 10:27 pm

Say Her Name: Lessons in (Im)permanence

I heard a story last night while at dinner with P. and E. about a young woman who died suddenly and seemingly without cause. While running this morning I listened to Radiolab’s podcast on “Things” that explored (among other things) how it is that we, human beings, are able to devote ourselves to objects – but more importantly, to other people – when we know, and are constantly reminded, of the impermanence of both.

The two stories helped me make more sense of (or maybe complicated?) Francisco Goldman’s Say Her Name, a memoir that follows Franscico – Frank – as he grieves the death of his wife, Aura, after she dies in a “freak” or “random” accident. While these two threads in the book – grief and the apparent senselessness of her death – weave together (his grief is magnified, he thinks, by the accidental nature of her death; the senselessness of death is magnified by its material influence on those who continue to live), their separation is important – I think – in allowing all readers (and certainly this reader) to put loss into, and out of, scale and perspective.

What do I mean? I mean that because the book thinks about death as both loss *and* impermanence, it lets the reader see the ways we must continuously convince ourselves of the permanence of those we love (and the ways we love them), even while we are confronted, also continuously (and often violently) with the awareness and experience of their (imminent or inevitable) loss.

The book looks at this experience in the grand displays of grief, the bureaucratic consequences of death (lawyers, estates), but also in the mundane and material experience of trying to live in the space formerly occupied by the loved, now dead. It explores the capacity of others to recognize – at the most basic scale of seeing and the more complex of empathy – grief; the urge of others to “fix” and “finish” grief for the grieved; the incapacity of others and society to make space and time for the continuation of loss and the fundamental change to the grieved.

But more than a book about how Frank grieves – much more, really – it is a book about and of Aura. Her life – her liveliness, humour, potential and warmth – “live” on the page (in one of my more cliche descriptions) as character: a superbly drawn, wrenchingly humanized and believable character. The book presents no photos of Aura directly – though it does offer a few traces (shadows) in a way that shows the extent to which the book is not interested in “fixing” Aura in place, not of making her – here in the book – permanent in a way she – and none of us – can ever be, but instead lets her fill the pages and the reader’s imagination with the full force of description, action, belief and dialogue. We know her through the fragments of her writing contained in the book, but what we really know is the Aura Frank experienced. We know her through him and through text and the rendering he offers is simply beautiful.

It is a book worth reading not only for its beautiful writing, its expression of love and its exploration of character, but for its explicit evocation of “relative” scales of grief. Frank knows his loss is not empirically greater, nor his reaction or feelings. What he describes is the absurdity of trying to make such comparisons. Instead the book gives a portrait – a briefly permanent representation – given to each reader, of love, loss, Aura and Franke. It gives to each reader a sort of assurance that here – in words and in the reading of them – we find for the duration of reading a groping towards sense and permanence.

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April 14, 2014 · 11:16 am

Eleanor and Park: Why did I like it so much?

In contrast to my experience reading Vernon God Little, here’s my post about Eleanor and Park that has been languishing as a draft (no memory or writing this! evidence that it’s important for me to blog or else I’ll forget it all!)

If novels are supposed to connect us to stories outside and beyond ourselves, they are also supposed to help us illuminate truths about our own experience that we might not properly understand (or have allowed ourselves to think too much about). Rainbow Rowell’s Eleanor and Park did the latter for me. Even while the novel details experiences I definitely did not have — falling/being in love as a teenager, listening to and appreciating music (I do have a distinct memory of being in grade eight and willing myself to listen to the radio thinking that I’d fit in better if I could sing ‘Barbie Girl’ with the rest of the girls in my class), growing up in an abusive household — its exploration of what it is and feels like to doubt yourself, to doubt your worth/love-ability resonated across both characters.

And… that’s where the draft ends. So… in one of the less-awesome posts I’ve ever written (and about one of the more-awesome books I’ve ever read) I’ll leave it at this. With opportunity to revise if I ever manage to get my little book club together (this is meant to be our first book).

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September 15, 2013 · 9:21 pm

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running: The Arrogance of “I’m soooo busy”

G. bought me Haruki Murakami’s *What I Talk About When I Talk About Running* for my birthday this year. It was a thoughtful gift in that the book combines the things I love best in the world: running, writing and reading. Alas, shortly before my birthday I sustained a concussion and was unable to read or run for several weeks (a near intolerable state). In any case, between the concussion and its recovery (I’m only now able to run 15km at a time) I hesitated to read Murakami’s book. I suspected (rightly) that whatever his intention, I was going to read the book as an indictment against non-runners and a clarion call to pick up my shoes.

Hence reading the book now that I’m able to run again.  And I’m glad I waited. Sure the book is about a lot of other things, among them the “making” of time for things like running, the illumination that comes from solitude, the benefits of self-awareness in defining and reaching goals and the need for determination and courage in meeting these goals. More explicitly the book is also a book about writing and the writers life. A sort of metaphoric welding of how (long distance) running-is-like-writing and how writing-is-like-running: both require determination, focus, sacrifice and solitude.

And both, for Murakami, are to be admired. Oh sure, at several points in the book he makes claims about how these things he does – long distance running or writing – are just his personal preferences and *not* to be mistaken for declarations of what *should* be for everyone, and yet, an unmistakable tone of arrogance and self-satisfied judgements underpins these very claims. For instance, on discussing his choice in shoes, he writes “I like the fact that this brand of shoes doesn’t have any extra bells and whistles. This is just my personal preference nothing more. Each person has his own likes […] They have no gimmicks, no sense of style, no catchy slogan. So to the average consumer, they have little appeal” (92). In setting up the shoes as the bare-bones runners and putting these in contrast with the “average consumer” who will be taken in by “gimmicks” (bright colours? snappy laces?) Murakami implicitly makes himself – the exceptional consumer – one who is wise to the gimmick and a “real” runner. The rest of us, who hold our “personal preferences” just happen to have a crasser preference.

This tone that says on the one hand “to each her own” and the other “but other approaches are inferior” smacks of an arrogance that I found tough to get past. Much as I felt the book was written for me – a reader, a runner, a writer – and much as I could identify with the parallels he drew among these activities, I couldn’t get past the quiet arrogance that permeated the text that argued for these activities as superior. That by taking part in marathons (and Murakami pointed out that he’s also done ultramarathons the *real* marathon in the age of the bucket list and that in his younger years he ran marathons in “good” times inviting, of course, the observation that there are “bad” times) Murakami was proving his credentials as a masochist. Sort of like the colleague who constantly complains of being “sooooo” busy, or the insomniac who takes pleasure in how little sleep he gets “I’m sooooo tired” as if to take you to task for managing your time well, or getting enough sleep for health, or – heaven forbid – enjoy social sports, watching television, running a mere 4:30 marathon and buying shoes in bright colours.

And clearly I do identify with parts of Murakmi’s work and attitude to non-runners. I started out this post, after all, pointing out that I *do* run, talking about how far I run and explaining away my slow arrival to the book. So yes, I see myself in the arrogance of the long-distance runner, and I don’t like it. So perhaps a point of praise in that I like to think I’ll be more deliberate and circumspect in my discussions of exercise.

For all these complaints I’d still suggest the book if you run – or perhaps it would be better still if you didn’t – or write (though it is a book much more about running than writing) because it offers space to think about the deliberate construction of our identities by way of the habits we adopt, practice and come to see as essential to who we are. That these identities must be worked upon and worked over – that we cannot be writers unless we write, nor runners unless we run – but that there is flexibility in these categories, too, that we can call these our identities our own even if we do not inhabit them with perfection or even to our own ideal. That sometimes we can be satisfied with having done the thing at all (but never, in this book at least, if we didn’t bother to try). 

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