justin

This is a romance in the original meaning of the word: not a love story so much as a tale of fabulous doings. One of the characters asks, ” ‘What succour, what consolation is there in truth, compared to a story?'” A writer after my own heart, in other words.

Margaret lives with her parents over the bookstore where she and her father spend their quiet days while her mother recedes further and further into her own world. The story opens with her receiving a letter from a reclusive writer, Vida Winter, asking Margaret to write her biography. Mystery surrounds the famous author, whose first book was originally entitled Thirteen Tales of Change and Desperation but only contained twelve stories. Although the title was fixed in later editions, fascination with the missing story lingered.

Stories help us make sense of our lives. Chaos is reduced to blocks laid end to end to create a narrative arc: a beginning, a middle, an end. What is the missing story, the story that hasn’t been written? It is all about possibility, about knowledge kept secret and half-forgotten histories.

I’m such a book nerd that I love to read books about books. Christopher Morley’s Parnassus on Wheels about a man who takes to the road with a tinker’s wagon lined with used books made me think I’d discovered the perfect life. Bookshelves lined the outside of the horse-drawn wagon, so he only has to lift the flaps to open his portable bookstore. When I visited my son in Madrid a few years ago, I was tickled to notice, down a narrow side street, a man doing the same thing: lifting wooden covers to reveal bookshelves attached to the stone walls of the street. Of course we had to stop and buy some books! Other books about books that I’ve enjoyed are A.S. Byatt’s Possession, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, Dai Sijie’s Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, and Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s The Shadow of the Wind. The idea of a Cemetery of Forgotten Books utterly beguiled me.

So I should have loved this book which is so clearly based on Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, with subtle references to many other books, such as The Woman in White and The Turn of the Screw. There’s a ride across the moors out of The Secret Garden and an unwelcoming housekeeper reminiscent of Rebecca.

In fact, the list above is the core of my slight reservation about the book. It’s certainly an enjoyable read. A selection for one of my book clubs, I picked it up at the end of a stressful week and found it just the thing for a relaxing evening. Although I saw the ending coming, the main plot still engaged my interest enough to keep me reading. But I found it a bit too derivative. At times I felt the story being twisted to match the Bronte books. The persistent coherences distracted me from the story and probably contributed to my seeing through the various smokescreens to guess the ending. Or endings, I should say, as there are several.

Having said that, I must add that the book is very well written and an intelligent and absorbing read. The most effective characters, those that come alive for me, are Margaret, her father, and Hester the governess. Perhaps that is because they are not so obviously based on characters from the other novels. And the story that intrigued me the most was one that has nothing to do with Jane or Heathcliff: the story of Margaret’s home life, that disappearing mother, her father’s gentle care of her. Not the fabulous doings, the romance, the madness, but what happens in the family. I’m left thinking Setterfield actually does better without the crutch of better-known books, so while I enjoyed the hide-and-seek game of literary references, I look forward to her next book.

I recently reread this book of journal excerpts in preparation for a discussion of Sarton’s poetry that I was scheduled to lead. I first read the book over thirty years ago, and I was completely blown away by it.

Sarton published this journal in order to correct the mistaken impression created by her memoir Plant Dreaming Deep which described her life since moving in 1956 from the Boston area to Nelson, a small town in New Hampshire, where she bought a white frame house and proceeded to create a garden and a home. In the memoir, she also described the people she met in Nelson: Pearley Cole who cut her fields with a scythe, Bessie Lyman from the parsonage who addressed her in Turkish, Quig who made violins and painted, the Warners who cut the hay in her meadow with a team of horses.

Her life in Nelson sounded idyllic to many readers, so in Journal of a Solitude Sarton set out to tell the truth about what it was like for her to live alone for the first time, in a strange town, while wrestling with her first house, a house where the well ran dry in drought and let in marauding squirrels. She writes frankly about loneliness and depression and winter that never seems to end. But also about arranging flowers from her garden and entertaining friends in her first real home. And poetry.

Not having read the earlier memoir, I didn’t realise that this book was supposed to dampen my enthusiasm. I fell in love with the book and read it over and over. She seemed to be speaking directly to me. I too was living alone, trying to write, creating a home in bleak, beloved New England.

I fell in love as well with Sarton’s life, even as I despaired of ever having anything like it. What was not to love? She wrote poetry all morning, gardened in the afternoon, had a wide circle of friends—goodness, in her youth she had known and been encouraged by none other than Virginia Woolf! I skimmed over Sarton’s complaints that the critics ignored her work, her formalist poems running counter to the free-wheeling trend of the times. She seemed very successful to me. Didn’t Norton continue to publish her poetry collections? I somehow missed the fact that she had to teach classes and Wellesley and go on speaking tours in order to make a living.

I missed also that she was so much older than I. Born in 1912 in Belgium, brought to this country by her parents after the outbreak of the Great War, she wrote these journal entries the year she turned 59. Now I have to laugh at my youthful self: how could I, so much younger, expect to have achieved what had taken her so many decades to attain?

I was not the only one who fell in love with Sarton and her life through this journal. Arriving in the early days of the Women’s Movement, it seemed a model for how a creative woman could lead an independent and rewarding existence. Young women swelled her fan base and made her for the first time able to live off of her writing alone. We bought her journals, which continued to appear every few years, her novels and her poetry.

Now I am almost the age she was when she wrote this journal. Rereading it for the first time, I ruefully acknowledge that my earlier despair was groundless. If I haven’t achieved her success as a writer (being nowhere near as good a poet), I have created a life for myself that balances friends and solitude, writing and earning. And one that is full of beauty: sunlight on the trees, birds at the feeder, roses on the table. A perfect life.

I must also acknowledge what an influence she has had on my life. Even though we never met, her example gave me courage over the years to stick to my unorthodox path. Reading this journal now, I don’t see the strong, independent woman I remember. Instead, I see the loneliness of a woman who is not solitary by nature and the persistence needed in her struggle to succeed as a writer. And I recognise my debt to her.

I enjoyed this short story collection immensely. The author was new to me, selected by one of my book clubs. Unlike Olive Kitteridge which I blogged about a few weeks ago, each story here stands alone.

Some people dislike reading short stories because of the effort required to get into a new set of characters and situations; once having made that investment, it can be frustrating to have the story end after a couple of dozen pages. However, I find short stories are perfect for when I have only a little bit of time to read, such as during my half-hour lunch. Also, I appreciate the punch they deliver, heightened by the compression necessitated by the short form.

What does tie the collection together is the author’s unsentimental compassion for his characters. And his generosity. And his remarkable writing.

In “Bastogne”, a man visits the Belgian village where his father fought in the Second World War. This is a story about love. Faced with his own mortality, the narrator moves back and forth in time, weaving his father’s tales into the threads of his own life, and those of his mother, his wife and young son.

Only a very good writer can handle this kind of impressionistic style without irritating me, and McNally is very good indeed. Instead of using linear time to create the narrative arc, McNally uses certain images—dogs, an apple-cheeked nurse, a burning tank—coming back to them again and again, finding a deeper meaning each time. The other thing that he does very well is include specific detail, for example about the design flaw in the original Jeep or Goring’s airdrop of meat paste or Russian-trained dogs. And in the midst of all this detail he can throw in a stunner of a sentence that makes me catch my breath. (I was going to give an example, but they’re not the same out of context.)

Another story that I particularly liked was “Skin Deep” about Lacey, a teenaged girl working for the summer for some landscapers. Her father is in jail, so she lives with her mother and her mother’s boyfriend, “an indefinitely-suspended-without-pay firefighter”. Her mother—a former Amway saleswoman who now sells their furniture in yard sales to get by and has just decided to be a Broadway agent—believes Lacey’s destiny is to be a star and wants to sign her up for acting classes at the community college. However, skeptical Lacey has been making plans, with the assistance of her father’s lawyer, to go to college in Massachusetts. McNally captures the end-of-summer ennui, the difficulty of finding and holding jobs, the reluctant love for family mingled with exasperation. And he brilliantly captures what it’s like to be a teenaged girl getting ready to leave home and starting to see her family with objective eyes.

The last story, too, the title story, affected me deeply, resonating with “Bastogne” and its themes. Shortly after his father’s death, Thomas visits Paris with his wife and their young daughter. Paris is where his wife lived and loved before she returned to the States and met him. I loved the image of the gateway itself, a huge arch in St. Louis, the “gateway to the West”, Thomas’s home town where he returned after failing as a screenwriter in Hollywood and became a real-estate agent. Dreams not just deferred but abandoned. And I had to stop and think about mortality and love and parents and children when Thomas says, “People used to call my father The Colossus; then he died; and eventually, not that far into the future, there will be nobody left alive to remember the things he said and did. But when I was a boy, he explained to me the history of the world . . .”

These are real lives, stories from the heartland. I highly recommend this collection.

I had an odd experience with this book. For some reason, I had it in my head that this was a memoir, perhaps because before I started it, some people in my book club compared it to The Glass Castle, an excellent memoir by Jeannette Walls that we read a few years ago. I ordered Caucasia through the library, so I didn't see which section it came from. I didn't look at the back cover or flaps; just started reading. Yes, I noticed the author's name on the cover didn’t match the main character’s, but she says right away that she has changed her name.

So, thinking that it was a true story, I thought it brilliant. Really captured the time period—Boston during the Civil Rights era (which, yes, I remember well)—and laid out some very interesting issues re race. The narrator, Birdie, and her sister are daughters of a bi-racial family: their mother is Caucasian and their father is African-American. By the luck of the gene pool, Birdie can pass for white while the sister has obviously African-American features and coloring.

The father is a scholar, who disapproves of the mother’s activitism and the rather dangerous people she begins to hang around with as she becomes involved with a wing of the Civil Rights movement who believe violence is the answer. The parents separate, the sister going with their father and his new (African-American) girlfriend, Carmen, to Brazil while Birdie goes with their mother and begins a new life as a white girl, moving around to avoid the consequences of the mother’s activism, but eventually settling in New Hampshire.

I did think the bond between the sisters almost too good to be true, but maybe not everyone fought with her sister the way I did, and I was willing to cut the author some slack since truth is often odder than fiction. I read about a quarter of the book before I actually looked at the flaps and realized it was a novel. I can't tell you how disappointed I was! I think that original misunderstanding was why I began to feel that the story—though very well-written—was too far-fetched.

For one thing, certain things were just paired too neatly. One white-looking daughter, one black. A fat, sloppy mother and a hip, gorgeous aunt. One sister overtly favored by their mother’s mother (a wealthy suburbanite), one by Carmen (In fact, I found Carmen's favoritism hard to understand; there seemed no basis for it). Polar opposites always make me suspicious; the world seems more complex than that.

Secondly, parts of the story, starting with the part set in New Hampshire, seemed unrealistic to me. I don’t want to give anything away, but things fall into place for them very easily and the last scraps of their former life seem to float away. To me, the first part of the story was character-driven and the second part more plot-driven, where the exigencies of the plot overrode the nuances of the characters and the complexity of their relationships.

The book raised interesting questions about race, which I thought could have been explored more fully. The weirdness/madness of the father's situation at the end—like a male cat lady—kept me from considering his theories about race. The whole did-she-or-didn't-she of the mother's situation kept me from considering how Birdie felt about being secretly black in white world.

These minor quibbles aside, I think the book is very well-written. The voice was wonderful; Senza really captured the child's and then the teenager's language and world view perfectly. And the period details were added in just the right amount. I loved the way the relationship between Birdie and her mother was developed, the clear-eyed love Birdie had for this flawed woman.

A few weeks ago, in blogging about the Donna Leon book, I mentioned that in the mysteries I like, the detective has a moral code. This code may be openly expressed, as in Robert B. Parker’s books, or it may be shown through the detective’s actions, as in Reginald Hill’s books. Red Harvest takes this concept a step further. Hammett’s first novel was the April selection for one of my book clubs. I hadn’t read it before, though I’d heard it was the basis for Akiro Kurasawa’s Yojimbo and therefore all its descendants. Hammett’s detective is unnamed, but commonly referred to as the Continental Op because he is an employee of the Continental Detective Agency. He is also the narrator of Hammett’s second book, The Dain Curse and several short stories.

The Continental Op is sent to the mining town of Personville, Montana, hired by the newspaper editor to help smoke out corruption, but before they can meet, the editor is murdered. The man’s father, Elihu Willsson, runs the town: he owns the mines, the bank, the two newspapers, the sheriff, etc. He is also the man who brought in the gangsters that his son was trying to nail, brought them in as strike-breakers, but was now powerless to rein them in. Willsson couldn’t openly break with his thugs, the leaders being Pete the Finn, Lew Yard, Max “Whisper” Thaler, because they had too much on him. Elihu Willsson sees his chance to take back his town and hires the Op to clear out the gangsters. The story thus marries two genres, detective fiction and westerns, the first to do so.

Personville—known to its residents as Poisonville—is loosely based on Butte, Montana, where Hammett was sent as a union-buster by Pinkerton. While there, Hammett was traumatized by the lynching of an IWW leader, Frank Little. Hammett suspected other Pinkerton agents may have been involved, but the murder was never solved. The horror stayed with him—Lillian Hellman later wrote that the lynching was “a kind of key to his life”—and it may have been what prompted him later to join the Communist Party. Certainly one of the main characters here is Bill Quint, a labor organizer from Chicago sent out to help the local IWW regain its footing.

Published in 1929, the book was first serialised in Black Mask and is dedicated to its editor, Joseph Thompson Shaw. Shaw demanded tight writing, lots of action, and no dilly-dallying with literary techniques. Within those parameters, Hammett does an amazing job of conveying characters through dialogue and compressed description, such as depicting the Op as “a blond Satan”. The dialogue is full of period slang, portraying these tough guys in their element. Despite the limitations of the first person narration, Hammett enables us to make our own assessment of the Op; his short bursts of dialogue convey when he’s being sarcastic or outright lying, a marvel of compression.

Surprisingly, the murder is solved early in the book, but there are many murders to come, hence the title. This unusual structure keeps the action moving at a clip almost too fast to follow. The most interesting character (for me, anyway) is Dinah Brand, a prostitute, but not the stereotype with a heart of gold; rather, a hand held out for gold. She paints herself as a woman who will do anything for money, but at the same time gives houseroom to a man afflicted with tuberculosis, a disease from which Hammett himself suffered. She is Whisper Thaler’s girlfriend, but manages to thread her way through the town’s corruption and bloodshed, following her personal code.

The Op’s own moral code evolves as the story progresses. His plan for cleaning up the town is to turn the various factions against each other, but as the murder count rises, he finds himself becoming callous and indifferent to the wholesale slaughter around him. He says, “‘Poisonville was beginning to boil out under the lid, and I felt so much like a native that even the memory of my very un-nice part in the boiling didn't keep me from getting twelve solid end-to-end hours of sleep.'” Watching him teeter on the brink of the abyss is the real suspense in this story.

Looking for gentle wisdom and beautiful writing? Try this collection of short stories, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction this year. How I wish I’d read this book when I was younger, back when I read novels to try to understand the world and why people did what they did. These stories tease open the secret chambers of people’s hearts, revealing everyday pettiness and unexpected generosity. In some cases, we find motivations that are hidden even from the person herself.

If I were teaching a writing class, I’d assign this book as an original way to create character. Olive is a retired math teacher living in a small town in Maine. She has a difficult relationship with her son. Her husband, Henry, runs the town pharmacy. Although Olive is only a bit player in some of these stories, we grasp her essence by understanding what’s happened to her former students, by seeing how Henry befriends his mousy assistant in the pharmacy, by hearing her exchange a few words with her neighbors at the grocery store or a local concert. We watch Olive learn in the most unlikely way that a small kindness reaps a greater one.

In a small town everyone knows each other’s business. More than that, their lives are so closely tied up with each other’s that commonalities emerge, as a couple after years of living together come to resemble each other. By exploring the ramifications of a community’s everyday life, this book complements last week’s David Adams Richards book, which dwelt on the tragic consequences of gossip and boredom and self-importance. The tragedies here are smaller but no less painful. They are lightened by those rare moments of grace, when one person recognizes another’s pain or loneliness and speaks a gentle word to soothe it.

What I valued most was the insight into the long marriages, the ebb and flow of affection and loyalty. There are some young people in the book, but most of the stories explore the consciousness of older people, as for example those who have lost a spouse and feel the lack of someone to tell about the small things that have happened during the day.

With Harmon, we sense his unexpected melancholy now that the children are grown and gone. Although he struggled for years with the chaos they brought in their wake, keeping the house in a confusion of bickering and lost ice skates, he misses them now. Not his wife Bonnie, though. She’s taken off: joined a book club, written a recipe book, reinvented her life. She makes things: braids rugs, creates wreaths from dried roses and bayberry, sews quilted jackets. In Harmon’s hardware store, the customers talk about each other, about their hip problems, and he sees their loneliness. He finds himself visiting Daisy Foster, a recent widow. He brings her a doughnut.

It doesn’t sound like much, but really, it is. Patiently, Strout pursues her characters, sometimes catching them in a net, worn soft with years of use; sometimes slipping in the sharp filet knife and laying bare the hollow bones. She captures familiar turns of phase and spreads them before us: “Now was that so hard to do?” “Say, isn’t that something?” Each story is full of small truths, like realising you want to hear that someone is having more trouble with their child than you.

These are working people. We see them in their jobs, with their families, out for meal or a party. We are presented with life in its entirety, life in the round: petty jealousies, small prejudices and intolerances. Yet throughout the book there is, not a sweetness, but a current of acceptance, bracing and salty and aware. We are constantly aware that these people, however flawed, however small their lives, have value.

“Show; don’t tell,” novice writers are told, a cryptic rule which leads some of them to wail, “What does that mean?” Were I teaching an introductory creative writing class, I would use this book as an example.

The first 70 pages (Part I of the book) are almost entirely “telling”. The events preceding the main story are summarized: “The year after Will took over the entire Jameson tract, Owen fell in love with a whimsical, emotional girl named Lula Brower.” So much for falling in love, meat for any number of entire novels. Characters’ motivations, which writers are told to “show” through their actions and reactions, are laid out in plain, declarative sentences: “Nolan was certain of his position and did not like being challenged.” And imagery is made explicit, rather than leaving it for the reader to notice: “These were the gnarled and toughened trees. Like the men, they came to root in tough soil and could not be easily defeated.”

However, as with all rules, once you understand the “show; don’t tell” dictum, you may break it for effect, which is what Richards does here. This is the story of a logging family and the men who work for them in the harsh, 30-below woods. It is also the story of the townspeople whose opinions shift with the wind of rumors born of boredom, envy, greed, or pride. Richards’ incantatory narration is not only appropriate for these simple souls, but also puts the reader at a distance from the story, reminding us that it happened a long time ago (just before and after the Great War) and far away (New Brunswick in the Maritimes), making it over into a legend, something that has been handed down in the oral tradition. The forces that drive the story—unscrupulous labor barons and the damage done by irresponsible rumors—match those common to the stories of that time as well.

Two brothers are left to run their father’s lumber company after his early death, first Will, the golden boy who knows the woods and the trade, and then Owen, the frail, bookish younger brother who wants to read a million books. Once the groundwork is laid, Richards proceeds to show just what life in a lumber camp is like, harsh and brutal. He names the men and their roles: the “Push” who oversees the work, the “tend team” who feeds the horses, and the teamsters who work them: the Belgians, Clydesdales and Percherons. Some of the fallers use axes; some use saws to cut down the great trees, but none of them realise that that in a handful of years, they, their tools, and the horses will all be replaced by the mechanisation that is coming.

Richards takes great risks here, even as his woodsmen risk their lives and horses every time they race downhill in front of sleds carrying tons of timber. When he talks about the men or describes walking through the virgin woods at night with no guide or lamp but instinct and memory, he is not afraid to sound as sentimental as a Stephen Foster song. Many times I found myself thinking Ah, too bad; now he has ruined the book such as when he gives a twist to the title partway through. Yet, like the men hauling logs too heavy and working hours too long for any human to survive, Richards pushes on with his blunt, sometimes even clumsy sentences, refusing to give up. And he brings it off. Inevitably, ineluctably, he carries us away with him into this world and leaves us shaking with the wonder and the tragedy and the humanity of it all.

I’m a big fan of Chabon’s writing. When my book club read The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay some years ago, I didn’t think I would like it because the subject didn’t interest me. However, I was so caught up by the writing that I ended up loving the book. Recently I read (and blogged about) his book of essays, Maps and Legends, one of which has to do with how he came to write this book. Apparently, he stumbled across a phrase book called Say It in Yiddish and was utterly taken with the notion that somewhere there might exist a country or even a town where Yiddish is the primary language and business is conducted in Yiddish by everyone—gas station attendants, hotel clerks, police officers. Where could that be?

This mystery, then, takes place in fictional Sitka, Alaska, a temporary Jewish colony established in 1948. In reality, such an Alaskan safe haven was actually considered by Roosevelt, but of course support for the state of Israel in then Palestine won out. In Chabon’s alternate universe, the District of Sitka is about to revert to Alaskan control, and the Jewish population dispersed. Our moral center in this atmosphere of chaos and fear is Meyer Landsman, a homicide detective who can barely keep his own life together since the collapse of his marriage, leaving him with only alcohol and work to hold onto. Landsman and his half-Tlingit partner investigate the murder of one of Landman’s neighbors.

I like mysteries, and the plotting here is great: twists and turns that shed new light on the clues and put them in a different relationship to each other. As always, Chabon’s writing is a thing of beauty, with marvelous images such as “In the rain the wind shakes rain from the flaps of its overcoat.” Yet, for some reason, I never felt engaged with the story; rather I felt that I was observing it from the outside. However, I must say that the other members of my book club were thoroughly caught up in it.

A friend told me about a puppet show she saw recently, where there was no theatre or curtain. Instead, a man stood operating his puppets in full view of the audience. As a result, she focused on his expertise rather than the story being enacted by the puppets. This, I believe, is what happened to me here: I was so busy admiring Chabon’s cleverness that I never really connected to the story or to Landsman. Perhaps as well, I thought Landsman too much the stereotype of the noir detective. Some of the other characters seemed more complex and interesting: his ex-wife, particularly in her efforts to balance work and personal life, and his partner, particularly in his relationship with his father.

My book club discussed the religious sects described in the book, as well as how some fundamentalist factions in various religions seem to want to “return” their culture to a former time, a past that appears less complicated, when it was easier to be good. Nostalgia for a golden past is part of the human condition. All paradises are lost paradises. The modern world can be terrifying and, like many others, I take comfort in mysteries. There, wrongs are righted and, as P.D. James has said, we are reassured that we live in a moral universe.

In his essay, Chabon goes on to wonder what Europe would look like today if those millions of Jews had never been killed, if they had gone on to have grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Perhaps there would be rural towns where Yiddish is the first language. Perhaps he would have cousins in these towns whom he could visit and family roots he could search out. What does it mean, Chabon asks, to come from a culture that no longer exists and from a language almost no one speaks anymore? Recalling my mother’s obsession with her genealogical researches and her pride in how far back she could trace her family history, I wonder about how we define our identities when we are stripped of language and history. Can this loss ever be freeing, making it easier to engage in the peculiarly American pastime of reinventing ourselves? Or does it always cause alienation, leaving us longing to recreate a past, even a mythical past, where we might feel at home?

This is the twelfth of McPherson's books, but the first I've read. It is made up of two parts: the first, the portrayals, are poems about outsider artists; the second, the trails, longer poems about particular trails she has traveled, rich with descriptions of flora and fauna.

In the endnotes, she mentions the resonance between the two words, portrayals and trails. An epigraph defines edge effect as the place where two communities overlap like a Venn diagram. Because these liminal areas share characteristics of both communities, they boast a richer diversity than the bulk of the community. I am reminded of a time Jill and I were at the Worcester Art Museum looking at a painting of two blocks of color. I couldn't make sense of it until Jill pointed out that where the colors met was no clear line, but a shimmer of many colors, spreading, interpenetrating, playing off of each other.

I enjoyed the first part of this book but the second, the trail poems, seemed impenetrable to me. In one of my maillists we have been discussing poems you have to take a chisel to, their peculiar rewards, and what it is fair to ask of a reader.

I've mentioned here before how each reader brings to a book a constellation of circumstances that the author can have no way of anticipating. I had just come off a stretch of reading the poetry of William Carlos Williams in order to prepare to lead a discussion and, after his adherence to plain language and the rhythms of speech, McPherson's trail poems seemed overly complex and obscure. I had trouble following the sense of the sentences. Even some of the flora was new to me: I know weeds and wildflowers, but mostly those of the east coast. Of the places she names, I have walked only one.

Remembering the chisel, I struggled with several poems, reading and rereading, not sure that the effort was worth the reward. Then as night fell, I read a poem that I simply didn't understand. Irritated at being held at arm's length, I tossed the book aside.

That full-moon night I dreamed many dreams, but the last one was of my city, the one I often dream about, but a new aspect of it: underground. Cynthia had to go downtown for an interview, so for the adventure of it, we decided to go by way of the abandoned water tunnels that we'd heard interconnected in such a way that you could get from the uptown plaza with the blue reflecting pools to downtown's towers without ever surfacing.

To make it more interesting, and because we thought it too far to walk, we rode two glossy brown horses. I'm not sure where we got them—the only horses I'd seen in this city before had belonged to mounted police—but we seemed to know them well. And our small cats, Blue and Sophie, came with us, scampering alongside when not dashing off to explore.

The tunnels were where our friend Frank, who had designed the plaza with the reflecting pools, said they would be and tall enough for us to ride easily. I'm not sure what the source of the dim illumination was. Sometimes we slowed to a walk while the horses picked their way over cobbles strewn with broken chunks of branches, smoothed from their immersion years earlier. Other times we moved up to a trot, the smooth motion of posting like a second heartbeat.

But then we came to a dark pool with no way around. Nor was it shallow enough to walk through. I let my horse step into it, but he soon lost his footing and began to swim, so we returned to shore. Cynthia didn't want to risk ruining her interview clothes, tied up in a bundle behind her saddle, so we decided to retrace our steps and ride downtown on the familiar surface street.

As we emerged from the tunnel, Cynthia spied two friends of hers—she has friends everywhere, dream city or no—entering an apartment door. Chatting of many things, she explained our dilemma. The women said they often used the tunnels and invited us to dinner the next night. I hoped that over pasta and wine they would reveal the secrets of the unfathomable pool and how to traverse it. We emerged into sunshine and the bright shimmer of the reflecting pools. My cat Blue squirmed under a fence, taking off on her own adventures, and I awoke.

I reread the poem, and this time it made perfect sense. I found that I had dreamed the poem: the wood underfoot, the depths and dim tracings of time, the intricate working of fetlock, cannon and pasterns. I went back to the earlier poems, and their rewards came easily. Sometimes it takes a chisel; sometimes a dream.

Last year, Kyoto celebrated the 1,000th anniversary of this epic tale, generally considered to be the world's first true novel. Consisting of 54 chapters, it describes courtly life in the Heian era of Japan, which extended from 794 to 1191, when Kyoto was the nation’s capital. An extended period of peace and prosperity meant that art and literature flourished, and a Japanese culture, distinct from that of China, began to emerge, a culture based on poetry and music rather than the arts of war.

The author is a woman, Murasaki Shikibu, who lived in Kyoto from approximately 978 to 1014. Her real name is unknown. Her first name, Murasaki, is the name of Genji’s most beloved wife, while Shikibu comes from an office held by her father. After her husband's death, she became a courtier to the empress Joto Mon'in. According to tradition, Murasaki dreamt up The Tale of Genji during a single night at the Ishiyama-dera Temple in August of 1004 while she contemplated the moon (which curiously reminded me of J.K. Rowling’s famous train ride in which she conceived of the entire Harry Potter sequence). Evidence indicates the tale was composed sometime between 1001 and 1010.

The story covers three generations of aristocratic and royal families, but concentrates primarily on one man, Prince Genji, the son of the emperor and a lesser consort. Genji is a hero of love rather than battle, a man who appreciates women of all types and stations. These women are not just conquests to him, notches on a sword, but individuals. He is attentive to their lives and wants and needs, and it is this sensitivity, along with his surpassing beauty, that makes him so successful a lover.

I had to keep reminding myself to suspend judgment. This tale is set in a different culture, far distant in time and place, with different mores and different expectations. I found it hard not to be shocked by the casual assumption that all women are there for an aristocrat’s taking, whether they like it or not, and that a man forcing himself on a woman may be considered romantic and the prelude to a love match. Genji is regarded as remarkable for taking responsibility for the women he has used in this way, housing them in a wing of one of his palaces or providing for their upkeep. A different time. A different culture.

Once I could let go of outrage, I fell victim to the poetry:

“‘_Ageless_ shall be the name of our pleasure boats.’

‘Our boats row out into the bright spring sun,
And water drops from the oars like scattering petals.'”

It is not just the small poems Genji exchanges with friends and lovers, but the narrative and description. “Even the most ordinary music can seem remarkable if the time and place are right; and here on the wide seacoast, open far into the distance, the groves seemed to come alive in colors richer than the bloom of spring or the change of autumn, and the calls of the water rails were as if they were pounding on the door and demanding to be admitted . . . ‘A bridge that floats across dreams?’ he whispered, reaching for a koto . . . Diffidently she took up the lute which he pushed towards her, and they played a brief duet.”

And it is not all about love and music. The author writes sensitively of nature: “There was a heavy fall of snow . . . The contrast between the snow on the bamboo and the snow on the pines was very beautiful . . . (Genji says,) ‘People make a great deal of the flowers of spring and the leaves of autumn, but for me a night like this, with a clear moon shining on snow, is the best — and there is not a trace of color in it. I cannot describe the effect it has on me, weird and unearthly somehow.'”

Here is Genji after his father’s death:

“Coming to the grave, Genji almost thought he could see his father before him. Power and position were nothing once a man was gone. He wept and silently told his story, but there came no answer, no judgment upon it. And all those careful instructions and admonitions had served no purpose at all?

‘Quickly the blossoms fall. Though spring departs,
You will come again, I know, to a city of flowers.'”

And of Genji’s own death Murasaki says:

“He went away like the foam upon the waters.”