justin

This is one of those books that follows an object through time, in this case a painting by Gwen John. The first section of the book is about Gwen herself and her attempts to establish herself as a painter, struggling not just with the poverty and dearth of recognition that most artists experience, but also with the shadow of her more-famous brother Augustus and, of course, with the role restrictions for women in the late 19th and early 20th century. She early recognises the conflict between the demands of her art and those imposed by marriage and children. Her response is to shutter her passionate nature and keep to herself, hence the book’s title which is from a quote from John’s own writings.

These conflicts—between home and work/art, between solitude and society—have dominated my life, as well. I am constantly trying out new ways to balance my time and energy. In order to write, more so than for other kinds of work that I do, I need fairly large blocks of time alone. By “alone” in this context, I mean not interacting with others. I actually write best in a public space, such as a pub or coffeehouse, where there are people around me, but no one distracting my attention from the work. In order to have sufficient alone-time, I have, after much experimentation, developed a routine that consists of substantial periods of solitude interspersed with short, but intense social times.

Of course, when I had small children at home, such a routine was impossible. In those days, I dreamt constantly of a white room. An empty, white room with a plain wooden table and chair under a window hung with sheer white curtains that lifted and belled in the breeze. Perhaps a cot, but nothing else. Plain as a nun’s cell. I longed for that room.

So I was captivated by the particular painting in this book: a still life of a corner of John’s attic room in Paris, a chair with a parasol, a table under a window, a glass of yellow primroses. We follow the painting as it changes hands, going from one woman to another. It means different things to different women, but also changes its meaning for each woman over time.

I was a little disappointed every time the story moved away from a particular woman, as I wanted to know more about her and how the insights she gained from the painting changed her life. Also, I found the idea that all the women who owned the painting wanted to live solitary lives a bit surprising, as I know few people of either gender who would choose to “keep the world away” to that extent. I suppose it could be said that the painting’s owners were self-selected, by their attraction to the painting.

What I liked best about this book were the descriptions of how the painting affected different people, how it echoed their lives and emotions, how it shifted its meaning for each viewer. I once read a mystery by Jane Langton, one of my favorite authors, where one of the characters was an eccentric old woman who wrote letters to God, crushed them into a ball, and threw them up into the air. That illustrates how I feel as a writer, laboring over a story or a poem, tossing it out into the air, never knowing what it will mean to a reader, often surprised by the comments that do come back to me. Here, the section written from the point of view of the artist, Gwen John, is fascinating, but the sections from the point of view of the recipients, those who look at the painting, are brilliant.

I like westerns and Kelton’s books in particular. I’ve written before in this blog about his books. His stories are often coming-of-age stories where a young man is finding his place in the world and coming to grips with the complexity of the people around him, learning to appreciate their qualities and accept their faults. Kelton’s books also have a strong sense of place: Texas during and after the Civil War.

This story is set a bit later, around the turn of the century, when a wealthy rancher named Frank Claymore is on trial for murder. Crippled with rheumatism and bursting with cantankerous crotchets, he is helped into the courtroom by his lifelong friend, Homer Whitcomb.

Almost immediately, we flash back to his youth, when he and Homer and another friend, George Valentine, ride out to search for cattle on the Clear Fork of the Brazos River and run into a Comanche hunting party. With the Civil War going on back east, the Confederacy cannot send troops to Texas to fight the Indians, so families from Clear Fork, including Frank’s sweetheart Rachal, have taken refuge in Fort Davis.

Each succeeding chapter starts with Frank’s trial and then takes up the story of the past again, until finally we understand the twists and turns of the path that led Frank to this moment in the courthouse, where the town seems to be against him, all but Homer and the two Native Americans under the Chinaberry tree outside.

Kelton handles the time changes deftly never leaving me in any doubt as to where and when we are. And I found the descriptions of the land stunning, particularly those of the early years, before the buffalo had been slaughtered and the prairie grasses plowed under. The valley that Frank stumbles upon and swears to return to is vividly drawn, not just the look of the hills and stream, but the feel of the place, the awe that it inspires.

Frank is well aware that his actions have brought about, or at least contributed to the changes he so deplores, not that he would admit that out loud to anyone. I, too, have been ruefully surprised when I look back at the unintended consequences of so many of my decisions and actions. My poor record at predicting outcomes, both good and bad, leaves me humble and repentant.

Initially, Frank seems like the worst kind of bad-tempered, controlling old man, certain that he is always right, never hesitating to criticise those around him. But as his past unfurls, marked by grief and loss and unlooked-for responsibilities, he begins to make sense and inspire more sympathy. How could he be otherwise—this taciturn man who understands cattle but not people—given the trail he has followed? Through him, I came to understand and appreciate several of my acquaintances.

Frank’s story moved me, at first to rage and frustration, sometimes to nostalgia, occasionally to amazement and respect. It left me thinking about friendship, the bonds of the past, and—finally—forgiveness.

Yes, I have ants in my cabin. At 5:30 the sun—already fierce—slams against the side of the cabin and pours through the window, scattering rainbows from Kate’s prisms across the walls. Within seconds, the ants begin to trickle from the corner of the roofline over my desk. Carpenter ants, as I know by the pile of debris and the swarm of flying ants on that really hot day, their lacy wings such a contrast to their hard black bodies. No matter how interesting, though, they are destructive and will have to go.

Mostly they don’t interfere with me as they scatter across the roof ledge and down the wall, though watching them take over the space is a little disturbing, and of course I have to brush them off the desk before they get to the laptop with its warm, inviting hum. I try to adopt Thoreau’s let’s-live-together philosophy towards them till the exterminator comes. It helps that they disappear at night, withdrawing with the sun’s warmth, bustling back to their nest. Some things that don’t bother me during the day really creep me out at night.

I figure that being in a cabin means welcoming the wildlife. I’ve gotten used to my 3 a.m. caller: some large animal that comes crashing down the hill, rustling leaves and breaking branches, to drink noisily from the pond. Not sure what my nocturnal visitor is, a raccoon perhaps or a fisher cat. I encourage spiders because they help to keep the ant population down.

I pulled this book from the library hoping it would also help. It’s very short, less than 150 pages even including multiple appendices, and the acknowledgement to Orkin right up front made me a bit wary. But the prose is just what I want from this kind of book: simple and straightforward. One of the things I learned is that ants are predators of other insects such as bedbugs and the chiggers that made my childhood a misery. I wondered why they seemed to have disappeared. Now if only the ants would eat all the deer ticks . . .

Some of the introductory material about different types of ants and their habits was interesting, but unfortunately was repeated several times throughout the book, as was other information and advice. I assume the repetition was included because readers are expected to dip into the book here and there, not read it straight through as I did.

I enjoyed reading more about the way they organise their colonies. I knew about ants being a superorganism, but there were details here about the ways different kinds of ants choose their queens and how some actually enslave other ants. Thoreau used ants in a fable about war, but there are certainly other comparisons to be drawn or pondered.

In the end, I didn’t learn any new tricks to discourage ants—the advice boiled down to keep the place clean and call an exterminator—but I was left thinking about different forms of social organisation.

Cornwell seems to be a popular mystery author with a long-running series featuring Dr. Kay Scarpetta, a forensic pathologist who also has a law degree. I like a good mystery, so I thought I’d check her out. I first tried Isle of Dogs which is not one of her Kay Scarpetta books. I guess it was supposed to be humorous, but I found it boring and abandoned it after a couple of chapters.

Then I tried this book. Here, Dr. Scarpetta (she’s not the kind of character you call Kay) goes to Black Mountain, North Carolina, to investigate the sexual assault and murder of Emily Steiner, an 11-year-old girl. Black Mountain is said to be near Asheville, touted by Eric Weiner in The Geography of Bliss and ABC’s 20/20 as the happiest place in the U.S. Cornwell does not do much with this contrast other than occasionally mentioning that people in a small town believe the crimes they see on tv happen elsewhere and will never affect their town.

Complicating Scarpetta’s investigation are her relations with two co-workers: Pete Marino, a detective from Richmond, VA, and FBI Unit Chief Benton Wesley. Emotional undercurrents that had apparently been explored more fully in earlier books made the opening chapters of this book somewhat baffling for me. Scarpetta’s niece Lucy also complicates the story. Taking her aunt as a role model, Lucy has been working on a classified project at Quantico but lands in emotional and professional problems which may or may not be related to the case in North Carolina.

The investigation initially focuses on Temple Gault, a serial murderer whom Scarpetta has encountered in the past. Apparently assuming that readers would be familiar with the earlier books, Cornwell provides only the briefest outline of their earlier interaction. Similarly, Marino and Wesley are barely sketched in and did not come alive for me. Lucy is characterized a little better, as are Lucy’s mother and grandmother. I would have said that Scarpetta’s sister and mother are drawn too broadly to be realistic had I not had similar conversations with my own mother and one of my sisters. Still, there is little subtlety or shading in any of these characters.

The hardest part of writing a series must be deciding how much to explain what has happened in past books and when to present it. Here, not enough information was given at the right time, for me anyway. Yet, such explanations can be overdone. I had to give up reading Martha Grimes’s books because I got tired of the arm sticking out of the rubble memory. The best examples of weaving in earlier information that I’ve read are the Harry Potter books. One could also choose to make the books of a series stand alone a bit more, keeping the amount of necessary earlier information to a minimum, as P. D. James does. Another difficult factor in writing a series is the progression of the characters’ lives. I have sometimes found that reading books out of order has meant that I already know important plot points in the earlier books when I get to them.

Back to Cornwell’s book, if the setting and characterization are not detailed enough, the plot is almost too complex, with many different subplots and much traveling back and forth between more than half a dozen East Coast towns and cities. Some promising plot threads are dropped with perhaps only a sentence to tie them off at the end. The identity and motivation of the murderer seemed obvious to me early on but I was willing to play along with the red herrings. The forensic detail is interesting, as are the descriptions of the FBI research projects. As always, these are only my opinions, and while I probably will not seek out any more of Cornwell’s books, I’m sure many others will.

James has said that ideas for her books begin with a setting. Here the setting is a small (fictional) island off the coast of Cornwall that has been turned into a resort for people of distinction—politicians, writers, diplomats—who need a break from the stresses of their lives. Combe Island offers a secure environment—visitors do not bring their bodyguards—and options for solitude or society.

The island calmed and enchanted me as well, with its crashing tides and cliff walks, its rustic chapel and stone cottages. And of course its lighthouse, no longer in service but maintained as an historical site. James deftly brushes in allusions and connotations, not only of lighthouses but of small islands: treasure islands, self-contained paradises, embattled outposts threatened by the sea.

Commander Dalgleish, in his role as leader of the Special Investigation Squad, is asked to look into a suspicious death on Combe Island. Abandoning his plans for a weekend with Emma Laverham, Dalgleish rounds up his team—DI Kate Miskin and Sergeant Benton-Smith—and heads out.

James is one of my favorite authors. She understands how government works and Scotland Yard. Her stories are well-plotted, with the right amounts of suspense and baffling turns. Her writing is simply amazing: intelligent, forthright, engaging, and at times profoundly moving. Best of all, she has created characters with subtle shadings who grow even more complex in each installment of her long-running series. She gives us just enough of their personal lives to make them interesting, but never so much that it interferes with the story. Here, the denizens of the island are fully drawn as well, their fears and routines, their needs and desires, their histories and dreams.

As I was reading, I couldn’t help but think of The Book of Ebenezer LePage with its Guernsey setting and memorable depiction of daily life on the island. As he described, World War II brought the end of Guernsey’s centuries-long isolation and the loss of their unique culture, overwhelmed by tourism and television. Isolation, though, is not always a good thing. I wondered if the isolation of Combe Island in James’s book made it easier for the people there to slip the bonds of society’s rules and expectations, if perhaps something taboo like murder could there come to seem a natural solution.

It is hard to believe James is 88. She has lost none of her power as a writer, her confident prose contrasting sharply with Elizabeth Smart’s struggles (described in the last entry). I was first attracted to her books by their intelligence, but have come to treasure every aspect of them. This is a worthy addition to the series.

I liked this later book much better than By Grand Central Station if only because its view of the world is much closer to mine. The prose is still poetic and cut up into short sections, but together they make up a mosaic that—for me, at least—was much more intelligible and satisfying than the earlier book.

I read it in conjunction with On the Side of the Angels the second volume of her journals and, as before, found much that is lifted from her journals and woven into the book. In one entry, too, she talks about organizing Rogues and why she put the pieces in the order she did; I confess that this helped me better appreciate the book’s structure.

Rogues starts out in post-Blitz London, a bleak environment where people must count over their losses. And, indeed, this book is about loss: about growing old, trying to write in the face of waning powers. Smart’s journals are full of the difficulty of trying to start writing again in middle age, having spent the decades since By Grand Central Station working as a copyeditor and sometime journalist to support her four children.

In Rogues Smart writes, “The page is as white as my face after a night of weeping. It is as sterile as my devastated mind. All martyrdoms are in vain.” Her poems too—I was also reading her Collected Poems at the same time—talk of the difficulty of writing. One is even titled “Trying to Write”. But they are also full of the difficult joys of parenting and the small lessons learned from snails and bulbs in her garden.

These are struggles I know all too well, however much I berate myself for insufficient self-discipline, for spending too much of myself on the day-to-day pleasure: that first cup of tea in the morning, watching the birds at the feeder, or taking a walk through this astonishing world where lilacs and dogwoods are blooming again, surprised all over again by their extravagant ebullience.

I thought about Tillie Olson’s Silences which discusses the silences in women’s lives, the long stretches when they do not write or paint or whatever because they are busy with children and home-making. I swore that wouldn’t happen to me but it did. How could it not? Now, like Smart, I struggle to find the words that once filled my head and hands. But I have the great joy of my children’s company and all the lessons they have taught me. I’m also delighted to see many of my friends, their children grown, taking up (or retaking) some form of art: painting or writing, viola or piano.

I hate it that we have to learn these lessons all over again, every generation. And saddened that, for all our work in the 1970s and since, for all our progress, this is one riddle we have not solved: how to do the best for our beloved children, as we so desperately desire, and not lose the vocations and avocations that seem intrinsic to our very selves. Although perhaps they are only postponed, and that is not so bad. At least these days most of us live long enough to embark on a second life once the children are grown. For Smart, having to care for two of her grandchildren, that second life seemed far too short.

This is the first of two volumes of her journals, from 1933-1941, up to the point where she has written By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept the impressionistic novel/memoir for which she is most known. More a series of prose poems than a narrative, By Grand Central Station takes the reader inside the tumult of her affair with George Barker. She fell in love with him through reading his poetry, not realising at first that he was married. As the book opens, she is waiting to meet Barker and his wife for the first time, having sent them money to come to the U.S.

I first read By Grand Central Station in the late 1970s when I was a single mother, struggling to raise my children with no child support, and have to confess I was impatient with all the emotional drama. Look out, I remember thinking, or you’re going to end up raising kids on your own. In fact, that is exactly what happened to Smart. She went on to have four children with Barker, as he alternated his time between her and his wife.

I enjoyed it more this time around, caught up in the lush prose, the images tumbling over each other. I liked the humor that punctured her swollen prose, like the title with its reference to biblical grief twisted into—for me—an image of a bag lady huddling in a corner of that lobby in New York. She grounds her fanciful passages with the details of daily life: meals, swimming pools, rattlesnakes and spiders.

I kept going back trying to analyse how she strung the images together, how she structured the book, how she achieved her effects. But every time I ended up enthralled again and just reading, immersed in the flow. By reading Necessary Secrets at the same time, though, I could see how she used her journals in writing the book.

Smart kept several journals concurrently. Sometimes separately, sometimes jumbled together, she recorded her daily activities, lists of books she had read or wanted to read, quotations, conversations with herself, images to remember. Writers keep journals for a variety of reasons. Some, like me, need to write things out in order to understand them, in order to think them through. Others use their journals as workshop, i.e., a place for writing exercises. Some use them as a catch-all for ideas and images that may be useful someday. Others, like Smart, simply need to record things and then later go back and troll through them for input to their writing. (I’m grateful to Kathleen Flenniken for sending me a compilation of responses to her question as to why poets keep notebooks).

There are great chunks of her notebooks in By Grand Central Station and I enjoyed seeing how she blended them in and filled them out. Writers are predators, for sure, ready to steal anything from our lives to enhance the writing. The other interesting thing about Necessary Secrets was seeing her style develop over the years, enabling me to better appreciate the full-bore gush of it in By Grand Central Station with its unrepentant emotions and its comedic tragedy.

I seem to have been jumping around in my reading: France, Guernsey, Quebec, England, Maryland, Iran. With this book, I return to France, specifically to the southwestern rural uplands with their limestone outcroppings, sheep pastures, and vineyards. Merwin’s poetry is among the best that I’ve read, so I was curious to see how he would handle these three stories. The answer is: beautifully.

“Foie Gras” circles around the tale of Fatty the Count and his love of that delicacy. Merwin paints a rich portrait of the people and customs of the area. Rumors, relationships, and robbery blend together to create a memorable cast of characters. I was reminded of Flaubert and—more recently—Nemerovski in their joyfully affectionate look at the absurdity of their countrymen and women.

“Shepherds” uses the narrator’s work in restoring a vegetable garden and his interactions with his neighbors to illustrate the region’s change in the 1960s to factory farming. The local shepherds are persuaded, bullied, and coerced into replacing their stone barns with larger corrugated metal barns where the sheep could be kept all the time and given commercial feed instead of being allowed to graze for free in the pastureland. Corruption and graft in the local government—but I’m getting carried away. In fact, the tone is more nostalgic than outraged. This gentle story brims with evocative descriptions of fields bordered by walnut trees, ancient stone fences with little huts built into them for shepherds, neighbors helping each other out. Well, that’s not entirely right either. For every luminous sunset, there is a clear-eyed description of a neighborhood feud or a house with all its furnishings left to rot while the heirs fight over it. Beautiful and provocative at the same time, the story captures what it is to be human in society and in this beautiful world.

“Blackbird’s Summer” at first seemed to ramble, somewhat in the way that the main character is often on the move, showing a local spring to the priest, delivering wine to his customers, visiting neighbors, helping his daughter and her husband in the hotel. Gradually, however, I came to respect the nuanced image of Blackbird that was being built through all these interactions and reflections. He begins to pick through the contents of the old house, down the road from the hotel: old account books, crocheted bedspreads, wooden kneading troughs. His thoughts of the past are reinforced by talks with his customers, those who are prospering and those whose fortunes are fading. And he begins to wonder who would be willing to carry on his wine business, since his son-in-law is a milk-drinker and his only grandchild still an infant and a girl at that.

Merwin’s language is simply gorgeous. And his insights into these flawed and endearing characters are devastating. Their stories are enlivened by humor and a sense of the past—the Occupation, the 1914 War, even Napoleon cast their shadows over the present. The many tales of parents, grandparents, great-grandparents and the concern for the children’s legacy brings out the sense of nostalgia, of an ancient way of life slipping away.

I have learned not to trust books that trumpet their bestseller status on the cover and have pages and pages of glowing endorsements. More often than not, these books disappoint me, perhaps because my expectations have been raised by all the hype. Some are real stinkers: I couldn’t get past the first 50 pages of our last month’s book club pick Lempriere’s Dictionary with its frenetically jumping point of view and lack of any discernable plot. Desai’s book was this month’s book club pick and, while not a stinker, it has serious flaws that would have made me abandon it if I were just reading it for my own pleasure.

Certainly the language is often gorgeous. The lush descriptions of the house and garden in Kalimpong, in the Himalayas, drew me into the story. The details of the lives in the house—the leather-bound National Geographic magazines, the scorpions in the woodpile—were brilliant.

The inhabitants are Sai, her grandfather (a retired judge), and the cook (whose son Biju has emigrated to New York). Sai’s isolation among the artifacts of the past is broken by regular trips to the village, where she is tutored by one of two sisters who have retired to the village, and visits from Gyan, a young man who has been brought on to tutor Sai in mathematics and science.

How Sai came to live with her grandfather nine years earlier is one problematic area: too many threads are left dangling. The judge disowned his daughter when she married, but apparently paid Sai’s school fees after his daughter and her husband were killed. Then when for some unstated reason, the fees are not being paid, the school decides to send Sai to her listed next of kin, her grandfather. Did he stop paying the fees? Why? Why did he pay them in the first place if he had disowned his daughter? It seems as though this section was not thought out completely.

The main problem with the book is structural. Within the first few pages we get the mandatory in media res scene of seemingly-irrational violence erupting into their quiet, inwardly-focused lives: McEwan’s favorite jump-start for a plot. But Desai then abandons her plot for 200 pages of static backstory, slowly filling in the backgrounds for Sai, her dead parents, the judge, the cook, his son, and so on. When she finally picks up the story again—did I say it was 200 boring pages later?—she also picks up the pace and the last section of the book is excellent. Desai’s insights about revolution and identity, about immigration and dreams, family and the loss of the past are woven into the story of Sai’s affair with Gyan and the fate of her family and friends during the Gorkha insurgency.

Usually I dislike too many changes of point of view, but here Desai handles the switch between Kalimong and New York very well, keeping the different settings in separate chapters. The interspersed chapters about Biju’s rather predictable life as an immigrant without a green card are short and add another dimension to the concerns of the people back in Kalimpong. In fact, all of the chapters are short and cut up into even shorter segments.

As it turned out, everyone else in my book club was still mired in those 200 pages, though several said they were enjoying them and not bored at all. I ended up enjoying the book and was glad I finished it. Still, if Desai had only shortened those 200 pages to perhaps 30 pages of backstory and integrated the backstory better, this would have been a truly excellent book.

I haven’t yet seen the film based on this graphic novel, a memoir of growing up in Iran during the turbulent 1980s. The book opens a year after the Islamic Revolution, with the ten-year-old and her classmates being told they must wear a veil at school. It is hard to write about political situations without becoming mired in outraged diatribes, yet Satrapi succeeds brilliantly. What is so effective here is that she stays in the child’s viewpoint. Hence, we see the girls using the required veils as monster masks or tying them together to make a jump rope.

Satrapi maintains that viewpoint as the child becomes a teenager and the family’s freedom gradually becomes more restricted. I was particularly curious about how her adolescent rebellion would play out in the context of the larger cultural revolution, and I was not disappointed. Swinging between patriotic fervor during the war with Iraq and horror at the gold keys “to heaven” given to young boys, the young woman’s reactions to her world struck me as deeply felt and emotionally honest. Satrapi’s art, although crude, does an okay job of conveying the emotional content. Some of the most effective panels are the occasional abstract ones.

The question I’m left with at the end of the day, though, is: does it work? And I have to answer: sort of. Parts of it are quite moving and others give a sense of the mingled ordinariness of daily life and shock of terrible events. Yet, for me, the inherent superficiality of the graphic novel format prevented me from full emotional participation in the story.

Don’t get me wrong—I like graphic novels, and I think it an especially appropriate format for this story from a child’s point of view. However, now I would like to read a story of women in post-revolution Iran that fully engages me with descriptions of place and nuanced characters. I didn’t get that from the oddly popular Reading Lolita in Tehran either. Despite its bizarre best-seller status, I found that book lacking in content. I’d hoped to learn more about the young women, and felt betrayed by finding out that the author had used composite characters. Only the mini-lectures about the books were interesting.

I recommend Persepolis as an excellent start at conveying the reality of life in post-Revolution Iran. If it left me hungry for more, that’s not such a bad thing.