barbara

Autumnal Tints, by Henry David Thoreau

by

tints

I had to laugh when I started this long essay. Thoreau begins by saying how surprised Europeans and even many Americans are when they first see the spectacular foliage of a New England autumn. Today, we in New England are besieged by RVs and SUVs with out-of-state plates clogging our roads and highways as leaf-peepers from all over chase peak foliage.

My hilarity soon turned to admiration as Thoreau takes us through the season’s offerings, from the purple grasses of late August to the scarlet oaks of late October. His lovely descriptions include what natural science information he has and sometimes lead to larger thoughts.

How they are mixed up, of all species, Oak and Maple and Chestnut and Birch! But Nature is not cluttered with them; she is a perfect husbandman; she stores them all. Consider what a vast crop is thus annually shed on the earth! This, more than any mere grain or seed, is the great harvest of the year. The trees are now repaying the earth with interest what they have taken from it. They are discounting. They are about to add a leaf’s thickness to the depth of the soil.

How many flutterings before they rest quietly in their graves! They that soared so loftily, how contentedly they return to dust again, and are laid low, resigned to lie and decay at the foot of the tree, and afford nourishment to new generations of their kind, as well as to flutter on high! They teach us how to die. One wonders if the time will ever come when men, with their boasted faith in immortality, will lie down as gracefully and as ripe,–with such an Indian-summer serenity will shed their bodies, as they do their hair and nails.

Some sections made me sad, such as the one on elm trees. I have a slight memory of great rows of elm trees from my early childhood before they were decimated by Dutch Elm Disease.

Other sections are thrilling, such as this excerpt from the section on red maples:

How beautiful, when a whole tree is like one great scarlet fruit full of ripe juices, every leaf, from lowest limb to topmost spire, all aglow, especially if you look toward the sun! . . . If such a phenomenon occurred but once, it would be handed down by tradition to posterity, and get into the mythology at last.

I also recognise his personal relationship with certain trees.

I notice a small one, half a mile off across a meadow, against the green wood-side there, a far brighter red than the blossoms of any tree in summer, and more conspicuous. I have observed this tree for several autumns invariably changing earlier than its fellows, just as one tree ripens its fruit earlier than another. It might serve to mark the season, perhaps. I should be sorry, if it were cut down.

One of my favorite maples was cut down last winter and I am missing it greatly just now. However, there are many other trees to wander among and admire, so I will go and do that now. I hope you will join me in appreciating this brilliant season and Thoreau’s appreciative essay.

What trees are you walking among?

Walden, by Henry David Thoreau

by

walden

I have read Walden a few times since I first encountered it in high school. Back then I was charmed as so many are by the idea of going to the woods to live, and thrilled by his bits of philosophy. Despite a heavy load of schoolwork, I still spent as much time as I could outside, among the trees, so it’s no surprise that I adopted as my lifelong personal motto “To be awake is to be alive.”

Later readings brought more informed insight. I learned how close his retreat was to town, for example, and paid more attention to his many visitors. I found that he had pulled together parts of his other essays which explained the resulting crazy quilt structure. The first chapter, though, remains a bit of a slog.

On this reading what struck me most was the chapter titled “The Ponds.” It’s mostly about Walden, of course, but he also briefly describes other nearby ponds: Goose Pond, Flint’s Pond (also known as Sandy Pond), White Pond, and Fair Haven.

When I first read the book as a teenager I lived by and loved the Chesapeake Bay, so I was not terribly impressed by his pond. However, all these decades later, it turns out that I have spent a good part of my life in a small cabin by a pond in Massachusetts. Now I can appreciate his beautifully observed descriptions of the water and woods.

“Walden is blue at one time and green at another, even from the same point of view. Lying between the earth and the heavens, it partakes of the color of both.” Being surrounded, like my pond, by pine and oak woods and blueberry bushes makes it seem like “an amphitheater for some kind of sylvan spectacle.” I recognise his descriptions of the “blue flag (Iris versicolor)” growing along the shore and the hummingbirds in June. He speaks of the transparency of the water and of the stones along the shore, recounting stories of how they came to be formed.

As a naturalist, he traces the pond’s rise and fall, its fluctuating temperature, and its various colors. He also worked as a surveyor and his map of Walden could still be used today. He names the kinds of fish and waterfowl, and detects traces of ancient paths “worn by the feet of aboriginal hunters, and still from time to time unwittingly trodden by the present occupants of the land.” He says of being out on his boat “In such transparent and seemingly bottomless water, reflecting the clouds, I seemed to be floating through the air as in a balloon.”

There is something about a pond, a humble one like mine and his, that invites contemplation. Often I set my books and papers aside just to watch the way the light glints on the water or to listen to the rustle of leaves and pine boughs and the sparkling bird calls. Many evenings I have left the lamp off, preferring instead to watch the way the light fades behind the far woods, the water and sky holding the last of the light, the dark band of trees between.

A field of water betrays the spirit that is in the air. It is continually receiving new life and motion from above. It is intermediate in its nature between land and sky. On land only the grass and trees wave, but the water itself is rippled by the wind. I see where the breeze dashes across it by the streaks or flakes of light.

He speaks of fishing during the midnight hours “from a boat by moonlight, serenaded by owls and foxes, and hearing, from time to time, the creaking note of some unknown bird close at hand.” And of “communicating by a long flaxen line with mysterious nocturnal fishes which had their dwelling forty feet below.”

It was very queer, especially in dark nights, when your thoughts had wandered to vast and cosmogonal themes and other spheres, to feel this faint jerk, which came to interrupt your dreams and link you to Nature again. It seemed as if I might next cast my line upward into the air, as well as downward into this element, which was scarcely more dense. Thus I caught two fishes as it were with one hook.

In the second chapter “Where I Lived and What I Lived For” he says

For the first week, whenever I looked out on the pond it impressed me like a tarn high up on the side of a mountain . . . and, as the sun arose, I saw it throwing off its nightly clothing of mist, and here and there, by degrees, its soft ripples or its smooth reflecting surface was revealed, while the mists, like ghosts, were stealthily withdrawing in every direction into the woods, as at the breaking up of some nocturnal conventicle.

I too have watched the way the mist drifts across the surface or sometimes rises in columns. I’ve heard a loon calling in the twilight and watched otters play by the bank.

He tells of an old man who lived by the pond before the revolution who told him that there was an iron chest at the bottom of the pond. Similarly, we have stories of the pond next to mine where somewhere near the center there is a piano resting on the bottom. We have searched for it, but never found it.

Thoreau says, “A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is the earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.” Just as I return again and again to my pond with its mysterious depths and sparkling surface, so too I treasure books like this where I can find something new each time I return.

How has your reading of this book changed over the years?

“To Die One’s Own Death,” by Jacqueline Rose

by

lrb

London Review of Books Vol. 42 No. 22 · 19 November 2020

Written during the first wave of the pandemic with its soaring death rates made worse by the fumbling response of corrupt governments, and amid accelerating climate catastrophes, Rose’s essay, subtitled “Jacqueline Rose on Freud and his daughter”, looks at how we cope with these repeated blows. If we shut down emotionally and intellectually, “does that leave room to grieve, not just for those who have been lost, but for the broken pieces and muddled fragments that make us who we are?”

Rose takes us back to a similar moment in time: 25 January 1920 when Freud’s favourite daughter, Sophie Halberstadt-Freud, died in the last wave of the Spanish flu. A devastated Austria had lost the war; Freud himself had lost his earlier enthusiasm for his homeland’s role in the war and now supported the breakup of the Austrian Empire. With his family starving, and himself unable even to get to his dying daughter because there were no trains, Freud’s situation was eerily similar to what many experienced during our own pandemic: “the lack of state provision, the missing medical supplies, the dearth of equipment and isolation from human touch have made it feel to many for the first time that death is something of which a person – the one dying, and those closest to her or him – can be robbed.”

He turned to writing, adding the lengthy Chapter Six to Beyond the Pleasure Principle which was published later in 1920. In this chapter, he first presents the idea of a death drive in conflict with our drive for self-preservation, the life drive, deriving it from what “he had first identified in soldiers returning from battle who found themselves reliving their worst experiences in night-time and waking dreams.” He compares this repetition compulsion to his other patients and their resistance to therapy, concluding that “The urge of all organic life is to restore an earlier state of things.”

He carries this idea further to postulate an internal human need to craft our own track to the end of life, regardless of any limit for self-preservation, saying “The organism wishes to die only in its own fashion.” Thus, for victims of wars and pandemics and natural catastrophes, the randomness of their deaths robs them “of the essence of life.”

Rose’s essay continues, supplementing Freud’s ideas from another paper written during WWI, “The Phylogenetic Fantasy,” with current research on inherited trauma to look at how anxiety travels through generations, an anxiety that is a “response to an imperilled world, but also . . . a reaction to the tyranny of the powers that come to meet it.”

There is much more to this essay, and I recommend it to anyone who is looking for new insight into our current state of being. However, I was struck by the idea of an urge to restore an earlier state of things and its relevance to the stories we tell.

Books such as Robert McKee’s Story, Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey, Lisa Cron’s Wired for Story, and Larry Brooks’s Story Engineering describe a basic structure dating back to the Western world’s earliest stories. This ur-story begins with a normal world—troubled but getting by—that is disrupted in some way. Hence novelist John Gardner’s famous saying about all stories being either about going on a journey or a stranger coming to town: the two ways a world is disrupted.

The story then is about the attempts, usually by the main character, to restore their original normal world. But there is no going back, any more than there is for the soldiers reliving their nightmares. Instead, the main character must address not only the events around them but also their internal troubles, now no longer balanced but demanding change. By the end of the story, they are indeed changed, as Gawain returns to Arthur’s Court humbled and contrite after his encounter with the Green Knight, as Elizabeth Bennet enters her marriage realising that she must look beyond her first hasty judgments in order to discover real goodness.

The urge to restore an earlier state of things also makes me think of the nostalgia for a previous age that so many today have succumbed to. Not only do our stories tell us that such a return is impossible, but the image of that previous age is false, usually edited to be more attractive than it actually was. While often that false image has been deliberately created for political purposes, it is also true that our own minds chip away at our memories, according to recent research, subtly changing them each time we recall an incident.

We cannot go back to the time before the pandemic, and how we remember it may not even be reliable. We have been changed by this experience, in ways we may not yet recognise, and we are not yet at the end of it. Eventually, I believe, we will turn to stories to understand, help us grieve, and put the broken pieces back together.

What are you reading or listening to that is helping you better understand this extraordinary time?

Prince Caspian, by C.S. Lewis

by

caspian

When I ran across Matt Mikalatos‘s blog posts on rereading C.S. Lewis’s work, I was inspired to look again at the Narnia books. In Prince Caspian, a sequel to the first book, Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy are about to board a train back to school when they are suddenly whisked off to the world of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, though they do not recognise it at first because over a thousand years have passed.

Narnia is now ruled by Miraz who became Lord Protector of his nephew Caspian upon the death of Caspian IX but now calls himself the king. Miraz prohibits any mention of Old Narnia: the talking animals, dwarves, the dryads and other what we would call mythological beings, and most of all Aslan himself. He dismisses Caspian’s nurse for telling the child such stories and replaces her with a tutor.

Dr. Cornelius turns out to be just as devoted to the old ways but more circumspect, and it is he who warns Caspian to escape when a son is born to Miraz and his wife, thus putting Caspian’s life in danger. Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy, who had become Kings and Queens in Old Narnia are dragged back to help Caspian and the remaining Old Narnians in their attempt to restore the rightful king to his throne.

I came to the Narnia books in my late teens, not as a child, but it was a time in my life when I was on the lookout for magic, spending time in the woods, studying Transcendentalism, and caught up in the 1960s whirl of possibilities. Charmed by the magical aspects of the Narnia books, I found the overtly Christian foundation a little off-putting, though tried to fit it into my then-exploration of different religions. I was also dismayed by the treatment of women and what I now know as colonialism, but recognised where these fit in the context of Lewis’s time.

On rereading the book now, I’m less struck by the religious overtones than by the similarity to today’s political climate. As Mikalatos says:

Imagine, if you will, a political climate in which truth has been completely discarded. Even the history books are full of falsehoods that advance the narrative of those ruling the nation. Stories of the past have been ignored, abused, or outlawed. In the midst of this political rule, certain classes of people have been persecuted, harmed, sent into hiding.

That is the world of Narnia during Prince Caspian.

As Hamlet says: “The time is out of joint—O cursèd spite, / That ever I was born to set it right!” Lewis himself said the book was about the “restoration of the true religion after corruption.” Leaving aside the religious aspect, the theme of a disordered world needing to be set right can’t help but resonate for me as I watch so many people who claim to follow democratic ideals betray them. At one point, after the children have been attacked by a non-talking bear, Lucy says:

“Wouldn’t it be dreadful if some day, in our own world, at home, men started going wild inside, like the animals here, and still looked like men, so that you’d never know which were which?”

Lucy’s question about talking and non-talking animals illustrates a technique that Lewis deploys throughout the book of using pairs as foils or complements. We have Prince Caspian and the four children; the separate narratives of the boys who pursue the war against Miraz and the girls who with Aslan dance and sing and awaken the Old Narnians. The latter pairing carries forward the scene early on when Dr. Cornelius takes young Caspian up to the tower to witness the conjunction of the two stars Tarva, The Lord of Victory, and Alambil, the Lady of Peace, which together indicate a great good is coming to Narnia. Note that both victory and peace are needed.

There’s also the contrast between belief and skepticism. In the first book it was Lucy who first visited Narnia and the others did not believe her. Here, she is the first to see Aslan and the others say they do not believe her, with terrible consequences. Believing in Aslan and the Golden Age of Narnia is what sets Miraz and his people apart from Caspian and his magical beings. I don’t see belief and skepticism as absolute good and evil, though understand why Lewis made them such here. To me, like victory and peace, both are needed.

Lucy’s reaction to not being believed illuminates a more important theme, that of doing the right thing even when no one around you agrees with you. Of course, the difficulty is that even they think they are doing the right thing, though as in this case a deeper look at their motives reveals more complexity. The question of what authority to follow is here handed off to religion, the old religion of Aslan. In our world and as adults this question has become more complex.

Much of my thinking about this book has been informed by Mikalatos’s posts and the ensuing discussions on them. He says of Lewis: “For him this is all about myth and fairy tales and what they signify. The stories we love are all about deeper truths.”

In my creative writing classes I often talk about tackling big ideas. As Donald Maass says in Writing the Breakout Novel:

A breakout novelist needs courage, too: the courage to say something passionately. A breakout novelist believes that what she has to say is not just worth saying, but it is something that must be said. It is a truth that the world needs to hear, an insight without which we would find ourselves diminished.

What deeper truth has a book you’ve read recently explored?

The Shape of a City, by Julien Gracq

by

gracq3-lg

In the 1920s Gracq lived for a time in Nantes. However, being a child at boarding school, only let outside the grounds on vacations and Sundays, his perceptions of the city are fragmented and idiosyncratic.

I lived in the heart of a city that loomed large in my imagination, but which I did not know very well. I was aware of certain landmarks, and familiar with some itineraries, but its substance, and even its smells, never lost their exotic flavor; a city where all the views led only to ill-defined, unexplored, faraway vistas, a loose framework easily absorbed into fiction.

The mysteries of a city we do not know well leave room for the imagination. And the pictures formed by our imagination outlast anything we may learn later, as reflected in the quotation from Baudelaire that provides the book’s title: “The shape of a city, as we all know, changes more quickly than the mortal heart.”

One result of only learning about the city through Sunday afternoon school promenades, is that he understands the structure of the city to be a series of lines radiating out from his school, like a starburst, with no interconnecting lines between them. His mental map does not at all correspond to the two-dimensional paper map of Nantes. As a dedicated map-reader, I’ve long been interested in the interplay between our mental maps and the various other sorts available.

Even if we think we know a city well, it can still surprise us.

There is always that element of surprise when, walking down streets one expects to be ugly . . . we suddenly see them transfigured by a ray of sunshine – like a moment of fleeting happiness. But such a surprise caused by the most insignificant event or impression can also happen elsewhere . . . it could be an unexpected declivity in the road which invites, tempts one to continue in that direction, a very slight turn of a road’s axis which both veils and partially reveals a perspective, a tree leaning over the sidewalk from above the crest of an ancient wall, a pleasing harmony in the rhythm of buildings alternating with free spaces which suddenly catches the eye. Instances when we are overcome by a feeling of how wonderful it would be to linger there, sure that life has regained its normal pace and recovered its guideposts, and that the universe has found a way to renew us and confirm its promises with just one brief, smiling look.

The power of memory and imagination that weave through this portrait of Nantes—a hybrid of memoir, reflections, and travel writing—shows Proust’s influence on Gracq. Here, though, the author is less concerned with the social mores and peoples’ foibles than with the place itself.

His descriptions of various parts of the city are beautiful and evocative, yet somehow wearying. They are mostly unconnected to bits of reverie or even memory beyond the fact of being there as a child. Thus, it’s a bit like seeing someone else’s vacation slides. If I had been to Nantes before, I would have been able to summon my own memories and thoughts, but I haven’t so after a while the descriptions ceased to engage me.

I’m far more interested in his thoughts, such as his meditation on the borderline areas between city and country.

This is perhaps why I am more sensitive than others to the existence of all kinds of boundaries along which the urban fabric tends to fray and unravel, areas neither within nor outside of city limits . . . once we start imagining there is just one step from boundary to frontier . . . Adrift on shreds of inhospitable land, slowly conquered by silence and mired in a sort of catalepsy, I could feel from afar the immense, haunting presence of the city, like that of a giant beast holed up in its lair whose respiration was the only sign of life. In almost every town where I have lived since then, whenever I went for a walk, my steps would automatically direct me toward some point of departure into the country.

With references to Rimbaud, Dickens, and Hugo among others, there is much of interest here even though some parts sag. Readers of his other work, such as The Opposing Shore, know to expect beautiful writing, a slower pace, and an intelligent and well-read companion who challenges us to dig deep into ourselves and our own experiences.

One reviewer said that this book is “a model for how to write about one’s home place[.] … It should be required reading for anyone setting out to describe their home place.”

How would you describe your home city?

If Beale Street Could Talk, by James Baldwin

by

beale

This is a story of young love up against a society determined to keep them apart, yet it’s a story like none you’ve heard before. Tish, 19 years old, and Fonny, 21, have known each other most of their lives, friends first, then lovers, and now pledged to marry. However, in 1970s New York, like today, it can be a crime to be black. Fonny has been jailed for raping a Puerto Rican woman, framed by a white policeman who was still smarting from an earlier encounter with Fonny.

It’s also a story of family, the strength of black families despite the stereotypes that tell you otherwise. Tish’s family not only supports her in her pregnancy but love Fonny as a son, and all—mother, father and sister—join forces to find a way to get him out of jail. Fonny’s family is dominated by his self-righteous mother who believes her religion puts her above others.

It was like there was nothing, nothing, nothing you could ever hope to say to her unless you wanted to pass through the hands of the living God: and He would check it out with her before He answered you.

Fonny’s sisters follow their mother’s lead and there are wonderful snarky scenes between them and Tish’s sister. However, Fonny’s father Frank defies his womenfolk and puts himself on the line to help his son.

“It’s a miracle to realize that somebody loves you.” This is Tish talking about her beloved, but it is also true of the gift of familial love. You can’t take it for granted. One of my friends is concerned about the lack of stories—books, movies, television, news articles—about the strong bonds of love within black families like her own. Something to set against the flood of stories of gangsters and drug dealers, the abused and the abusers. Here is one such story.

I guess it can’t be too often that two people can laugh and make love, too, make love because they are laughing, laugh because they’re making love. The love and the laughter come from the same place: but not many people go there.

Tish’s voice conveys love in a fresh, unsentimental way. It reflects her hard-won understanding of how the world works: when to speak up against injustice, when to just keep going; how to hold onto dreams without getting lost in them. In giving us Tish’s inner thoughts, Baldwin expertly navigates the steady heartbeat of being black in America, almost never shouting, letting the events speak for themselves.

This is also a story about prison and what it does to a man, not just Fonny unjustly locked up, but also his childhood friend Daniel. Only recently released from prison on a charge of which he was innocent, though guilty of holding weed, Daniel is a shadow of his former self. Unfortunately, as Fonny’s alibi, he is also the target of the white policeman determined to make sure Fonny goes down.

The structure of the story reflects another of Baldwin’s themes. While the main storyline follows Tish from when she is three months pregnant to when she gives birth, we constantly dip into the past. Ranging from scenes of their childhood to their attempts to find a loft to rent to the events that led to Fonny’s arrest, Baldwin’s shifts in time are expertly handled, reflecting the rhythms of jazz and blues that he’s known for. More significantly, they summon thoughts about time itself.

Time, the word tolled like the bells of a church. Fonny was doing: time. In six months’ time, our baby would be here. Somewhere, in time, Fonny and I had met; somewhere, in time, we had loved; somewhere, no longer in time, but, now, totally, at time’s mercy, we loved.

The contrast of being in time and being at time’s mercy reflect the long, slow path to equality for the black people brought against their will to this country. I am reminded of the early days of the Civil Rights movement when whites and blacks (though mostly whites) told the protestors to be patient, to set aside their songs and marches, that things were getting better, but slowly.

Things are better than they were in the early 1960s, mostly due to those protesters, but not enough.

This subtle book, full of love, unsettled by the dark currents of racism, is as relevant today as it was when it came out in 1974.

Have you read this book or one of Baldwin’s other novels? What are your thoughts about it?

Night Boat to Tangier, by Kevin Barry

by

barry

Two aging Irish gangsters sit in the Algeciras ferry terminal. It’s October 2018 and, though they’ve been drug dealers since their teens together back in Cork, earning fabulous sums and losing them in failed business deals and their own drug habits, that’s not why they are there waiting for the next boat from Morocco to arrive. They pester the young man behind the hatch in the INFORMACIÓN booth since they don’t understand the Spanish announcements over the PA. He ignores them.

Maurice Hearne and Charlie Redmond sit on a bench just a few yards west of the hatch. They are in their low 50s. The years are rolling out like tide now. There is old weather on their faces, on the hard lines of their jaws, on their chaotic mouths. But they retain – just about – a rakish air.

They are in search of Maurice’s 23-year-old daughter who left Ireland after her mother’s death to wander the earth among other new age travellers. The two men have information—having “persuaded” a young traveller earlier—that she will be coming through the ferry terminal on this day. They hand out missing persons posters and question the tired, distracted passersby.

Dilly Hearne, Charlie says. She’s a small girl. She’s a pretty girl.

She may just possibly have done us over, Maurice says.

It’s in her blood to, Charlie says.

Green eyes, Maurice says. Off the mother she took a lovely set of Protestant eyes.

Cynthia. God rest her. She had the palest green eyes.

They were like the fucking sea, Maurice says.

Among the chapters in the terminal that read like a screenplay are other chapters set in the past, flashbacks that illuminate the incidents that got them to this place. Fractured, as memories are, the flashbacks help us understand the old weather on the men’s faces. “He was more than possessed by his crimes and excesses – he was the gaunt accumulation of them.” They help us understand what it is to be an Irish man riding the wave of the Celtic Tiger and then stranded by its withdrawal and their own failures.

They were hammering into the Powers, the John Jameson, it was breakfast from the bottle and elevenses off the mirror. The child would as well be raised by the cats that sat lazily in what April sun troubled itself to come across the rooftops of Berehaven.

These are damaged men: physically, emotionally, morally. It’s the last that stands out for me. Instead of romanticised gangsters, we get real men and their crimes, the risks and violence, and the effect of all that trauma on their souls. One could complain that there’s no mention of the effects on their victims, other than neglected baby Dilly. Yet that omission comes across as genuine: we are in Maurice and Charlie’s point of view, and how their doings might hurt others is simply not something that would occur to them.

Equally, their limited point of view explains why Cynthia, Maurice’s wife and Dilly’s mother, seems not fully fleshed out. Even when talking about his great love for her, it’s all about Maurice: “He adored Cynthia the first time he saw her. When she turned the twist of a smile on him, he felt like he’d stepped off the earth.” And “The first six months on heroin with Cynthia were the most beautiful days of all time. Love and opiates – this is unimprovable in the human sphere.”

Yet Barry is brilliant with tiny evocative characterisations. Here’s his description of a farmer that Maurice meets in a mental hospital: “Some misfortune netted from the hills of the country, Maurice guessed, who listened to the rain too insistently, maybe, until he took his instructions from the voices within it.”

Barry’s descriptions of place are equally strong, summoning atmosphere through sometimes surprising images:

It was a little after 4 a.m. on a January night. It was in the long, cold sleep of the winter. The shapes of the city were blocked out above the dark river, against the moonless sky. On the southside quays only the ghosts of the place traipsed by the doorways or idled on the steps of the river wall with their stories of old love. The black surface of the river moved the lights of the city about. It was hard not to believe sometimes that we were just the reflection, and that the true life existed down there in the dark water.

In an interview with the LA Times, Barry said “No matter what I’m writing, whether it’s a short story or a novel, it almost always starts with a place. It’s the atmosphere the place gives off, the vibration you get off the place, that’s usually what creates the desire to write something in response to it.”

Algeciras is certainly a perfect place to draw out the contradictions of these characters. Terminals—whether ferry or airport—are liminal spaces, despite the finality of their name. Similarly, stations—bus or railroad—make me feel as though I’ve stepped out of my life into a sort of limbo. What better place to take a hard look at what you’ve done with your life.

The flow of language carries you along irresistibly, page after page, a brilliant example of dialogue where all the meaning is in the subtext. You think it’s just kerfuffle and then you see it’s a lot more. The dialogue is also a great example of how to suggest dialect with word choice and order.

In the same LA Times interview, Barry said of the book, “It’s built on talk . . . It’s built on dialogue. One of the interesting things about Irish people is talk. We love the sounds of our own voices. We talk a lot and say very little. It’s what’s going on under the surface of the talk is what’s interesting.” He also said, “I think every good story or novel has its own kind of tune or a melody, and as a writer what you’re doing is trying to hear the music of it.” It’s that music that lures you on.

It’s true that I’ve been trying to read different voices, and there’s certainly no lack of novels about white male gangsters. Yet I could have happily listened much longer to these two men talk, with their humor and profanity and their evocation of a long friendship. But what makes this book stand out for me, more than its humor, beautiful descriptions and incredible dialogue, is its moral discernment, its subtle depiction of the erosion of the soul.

Have you read any of Kevin Barry’s work?

Permanent Rose, by Hilary McKay

by

rose

I’ve been taking refuge in YA books from the depressing ugliness of some of my adult reading. This series about the Casson family started out fun. It’s a rather madcap family where the mother, flighty Eve, is too busy painting in the garden shed to feed the children, while the father Bill lives in London where he can do his “real art” without being bothered by children underfoot.

Yes, I should have know then.

However, at first it’s rather fun. As in the best MG and YA books, the children take charge. Indigo makes hearty meals to keep Caddy’s strength up while she studies for exams and takes ridiculous driving lessons. She’s a heart-stoppingly incompetent and distracted driver but her teacher , “darling Michael”, is too enamoured to care. Saffy becomes friends with the wheelchair girl who lives nearby when they have an encounter that is half a battle and half a recognition of soulmates, before hatching a daring plan to find Saffy’s inheritance.

In the first book, Saffy’s Angel, we learned that the children are named after colors on the paint chart posted in the dining room: Cadmium is the oldest; then the boy Indigo, with the youngest being Permanent Rose who was so very impermanent at the time of her birth. Saffron, however, can’t find her name on the chart and thus learns that she is adopted.

My irritation with Bill grew, but what kept me reading was my fascination with Rose, a belligerent, truth-speaking child who is—through some trick of genes and chance—a born artist, more of an artist than either parent. She’s fierce in her passions and honesty, and utterly blunt in her exposé of the Casson family dynamics.

In this, the third book in the series, she writes letters to her father—“Darling Daddy,”—describing the desperate happenings at home, hoping that they will persuade him to come home, something that he has ceased doing since acquiring a new girlfriend. Bill, happy in his London life, spending the money he earns on trips to Paris and New York and on Samantha rather than on his cash-strapped family, chooses to believe that Rose is making things up.

She isn’t.

Indigo also pulled at my heartstrings. I have too often seen children bravely take up the slack and act as parents when their own irresponsible and self-indulgent parents prove useless. Sent to buy groceries—“Real food!” as one child demands—Eve returns with cherries and tubes of paint.

I know it’s all meant to be jolly fun and aren’t the children clever to manage on their own, but frankly, it’s all too real to me. I find it heart-breaking. Tempted to strangle Bill and smack Eve, I wanted—if nothing else—to call child services on the pair of them. They obviously “love” the children, but how empty is a declaration of love without a meal behind it or even just noticing that a child is struggling?

My only consolation is the other adults who step in to help the children with a meal or a timely helping hand. And the competence of the children themselves.

The theme of all these books seems to be that quirky families are far more interesting and wonderful than those boring families with regular meals and clothes and parental attention. For me, though, the only thing that matters in these stories is the love—as in care and attention—each child has for the other.

I learned long ago, when still very young myself, that “love is not some wonderful thing that you feel but some hard thing that you do.” As always, I learned that from a book, in this case one by Elizabeth Goudge. In these stories of the Casson family, I don’t see anything I would call love from the parents, only between the children. And that—the absence of parental love—seems to me a tragedy. No wonder Permanent Rose is so belligerent, demanding what she needs and brooking no denial.

Have you read a novel where you had mixed feelings about the characters and the theme?

Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro

by

klara

Klara is an Artificial Friend who, in the first part of this new novel from Ishiguro, is chosen and taken home by 14-year-old Josie. The AFs are apparently companions for the children in this future time: they don’t go out much and have little contact with other children except through “interaction meetings” set up by parents of other “lifted” children.

Although never defined, lifting seems to be the use of genetic engineering to increase children’s future professional and financial success. Josie’s neighbor and best friend, Rick, is unlifted and thus unlikely to be able to get into any college or university. Lifting seems to be the next step for the ambitious parents of our own time who are willing to do anything, break any law, to ensure their offspring get into a top college.

Along with our narrator Klara, we learn about Josie’s home life, the schooling she receives on her “oblong,” and the mysterious illness that threatens her life. It is Klara’s voice that makes this novel work. Befitting a machine, her tone is affectless and a little alien, yet with just enough warmth to beguile the reader.

Klara is constantly learning and adjusting based on her observations. She sees and describes the confusing emotions of the humans around her. She comes to believe that the sun is a healing god who can be approached and petitioned. One member of my book club wondered if perhaps Klara was solar-powered, which would bolster her religion.

The use of AFs harks back to the use of governesses, servants, and slaves to do the emotional work some parents, such as Josie’s mother, are too busy for. This theme of service and its evil twin power—the effects on both the servant and served—is one Ishiguro has explored before, notably in The Remains of the Day.

It is also a theme on the minds of many of us today as we consider the front-line workers who have had to bear the brunt of the pandemic, not just the doctors and nurses, but the workers who delivered meals and groceries and everything else to the doors of those who could afford to hole up at home.

Like so many of today’s dehumanised servers, Klara is considered a thing, an appliance. When Klara accompanies Josie to another home, the mother there asks, “ ‘Are you a guest at all? Or do I treat you like a vacuum cleaner?’ ” Klara is sometimes sent to stand alone in a closet until she is wanted. She does not seem to pass judgment on the humans around her, only to observe. On the other hand, Josie mostly treats her as a person, and even Josie’s distant mother begins to interact with Klara as she would with another person.

What does it mean to be human? Can a machine become human?

I was surprised by my book club and the reviews I read that many if not most people think that Klara is sentient. That she does experience emotion. That she loves Josie.

I’m not so sure. Klara has been programmed to do her duty as an AF which includes a dedication to Josie’s well-being. Klara goes all out to find a cure for Josie’s mysterious illness, but is that love or duty? Is there some essence of humanity that a machine can never have? One character says of human beings that there is ” ‘something unreachable inside each of us. Something that’s unique and won’t transfer.’ ” Is that true or wishful thinking?

These questions are complicated by the genetic tinkering that makes the lifted children into something deliberately built to specifications.

By using Klara as the narrator, Ishiguro leaves many questions open. We keep reading, hoping to understand exactly what Josie’s illness is, why her sister died, what the Cootings machine is. It is never explicit why young people need artificial companions, but here and with the other questions we ponder and perhaps come up with our own explanations.

One of the things that initially confused me is the way Klara describes what she “sees.” She talks about “partitions” which seems to be creating a two-dimensional grid before being able to recognise them as three-dimensional objects. The number of partitions increases when she is struggling (with emotion as some maintain? or with overwhelming input?). The effect is mesmerizing, as for example when a human in front of her appears in multiple partitions, each expressing a different and sometimes conflicting emotion—a brilliant way of illuminating the mix of emotions we feel at any time.

What I like most about this book, and indeed all of Ishiguro’s work, is his willingness to write about big questions. Here he explores the moral dimension of our rapidly changing world—expanding technology, environmental degradation, the ever-increasing wealth gap—in the context of our inevitable mortality and the love that may be the key to our redemption.

What novel have you read that left you pondering the big questions it explores?

The Woman Upstairs, by Claire Messud

by

messud

Anger.

On page one Messud gives us an angry woman. Is that allowed? Women are supposed to tamp down their rage so as not to upset others. And writers are told to work up to an intensity of emotion because if you start with high passion, where can you go from there?

Messud shows us in this brilliant novel. Nora Eldridge is the woman of the title: the quiet single woman who never keeps you awake with loud parties, whose help can be called on when needed, a woman for whom “Once your mother dies, nobody loves you best of all.” A second-grade teacher who regularly calls and visits her elderly father and irregularly sees her married lesbian friend, Nora’s early dreams of becoming a famous artist have withered to her seldom-used “studio” aka the second bedroom.

I was captivated immediately by Nora’s voice. Unlike Barbara Pym’s excellent women, Nora is open about her passions. She says her anger is “not because of all the chores and all the making nice and all the duty of being a woman—or rather, of being me—because maybe these are the burdens of being human.” What she’s angry about is the “hall of mirrors,” a society that is “lost in appearances” where every door that seems to lead to a more authentic life (though she wouldn’t say it that way) just leads to more mirrors.

It’s not just thwarted ambition; it’s the sense that she’s done everything right and ended up empty-handed. Influenced by her now-dead mother’s admonitions to be independent and not rely on an allowance from a husband, she postponed marriage and children to the point where it now seems too late. The idea that turning forty seems like the end to her may seem absurd, given our long and often late-blooming lives, but I know many women feel that way.

Meeting a professional artist, a successful woman on the verge of breaking out to international fame, sends Nora into unknown territory. Italian Serena Shahid has come to Cambridge, Massachusetts in this beginning of the 21st century with her husband, Lebanese Skandar, for his year-long fellowship at Harvard. When their son Reza appears in Nora’s classroom, Nora falls in love with him, and ultimately with both of his parents.

As they become friends, Serena asks Nora to share a studio with her, not only prompting Nora to take up her own art again, but also giving her the chance to be around a “real” artist at work.

I’ve heard often from writers and artists about their feelings of imposter syndrome and certainly felt it myself at the beginning of my career. If you’re not careful, the goal post of deciding you are a real writer or artist can keep moving: completing the novel, publication, achieving a certain sales number, bestseller, matching some perceived rival’s status. The only way off the hamster wheel is to accept in your heart of hearts that, as Julia Cameron says, since you create, you are an artist, whatever your medium.

Messud raises valid questions about what it means to be an artist. Does it mean, if you don’t want to simply work in obscurity, sucking up to the pretentious gatekeepers, those who schedule shows and write reviews and hang out with the “right” people? What must you sacrifice? What do you have to tell yourself?

I’m rarely angry, but I could relate to Nora. Plus the questions raised are ones I have long been interested in. As a memoirist and teacher of memoir-writing, ethical questions around creating abound. Even more, though, ever since the women’s movement of the 1970s I’ve been fascinated by the choices women make within the changing and unchanging constrictions of our society.

The writing is amazing. Nora’s voice just would not let me go as her relationship to her art, to the members of the Shahib family, to herself, all twist and turn, tangle and untangle. I’ve rarely encountered such an inhabited voice, one that leaves me feeling as though I truly know this woman. The passion in her voice is sculpted with a poet’s concision for maximum effect.

I always understood that the great dilemma of my mother’s life had been to glimpse freedom too late, at too high a price. She was of the generation for which the rules changed halfway, born into a world of pressed linens and three-course dinners and hairsprayed updos, in which women were educated and then deployed for domestic purposes — rather like using an elaborately embroidered tablecloth on which to serve messy children their breakfast.

Each phrase is so perfect: “deployed for domestic purposes!”

I especially relished the descriptions of the art: Serena’s Wonderland installation, Nora’s tiny boxes, each a room in a famous woman artist’s life. The ending felt a bit rushed, but satisfying. It left me speculating about what Nora would do next.

What novel have you read that cast a new light on your own experience?