Machinations and justifications (Books - Middlemarch by George Eliot)

Ah, the machinations and justifications that go into the acquiring of power. I seem to be seeing it everywhere lately. New York's current mayor wishes to overturn the twice-approved term-limit law (whatever one might think of it) so that he may run for a third term. He has convinced himself that this is because he is the only person qualified to get our city through the current financial mess we are in. The Ragazzo and I continue to watch Rome - in which we are witnessing its descent into moral and literal bankruptcy as those both high and low murder its people and divide its territory so that they might rule what is left of it, and persuade themselves that they do so for the good of Rome. And in George Eliot's Middlemarch there is a certain banker...

Mr. Bulstrode's power was not due simply to his being a country banker, who knew the financial secrets of most traders in the town and could touch the springs of their credit; it was fortified by a beneficence that was at once ready and severe - ready to confer obligations, and severe in watching the result...His private minor loans were numerous, but he would inquire strictly into the circumstances both before and after. In this way a man gathers a domain in his neighbours' hope and fear as well as gratitude; and power, when once it has got into that subtle region, propagates itself, spreading out of all proportion to its external means. It was a principle with Mr. Bulstrode to gain as much power as possible, that he might use it for the glory of God. He went through a great deal of spiritual conflict and inward argument in order to adjust his motives, and make clear to himself what God's glory required.

Yes, I'm sure he did. It is always scary when someone starts mixing god, or in the case of Rome - gods - into the equation and are so sure that they are the person who knows what it is this god or these gods want. The arrogance - but I suppose that lust for power is itself an expression of arrogance so this justification should not be so surprising, and Eliot meets this outrage with her tongue firmly in cheek:

But, as we have seen, his motives were not always rightly appreciated. There were many crass minds in Middlemarch whose reflective scales could only weigh things in the lump; and they had a strong suspicion that since Mr. Bulstrode could not enjoy life in their fashion, eating and drinking so little as he did, and worreting himself about everything, he must have a sort of vampire's feast in the sense of mastery.

Human nature hasn't changed, has it? 'If someone's nature is not like mine it cannot be good.' I think that is the saddest opinion one can hold. It's why political campaigns get away with bald manipulations of personality as a technique for acquiring office. Eliot's study of town and village domestic and political life is impressively comprehensive, it seems like one can study the entire world in microcosm, but I barely have the brain to read Middlemarch these days. It took me ages to read just this one chapter last night so preoccupied was I with studying for midterms.

Bukowskian revelry (Books - The Dead Fish Museum by Charles D'Ambrosio)

I continue to be impressed by the battered little worlds Charles D'Ambroiso conjures up in his short story collection The Dead Fish Museum.

We angled our heads back and opened our mouths like fledgling birds. Smoke gave the cool air a faintly burned flavor, an aftertaste of ash. A single flake lit on my wife's eyelash, a stellar crystal, cold and intricate. I blew a warm breath over her face, melting the snow.

I felt like I knew so much about the relationship between these two people at the end of this, the opening paragraph of Up North, and yet D'Ambrosio had written nothing explicit. In it the odd balance of this relationship between a husband and wife unfolds as we learn of the woman's rape, and see her husband try to function in the machismo-driven world of the womans' father, brother and cronies. It is a grotesque meeting of bravado, of promiscuity, and of a wish for intimacy.

The Scheme of Things is the story of two down-and-out scam artists and is an oddly tender and even sweet little tale. The title story is in a bleak, Bukowskian vein. A man gets out of prison and finds project carpentry work on a pornographic film. The stunning writing and the grimy, disturbed mileu make for an odd marriage.

Behind a thick sheet of acrylic, the desk clerk's face rushed up at him; it spread and blurred, white and without features, but never seemed to reach the surface. Ramage leaned forward and looked through a circle in the slab of glass, cut like a hole in ice. On the counter was a dinner plate with chicken bones and a few grains of rice hardening in brown gravy, and next to the plate was the splayed and broken spine of a romance. The clerk had been working over the chicken, cracking the bones and sucking the marrow. Her hair was tin and her teeth were leaning gray ruins in her lipless mouth. Her blue eyes were milky and vague, the pupils tiny beads of black. Ramage could not imagine a youth for her - it was as if she'd been born fully ruined...

God that's good.

The penultimate tale, Blessing, is like many in this book, one of a person finding themselves in a duo of some kind - a marriage, a friendship, a father-son relationship - but I mean in this case - really finding themselves. These stories seem to be acts of discovery that come upon the characters in the midst of the mess of daily living. I guess one could say they are insights. And in that way they are, I suppose, moments of brightness, or at least of clarity, though that doesn't mean that they necessarily look very 'nice.' But that is, I feel, the value of the experience of reading them - that and the sheer beauty of D'Ambrosio's language - it is revelry.

Nothing up its sleeve...just a good story (Books - The Road Home by Rose Tremain)

Rose Tremain's The Road Home is a good, old fashioned novel, and I mean that in the best sense. A central character wants something badly, sets out to get it, and meets lots of obstacles along the way. He meets people who help him as well as enormous setbacks. I won't tell you if he gets what he wants or not, but lets just say that the book resolves. The story has social and political resonance within the context of our world, but for the most part, it is the story of the man - a flawed man - a dreamer - who sets out from Russia to live in London and to make his life better. 24 chapters each hold an episode. There's a well developed backstory that drives the action as well as defining Lev, the central character. His wife is dead, and behind him he leaves his mother, five-year-old daughter, and a best friend. There's a love interest, there are some villains, and he makes a few true friends along the way. There are no letters, no emails, no one writes a novel within the novel, it doesn't combine mystery, history, and recipes for great Chinese food. There is one third-person narrator telling one story - don't get me wrong, I really enjoy clever writing, multiple genres, and fancy meta-fiction - but clearly I must have been in the mood for a book without a gimmick. I found reading it as satisfying as a baked potato.

Tremain is talented enough to get suspense out of a scene in which Lev, promoted at work from dishwasher to vegetable prep overnight, falls behind on a busy night in a trendy London restaurant.

The chefs' demands came fast and didn't slacken. Labouring his way through the skinning and seeding of tomatoes for a coulis, he was aware that Pierre needed spinach, and GK, who was moulding courgette cakes, shouted to him that he'd run out of mint leaves. Lev left the tomatoes sliding in a bloody mass to the far edges of his chopping area, tore a bundle of mint from the chiller, rinsed it and began picking off the leaves and hurling them into a colander.

'Lev!' shouted Pierre. 'Spinach! You're holding up table six.'

'Coming, Pierre...'

The mint leaves stuck to Lev's hands. He realised he should have picked the leaves off first and rinsed them afterwards. He saw juice from the tomatoes begin to drip down the front of the work station. He wiped his hands, ran water into his sink, threw in the spinach, then returned to his mint, shutting off the cold rinse-faucet with his elbow. He glanced up to see GK pausing in his own work to stare at him and he knew the import of this electric stare by now. No words were needed.

He thought about the promised seven pounds an hour. With that, he might be able to increase his payments to Ina by about ten pounds a week. And then, instead of bleating on and on about his return, she might at least begin to be proud of what he was trying to do...

Tremain aims a couple of swipes at the trendy London arts scene by imagining an opening night performance of a new play through Lev's eyes.

'Well,' siad Howie Preece, 'it's Portman. Portman's a genius. He's always right on the fuckin' button. Bet half the fuckers in Chelsea are screwing their kids senseless.'

'I think it's brilliant,' said Sophie.

Preece was about to speak again, but Lev snapped: 'Why?'

'What d'you mean, "why"?'

'Why you say this is brilliant, Sophie?'

'Because I think it is.'

'Why?'

'Because it is. Because it's radical and brave and - '

'It's shit,' said Lev.

'Well, there's a downer for Andy!' said Howie. 'The man from a distant country thinks Peccadilloes is a piece of - '

'I could kill this man!' said Lev.

'Excuse me?' said Preece.

'To see this: a father, a doll, his daughter... How can he show this?' Anger and misery swept through Lev like a rising tide of sickness. He jabbed a finger at Sophie - an authoritarian gesture he detested in other people - saw he try to recoil but be prevented by the crush in the bar. He knew he was becoming out of control, knew he should have tried to master his feelings, but why master feelings that, in this unreal world he'd just entered, felte real and true?

He jabbed at Sophie again. 'You!' he said. I understand you now. You don't see anything! You see what is "fashion", what is "smart". That's all that matters to you. Because you don't know the world. Only this small England. You know nothing, nothing.'

'Hey,' said Preece. 'That's a bit out of order, isn't it? What's the matter with you?'

Lev was trembling. His arms felt like wires, sparking with electric current. He felt their lethal power. 'The matter is I'm mad,' he said. 'Crazy, maybe. But I'm not sick, like this play. At home I have a daughter, Maya. I love this daughter - '

'Who cares?' said Preece. 'That's so not relevant. Who cares if you've got a daughter? This is art. "This is cutting edge - '

I enjoyed the many levels on which this scene functioned - the condescending assumptions the monied and arty classes can have when someone was born in another country and speaks with an accent, Lev's innocence but also his decency and his ability to see through pretention, the difficulty of making friends across cultural boundaries, it also establishes Lev's temper - a character detail we have only heard described prior to this point in the book.

Tremain adds a lovely touch to the book - Lydia, a friend, gives Lev a copy of Hamlet as a gift. When he receives it his English is not really up to reading it, but a few months later he begins slowly to work his way through it. What we get is a progress report on Lev's mastery of the subtleties of the language, we watch that struggle on an intimate level. It is clear that Lev does not have disdain for art at all, but his imagination is limited to the range of his own experience. Hamlet becomes a parallel character, another lone man who must stop dreaming and act to defeat the ghosts of his past.

Lev lit a cigarette. He took the smoke deep into him, imagining Hamlet alone on the stage now, ready to speak what was in his heart. He'd be young. Probably about thirty. Young and thin, like the boys who used to come down to the Baryn lumber yard, in winter, looking for work. Not princes of Denmark: boys who'd never known work. They used to stand around, silent in the low light, watching the shrieking saw coughing out sparks and oragne dust as it ate into the pines. Imagining how it would be to join this world where men laboured thourgh every season - in snowfall, under arc-lilghts on black afternoons, in driving rain and raw cold, in the first songstruck days of spring - and took home money, week by week. Lev hated to see them there, didn't like to look at their faces. Afraid to see his own face in theirs.

...O God! God!
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!

This was better. He could understand more words.

Heaven and earth! Must I remember?

Remember what? Back and forth, back and forth to the notes, his mind a saw, trying to shriek through a tough bark of words.

It is Lydia and her friend Pyotor (an artist) whose wider experience of the world must show Lev how to use imagination not to merely escape an unpleasant present temporarily, but how it can help his dreams gain a foothold in the world in which Lev lives and change that world for the better. I'm talking in a lot of abstractions about this book, I know, but that is because it was the story that kept bringing me back to it and I don't want to ruin that for you. The Road Home is a meaningful, entertaining, and compelling book with nothing up its sleeve - just a good story.

Here is my other post about The Road Home.

Moving from one element to another (The Anatomy School by Bernard MacLaverty)

Martin Brennan is what is known as a "late bloomer." In his last year of high school in Northern Ireland, he sits dutifully with his widowed mother's weekly dinner guests - two other solitary women and a priest.

'Who's talking about slang? It's the cursing I'm talking about. Giving everybody within earshot dog's abuse. Unadulterated effs and c's. If you'll pardon my French, Father - being so blunt. And, God above, it's not just pubs. It would curl the hair of your head to pass a primary school getting out these days.'

'Martin - you wouldn't say things like that, would you?'

'No.'

'God bless us and save us! He certainly would not - over my dead body.' said Mrs Brennan. 'I just love the innocence of wee children. Isn't it the terrible pity they have to grow up?'

'It is - but that's the way the Lord has planned it. They can't remain in ignorance for ever.' Father Farquhason seemed very definite. He bit decisively into his sandwich.

'Ignorance is innocence,' said Martin's mother. 'And it's lovely to see it. That's what I always say.'

'It's not a philosophy you hear seriously espoused these days.' Father Farquharson began to suck at something which had caught between his teeth.

'Indeed Father, I would go so far as to say that it applies not just to - you know what - but to things like doctoring and what have you,' said Mrs Brennan. 'If I have cancer I'd prefer not to know. You're bettter not knowing a thing about it. That's my theory.'

'A little knowledge is a dangerous thing,' said Mary Lawless. 'A doctor told me once what was wrong with my ear and he might as well have whistled "Blue Suede Shoes."'

It is the departure of Martin's innocence in matters academic, moral, spiritual, and sexual that we witness over the course of Bernard MacLaverty's The Anatomy School, as Martin makes his way from adolescence to adulthood. There are a few scenes of gripping suspense but I won't describe them because it will spoil the plot for you. MacLaverty is wonderful with dialogue scenes - he has an expert ear for the dialogue of witty teenage boys. And I laughed out loud at some of the scenes among the tea guests:

'You're never going to believe this.' said Mary Lawless. 'but - I had a twenty-inch waist the day I was married.'

'You had an elastic measuring tape, as well, if you ask me,' said Nurse Gilliliand. Father Farquharson turned in his straight-backed armchair and watched each person as they spoke. He had a face which was always on the verge of smiling.

Mary Lawless insisted, 'No, I had really - twenty inches.' She created a circle joining he thumbs and index fingers together to demonstrate her size. 'That's twenty inches.' Martin was going to set the plate of buns on the coffee table but his mother made a gesture that he should insist.

'Very like a whale in a wee tin.' said Mrs Brennan. 'You took the sausage rolls.'

'Sometimes I eats like a horse and sometimes I just eats grass. My hunger is now assuaged.'

Martin set the plate down.

'All the more for me tomorrow,' he said.

'Ate up, you're a growing boy,' said Mary Lawless. 'It's hard to believe I used to have an hourglass figure.'

'Aye - always running out,' said Nurse Gilliland.

Mary Lawless joined in the joke then said, 'Fruit is said to be a very good thing.'

'An apple a day keeps the doctor at bay,' said Mrs Brennan.

'I find apples an uphill struggle.'

'Aye, I know what you mean,' Nurse Gilliland nodded. 'It's hard to make a meal of an apple - like you wouldn't get a man coming home from the pub starving and then sitting down to an apple. Dieting also can do strange things to the breath.'

'Are you trying to tell me nicely...?'

'No, I am not, Mary. It's just that I was talking to Peter Faul the other day. He's badly failed.'

'A sight for sore eyes.'

'Is he no better?'

'Naw. Not by a long chalk.'

'As yella as a duck's foot.'

'Aye, they say he's not well at all.'

'The doctors have given up on him.'

'Is that so? But sure the doctors give up on everybody.'

'Merciful hour.'

'There's something odd about his face.'

'Aye - like somebody sat on him when he was warm.'

Adolescence is a time when much is expected of you but for many, like Martin, the world won't shed all its mysteries, and so he's left out of understanding why it is one has to perform all of these tasks - chores at home, spending time with people who you would rather not see, explaining what happened in your day, hours and hours of grueling homework, passing exams. Often Martin is even a mystery to himself. Although some of his peers seem quite decided on what they will do with the rest of their lives, that question is an utter mystery to Martin. I found the chief pleasures of this book, aside from the humor, to be quiet ones - especially the detailed writing evoking Martin's inner experience - as he goes on his sometimes painful, sometimes funny march from innocence to experience and the adult world sheds its mysteries.

'Hey it's nearly warm.' Martin dried his hand on the side of his trousers and lit a cigarette. He spun the match toward the water. He loved the tang of the smell of the sulphur. He lay down. There was also something in the grass which smelled good - a plant of some sort, like pineapple weed or meadowsweet or something. He looked around and the grass was close to his face. He closed one eye. Some of the blades were veined green, others were stalks - mixed new summer grass which slanted this way and that, creating a pattern that was perfect, with the sky behind it. The blades fitted the sky the way a key fits a lock. Grass green and sky blue. Those were the colours - they were what was being referred to. Adjectives and nouns. Grass and sky, green and blue. The sun was warm on the black material of his blazer. He inhaled his cigarette and felt a jag of pleasure, in his lungs, between his fingers. For a moment his head felt light. Everything combines to give him a rush of intensity at the rightness of things. The key turned in the lock. The liquid went clear with the addition of a single drop. Everything else he thought of only added to the feeling. The water at the edge of the lake was warm and silky on his fingers. His best friends were here, he was sure he would pass his exams this time. He identified the upward rush as happiness. He was sure he would never die. And he was sure he would remember feeling this for the rest of his life. It was like the feeling he'd had in Ardglass when he decided not to be a priest. He wondered if it had anything to do with lying down. Then, he'd lain on a wall, now he was on the grass. He knew it was a daft conclusion - like the kid who thought the wind was created by the waving of trees - but it was funny and the fact that he thought it was funny only added to the rightness of things. Suddenly there was the sound of swans lifting and flying overhead. Moving from one stretch of water to another. The sound of moving from one element to another. The stone falling from air to water. The swans from here to there. Love was in it somewhere but he couldn't tell where or with whom.

That's the book in a paragraph, moving from one element to another. This is the second of MacLaverty's books I have read this summer - the other was Grace Notes. He seems to exist below the radar in the U.S. (or had been below mine at any rate) but his outlook is humane and his writing a true pleasure so I hope many others will discover him. John Self has recommended his Lamb and Cal, so those are now added to my list. Here is my other post on The Anatomy School and here is the author's website.

Antigone in Chicago (Books - The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon)

One morning in Chicago I had tiptoed to the kitchen with the intention of making some coffee. While customarily spilling grounds all over the counter, I spotted a can in the corner whose red label read SADNESS. Was there so much of it they could can it and sell it? A bolt of pain went through my intestines before I realized that it was not SADNESS but SARDINES. It was too late for recovery, for sadness was now the dark matter in the universe of still objects around me: the salt and pepper shakers; the honey jar; the bag of sun-dried tomatoes; the blunt knife; a desiccated loaf of bread; the two coffee cups, waiting. My country's main exports are stolen cars and sadness.

I just love this excerpt. The way Brik, the writer in Aleksandar Hemon's The Lazarus Project, is surprised into a realization about himself through this little domestic detail. Strong emotion bubbles through this book of alternating plots - the Jewish immigrant, Lazarus Averbuch, who is accidentally shot to death in a moment of panic in the Chicago Police Chief's house in 1908 and is then branded a dangerous anarchist to get the Chief and his family off the hook - and the contemporary writer in Chicago, a Bosnian immigrant, who goes in search of Averbach's story - returning all the way to Lazarus's and his own roots in Eastern Europe.

Sadness sits beneath Brik's loneliness in his marriage, because his American wife, a surgeon named Mary, cannot know who he is as a Bosnian. Anger about being the victim of pogroms and then outrage at finding similar anti-semitism in Chicago, bigotry that killed her brother, fills Olga Averbuch's soul. It becomes focused on getting her brother a proper Jewish burial (denied him by the city of Chicago, who unceremoniously dump his body in a pit, only to then have it stolen). Lazarus becomes useful to fundamentalist christians as a symbol of resurrection, to anarchists as a prop of their cause, to medical students as a source of organs, and to a Viennese immigrant lawyer, Herr Taube, as a way to get some fair treatment for the Jewish community in Chicago. Olga becomes a Jewish Antigone to Taube's Creon. Their face-off scene is, to my mind, the best thing in the book - so suffused is it with passion.

"I mourn the death of your brother with you. Fraulein Averbuch. I was brought up to believe that if we lose one Jew, we lose the world. And I suffer your loss not only as a Jew but also as one who believe in the rule of righteous law."

Olga becomes aware of the smell her body exudes - she scrubbed herself time and again last night but still feels beshitten.

"There are men in this city, Fraulein Averbuch, all well-established members of society, who are duly apprehensive about the current atmosphere, as it could easily lead to uncontrollable violence. Such a development would endanger what they have been working for for a long time and would likely impede the further profress of their less-fortunate brethren.

[...]

"What do you want from me?"

"This might be very hard for you to hear. Very hard." He retrieves the glass from the desk and shoves it under Olga's face. Bubbles are streaming upward from the sugar cube. She turns her face away from the glass. Taube sighs. "Please listen. We must quell the rumors that your brother's body is missing as quickly as possible."

"It is missing. My brother's body is missing."

"Please listen. We need to rebury him according to our customs in the full view of the public, before it is too late. We have to put it all away and go on with our lives."

"You want to bury him without his heart? How could you even begin to say something like that?"

"There are Hebrew religious leaders who will be glad to approve of the funeral; indeed, even to be present at it. And the assistant chief will now be glad to allow your brother's proper burial. He is basically a decent man, if too beholden to powerr. He has ralized that disorder and mayhem will not help him in his further pursuits."

He leans back in his chair, looks to the left and to the right, nodding. She shakes her head, first slowly, then fast, until the pins loosed and her hair unfurls and now it just whips around. The glass escapes Taube's grip and rolls under the chair, but he pays no heed to it.

"We have no choice, Fraulein Averbuch. It is a question of life and death."

"What makes you think I want to live? You killed my brother. You have been lying to me. You put him away with a shivah, without Kaddish. None of you brought me a meal. And now you want me to bury parts of my brother as my brother. Have you no shame, Herr Taube? Have you no soul?"

Brik interviews the head of a Jewish center in Chisinau in Moldova, as he tracks down the history of the Averbuch family, he asks her how she feels about the pogrom.

"How do I feel about the pogrom?"

"Yes. How do you feel about the pogrom?"

Silence. Then she said:

"That outburst of bestial anti-Semitism is indelibly stamped upon our national consciousness."

I chortled, but she was not kidding. I said:

"No, really. How do you - you, Iuliana - feel about it? What do you feel when you think about it? Anger? Despair? Hatred?

She wagged her head to show she did not like the question.

"See, I am actually Bosnian," I said. She did not react to the news. "And when I think about what happened in Bosnia, I feel this filthy, fury, this rage at the world. Sometimes, I fantasize about breaking the kneecaps of Karadzic, the war criminal. Or I see my self smashing someone's jaw with a hammer."

[...]

Once Mary lost a patient on the surgical table. He was a gang member taken down in a drive-by-shooting. The bullet was lodged in his frontal lobe; somehow he was conscious when they brought him in. He talked to her; he asked her for her name; he told her his - it was, unbelievably, Lincoln. But there was nothing she could do; he died under the knife. That night she sat in the living-room armchair as on a throne, staring at the same page of a People magazine for fifteen minutes before she passed out, her cheek on her shoulder, only to wake up and confront my questions: "How did you feel after he dies? What were your thoughts? Whereupon Mary got up, dragged her blankets to the bedroom like a gown train, and pushed the door in my inquisitorial face. I was enraged; I banged at the door and eventually slammed it open, as though I was breaking in, to find her in bed, turned to the wall, the blanket pulled up to her temple. "Don't you ever get angry?" I shouted. "You must get angry. You must hate somebody. What makes you so goddam different?" Later on I apologized halfheartedly, and so did she. "When a patient dies," she explained, rather unhelpfully, "I feel that he is dead."

I really felt that this book was not so much about the events of the murder and the writing of it, but rather about the currents that ran beneath them. The passions that run beneath angry mobs, the frightened wealthy bureaucrat when an immigrant with worn clothes and an unfamiliar smell walks to his door, the writer when he feels he cannot really know someone who he loves ever, the pogrom survivor, whether you're fleeing Cossaks' in the early 1900s or Karadzic in the 1990s, who has only just now been captured. When those feelings began to be unleashed, that's when this book really got going for me; when it stopped being about the writing and started to come from somewhere. Sometimes I feel like Hemon is just too amusing for his own good. I feel like he toyed with me. Like I had to get that his writing is some sort of achievement. Well OK - I know he emigrated here in 1992 and wrote his first story in English in 1995. I know he's a certified genius. I don't care. I don't want that on every page. I don't read books for that. Give me the story. Ultimately this is a very powerful one.

Here's my other post on The Lazarus Project.

Captured in Amber (Books - The Anatomy School by Bernard MacLaverty)

It's not as if I didn't have enough books started, but when I came home last night after dinner out and a walk around the hot, humid city, none of them seemed right. I had found Bernard MacLaverty's Grace Notes a detailed and imaginative read and his The Anatomy School has also been sitting on the to-be-read-before-the-end-of-summer pile, so...

'Father Farquahrson's a bit...' Martin searched for a word that wouldn't be rude, '...boring.'

'Very well.' His mother spoke in a clipped I've-nothing-more-to-say-to-you voice. She put the top on the sandwich and sliced it into four triangles. 'Crusts on or off?'

'The way they are.' She took the waxed paper from around the loaf and folded up the sandwiches.

'Just because your mother chooses to do things a little better than anybody else...' The queen of the unfinished sentence. 'But that doesn't suit the like of our Martin. Oh no, he'd prefer to scorn things that are just that wee bit better...Mary Lawless doesn't stand up for you any more. She used to worship the ground you walked on. And Nurse Galliland says you're a changed boy. Being seventeen doesn't suit you.'

'I thought you liked change,' he said.

Being seventeen doesn't suit many of us and Martin is having to do a year over, having failed his exams. He is smart enough to know that he doesn't know much and is contemplating the priesthood. He goes on a silent retreat with several other boys from his school to observe Easter and to discover whether he has it in him. There has yet to be anything remarkable in the events of this novel but MacLaverty's captures the dialogue between teenage boys, and the relationships between them and their authority figures - parents, teachers, priests - with a wicked accuracy. As in Grace Notes, MacLaverty observes for us just the right everyday details so that you know who people are not through explanation but through their behavior.
MacLaverty thinks like an actor, taking pleasure in entering the lives of others wholly - their body rhythms, their opinions, and their actions - not just selling us the most attractive ones, but taking them all on. The characters in these novels are not types, they're people whom we seem to know in an instant, it's as though he has captured the stuffy Latin professor, the loving but unsure widowed mother, the distracted and thoughtful high school student, and frozen them in amber just as they are doing something characteristic. I am finding The Anatomy School a very amusing read and a good antidote to the equally amusing but relentlessly cynical The Lazarus Project.

Born to read (Books - Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf)

Maryanne Wolf, the author of Proust and the Squid, a book that chronicles the evolution of written language and how the brain accommodated the shift from oral language to print, had to win me back after her opening sentence.

We were never born to read.

Meaning what, exactly? That we were not intended by fate to read? I'm not a fatalist. That we were not designed to read? Genetic code accomplishes change by chance, evolution comes about when the changes happen to be useful in a given environment.

Our ancestors' invention could come about only because of the human brain's extraordinary ability to make new connections among its existing structures, a process made possible by the brain's ability to be shaped by experience.

Well then we were born to adapt, and we've adapted to reading written language. A strong opening is a good thing, but I found this one too sensational, but Wolf writes equally evocatively on what it is like to read, say, a paragraph of Proust, and what the brain is doing to result in that experience. I also found her saga of the human race's progression from purely spoken language, to written symbols pictorially representing things and concepts, to a finite system of symbols that represents units of of sound that can be generatively combined to evoke the spoken words which represent things, deft and engrossing storytelling.

Her book is a combination of anthropological and linguistic history and cognitive science.

Within that context, the generative capacity of reading parallels the fundamental plasticity in the circuit wiring of our brains: both permit us to go beyond the particulars given...Proust's understanding of the generative nature of reading contains a paradox: the goal of reading is to go beyond the author's ideas to thoughts that are increasingly autonomous, transformative, and ultimately independent of the written text. From the child's first, halting attempt to decipher letters, the experience of reading is not so much an end in itself as it is our best vehicle to a transformed mind, and,, literally and figuratively, to a changed brain.

I'm not sure that Proust's idea is necessarily paradoxical. That the point of a sequence of words evoking abstract experience is to go beyond the words is, well, the point. Wolf sometimes overreaches her subject matter for a "hey-wowness" it doesn't have. But her passion for what written language does do, the importance of reading as a formative experience, its necessity for the way we have evolved to think, and her eye to what she sees as the possible next cultural-linguistic transformation - one from printed narrative, which she characterizes as time-demanding and in-depth, to

the multidimensioned, continuous partial-attention culture

yes, it's the INTERNET, are powerfully expressed and make reading this book worthwhile. She can be credited for wondering of the potential gains as well as the losses in this next step, and compares her own fears of "unintended negative consequences" of a culture taken over by electronic media to Socrates' resistance to printed language in an age in which the oral tradition was the ne plus ultra of the cultured person.

Wolf is at her best when, for example, she addresses the current fashion of some parents to accelerate the speed at which a child learns to read, feeling it will give them an advantage. This is not necessarily the case and Wolf supports her case for what does constitute the most rich and productive learning environment with both descriptions of when in development neurons acquire their myelin sheathes and excerpts from To Kill a Mockingbird. There may be more to come on this book, as I am about half-way through, but right now I'll leave you with Wolf's excerpt from Harper Lee:

As I read the alphabet a faint line appeared between her eyebrows and after making me read most of the My First Reader and the stock market quotations from the Mobile Register aloud, she discovered that I was literate and looked at me with more than faint distaste. Miss Caroline told me to tell my father not to teach me anymore, it would interfere with my reading. I never deliberately learned to read.... Reading was something that just came to me.... I could not remember when the lines above Atticus's moving finger separated into words, but I had stared at them all the evenings in my memory - anything Atticus happened to be reading when I crawled into his lap every night. Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

No sentence goes unglazed (Books - The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon)

In 1908 in Chicago, a young, poor Jewish immigrant comes to the door of the police chief to deliver a letter. Once inside, he is shot to death and branded as a dangerous anarchist to cover up what was probably the over-reaction of the police chief's jittery household to having someone of a different class and ethnicity in their home. Plus ca change. In present day Chicago, a young writer, born in Bosnia, wants to find out exactly what happened with Lazarus Averbuch, the murder victim, and begins researching a book about the subject. This writer is not Aleksandar Hemon, that is the author of The Lazarus Project, the book containing these two alternating stories. Hemon is a writer gushed about in such hyperbole by other writers and critics that I was afraid to read anything of his lest, if I wasn't instantly transformed into a unicorn, I wouldn't be disappointed. I am not a unicorn yet, but he is a word-smith of prodigious inventiveness. Not a sentence goes unglazed:

The late winter has been gleefully tormenting the city. The pure snows of January and the spartan colds of February are over, and now the temperatures are falseheartedly rising and maliciously dropping: the venom of arbitrary ice storms, the exhausted bodies desperately hoping for spring, all the clothes stinking of stove smoke. The young man's feet and hands are frigid, he flexes his fingers in his pockets, and every step or two he tiptoes, as if dancing, to keep the blood going. He has been in Chicago for seven months and cold much of the time - the late-summer heat is now but a memeory of a different nightmare. One whimsically warm day in October, he went with Olga to the lichen-colored lake, presently frozen solid, and they stared at the rhythmic calm of the oncoming waves, considering all the good things that might happen one day...

Not even the weather escapes his enthusiasm. His pen (or computer) doesn't seem to discriminate between information and poetry. Everything worth telling is worth telling beautifully. The result makes everything, particularly in the historical sections of this book, alive:

An enormous automobile, panting like an aroused bull, nearly runs the young man over. The horse carriages look like ships, the horses are plump, groomed, and docile. Electric streetlights are still on, reflected in the shop windows. In one window, there is a headless tailor's dummy, proudly sporting a delicate white dress, the sleeves limply hanging. He stops in front of it, the tailor's dummy motionless like a monument.

But it is also (I imagine) like being on acid, or some club drug, and never coming down. The modern-day sections are similarly baroque, but embittered. Here our fictional writer/narrator attends a fund-raising event for the Association of Bosnian-Americans and makes fun of both ethnicities:

Americans, we are bound to agree, go out after they wash their hair, with their hair still wet - even in the winter! We concede that no same Bosnian mother would ever allow her child to do that, as everybody knows that going out with your hair wet commonly results in lethal brain inflammation. At this point I usually attest that my American wife, even though she is a neurosurgeon - a brain doctor, mind you - does the same thing. Everybody around the table shakes their head, concerned not only about her health and welfare but about the dubious prospects of my intercultural marriage as well. Someone is likely to mention the baffling absence of draft in the United States: Americans keep all of their windows open, and they don't care if they are exposed to draft, although it is well known that being exposed to severe airflow might cause brain inflammation. In my country, we are suspicious of free-flowing air.

The results are at times very amusing, and I admire the talent. Hemon clearly loves language, but it is a very different brand of storytelling after just reading Tim Winton's Breath in which, despite very beautiful writing, the story was more important than the storyteller. Here it is the other way round. That may be because the storyteller is himself a character in this novel and because the acts of writing and remembering are in some way being remarked upon by the novel, I'm about a quarter of the way into the book and I'm not sure of that yet.

This is the second novel I have read this year by a writer born in Bosnia, who left during the 1992 war, moved somewhere else, adopted the local language, and now writes in it to great acclaim by the locals. The other was Sasa Stanisic's How The Soldier Repairs the Gramophone. Hemon immigrated to Chicago and Sanisic to Germany. Both have a magic-infused, dreamy style and enjoy playing with form, but I found Stanisic's adventures in meta-fiction served his narrative better than Hemon's have (so far). And the voice of Stanisic's narrator was impassioned and naive while Hemon's is quite cynical. Still I want to learn what precisely happened in the Police Chief's home in the winter of 1908 and am interested to read on. The narrative is accompanied by photographs, some by a contemporary photographer named Velibor Bozovic, who is also given a fictional identity in the narrative, the other photographs are from the Chicago Historical Society.

I am also reading Proust and the Squid - a history of the evolution of reading and how the human brain evolved to accommodate the change from oral to written language. Perhaps I'll post on that tomorrow - I'm finding the subject matter interesting and the writing very fluid. We're also supposed to take in the huge Turner exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum today, if we don't get rained out.

Resisting the ordinary (Books - Breath by Tim Winton)

Let it be said that I already come to Breath a Tim Winton fan and that, if you haven't read Cloudstreet, I believe you are cheating yourself of one of the more beautiful, epic novels written in English. Since reading it, I have stuck by Winton, reading everything he has written, and some of lives he introduces us to in those books have been bleak. Breath is gorgeous. I read it in two sittings, starting at around 6 yesterday evening and finishing it by midnight. It is written is easy, pitch-perfect, colloquial prose, but that doesn't mean the writing is not a pleasure:

I will always remember my first wave that morning. The smells of paraffin wax and brine and peppy scrub. The way the swell rose beneath me like a body drawing in air. How the wave drew me forward and I sprang to my feet, skating with the wind of momentum in my ears. I leant across the wall of upstanding water and the board came with me as though it was part of my body and mind. The blur of spray. The billion shards of light. I remember the solitary watching figure on the beach and the flash of Loonie's smile as I flew by; I was intoxicated. And though I've lived to be an old man with my own share of happiness for all the mess I made, I still judge every joyous moment, every victory and revelation against those few seconds of living.

As you can probably tell from this excerpt, the narrator of Breath is a surfer but before you decide that, in that case, this novel is not for you, surfing is not the subject of the novel. The thrill of taking a risk. Challenging our human limits, our ordinariness. What one should feel like when life is good - is well lived. That is the well-worn territory of this coming of age novel. The narrator, as the excerpt above reveals, is a man already well into life. But some people take a while to grow into themselves, or at least to be able to look back with some insight.

More than once since then I've wondered whether the life-threatening high jinks that Loonie and I and Sando and Eva got up to in the years of my adolescence were anything more than a rebellion against the monotony of drawing breath. It's easy for an old man to look back and see the obvious, how wasted youth and health and safety are on the young who spurn such things, to be dismayed by the risks you took, but as youth you do sense that life renders you powerless by dragging you back to it, breath upon breath upon breath in an endless capitulation to biological routine, and that the human will to control is as much about asserting power over your own body as exercising it on others.

I found poetry in the ways Winton uses the theme of breath in this novel. It's an important motif beginning on page four and he finds myriad ways to keep coming back to it rhythmically, relentlessly. While its connection with both the theme of the story and the main activity of its characters is obvious, the way its used never is, it is elemental yet it can also be surprising.

Winton's writing can make the most overworked of themes - adolescent angst - live again. One of the reasons I keep coming back to him as a writer, even when I quake in my boots after reading some scenes of abuse in his short stories that I have never gotten out of my mind, is because his musicianship with my language can make me hear and see things as if for the first time. For example, the adolescent narrator of Breath is enrolled in a new school by his parents so that he might elude the influence of Loonie, whose need for a thrill borders on the pathological. As a result he is subjected to bus rides - a potentially banal source of angst - which, in Winton's hands, becomes a sensoral poem:

Still, such tenderness condemned me to years of bussing, and the bus ride is my chief memory of high school - the smells of vinyl and diesel and toothpaste, corrugated-iron shelters out by the highway, rain-soaked farmkids, the funk of wet wool and greasy scalps, the staccato rattle of the perspex emergency window, the silent feuds and the low-gear labouring behind pig trucks, the spidery handwriting of homework done in your lap and the heartbreaking winter dusk that greeted you as the bus rolled back across the bridge into Sawyer. The bus dropped me into a kind of limbo...

Winton embodies one of the chief themes of this beautiful book, which is a man whose daily exercise in life is to make something of beauty:

I couldn't have put words to it as a boy, but later I understood what seized my imagination that day. How strange it was to see men do something beautiful. Something pointless and elegant, as though nobody saw or cared.

In the context of many a rural community, like Sawyer in this novel, men doing anything remotely elegant with aesthetic rather than practical considerations is, in the best case, frowned upon and can be the source of endless judgement and even attack. Surfing, in this novel, is just about as useless as it gets - but what draws the young man to the water, to the ever-increasing risk of physical harm, and what draws his older self to reflect on the activities of his formative years is:

...the feeling of doing something graceful, as if dancing on water was the best and bravest thing a man could do.

This novel let me see the flame inside someone I could have assumed rather dull and ordinary - it even does it in a way that could have ended up being dull and ordinary - an old man looks back on his reckless youth, yawn. But it reveals someone whose impulse was to resist being ordinary, and to see how that drove this man once - like a surge in the ocean that turns into a wave. Some waves swell to perfection and one can ride them into shore in a single act of grace. Others you begin riding in and then you can no longer see that they will crash down upon you. Then the only thing you can do is hold your breath and wait out the violence of the tide. It is revealing what is elemental and alive in the life of this narrator, but not at first apparent on the surface, that made this novel such a beautiful one. The form of this book also takes on the inevitability of a tidal surge - the force is monumental but its events can be as quiet and pretty as they can be violent. This book resists the ordinary, and in so doing, rises to among the top reads I've had yet this year.

The Truth and its Consequences (Books - The Informers by Juan Gabriel Vasquez)

After reading the book, and seeing himself included in it, my friend Jorge Mor had called me and said, 'You've got every right, Gabriel, you've got every right in the world to tell whatever you like. But I felt strange, as if I'd walked into your room and seen you fucking someone. By accident, without meaning to. Reading the book I felt embarrassed, and I hadn't done anything to be ashamed of. You oblige people to know what they may not want to know. Why?' I told him that no one was obliged to read the book; that writing a memoir or any sort of autobiography implied touching on private aspects of a life, and the reader knows that. 'Well, that's just it,' said Jorge. 'Why do you want to talk publicly about what's private? Hasn't it occurred to you that with this book you've done exactly what the girlfirend did to your dad, just more elegantly?'

Of course, this hadn't occurred to Gabriel and for a while he hounds his father's former girlfriend mercilessly. Juan Gabriel Vasquez's novel The Informers closely examines these issues of truth telling and of the personal consequences that are left in the wake of an act that, on the surface, appears to be honest and even responsible. The novel is exhaustive in peeling back and exposing the layers of damage and drives home the point that no one is innocent, perhaps a little too thoroughly. When Gabriel Jr. (the author) finally visits the man who life was impacted by his father's act, the act that is unearthed by his book, there were no surprises left. The denouement drags on a bit too long. I found myself liking the writing in the 'present' time of the narrative - when Gabriel Jr., Gabriel Sr. and Sara - the woman whose starts the whole mess far more than the flash back and after-the-fact scenes. The relationship between father and son was intricate, tense, and also loving. It's ironic that although the events of the past are compelling enough to move Gabriel, the son, to write a book about them, when they are related to us I found the writing only made them expected, even mundane. I guess that's partly the point. One can commit this kind of act easily and without considering the consequences as one is caught up in the events of one's present life. But their consequences were rendered in a far more interesting fashion and ended up making better fiction than the events themselves.

Regardless of this criticism, I found the ideas explored by the story interesting and the characters very well developed. I would be interested to read some more Juan Gabriel Vasquez. Thank you, Dovegreyreader for the recommendation.

Here is my other post on The Informers.

When Books Matter (Books - The Informers by Juan Gabriel Vasquez)

Interesting, in light of the many voices raised world-wide against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia (FARC) this weekend, that I am reading The Informers by Columbian author Juan Gabriel Vasquez. It is also a story of Columbian politics that starts when Gabriel Santoro (son) interviews a family friend - a Jewish Columbian woman who had emigrated from Germany in the 1930s - and writes a book telling her story and the story of the Columbian relationship with the Germans during the Second World War. Gabriel Santoro's father - an important professor - is upset by the memories of blacklisting and damaging betrayals that the book unearths and writes a scathing review of his son's book in a prominent newspaper. Gabriel the son tries to understand what has happened in the past that his father would react in this unexpected way - so the book's form is part mystery and also a novel of the relationship between father and son.

Juan Gabriel Vasquez's prose as translated by Anne McLean is eloquent and detailed.

So the most natural thing in the world, the afternoon I went to see him, was to think it was the book he wanted to discuss with me: that he was going to make amends, three years late, for that betrayal, small and domestic though it may have been, but no less painful for that. What happened was very different. From his domineering, ochre-coloured armhcair, while he changed channels with the solitary digit of his mutilated hand, this aged and frightened man, smelling of dirty sheets, whose breathing whistled like a paper kite, told me, in the same tone he'd used all through his life to recount an anecdote about Demosthenes or Gaitan, that he'd spent the last three weeks making regular visits to a doctor an the San Pedro Claver Clinic, and that an examination of his sixty-seven-year-old body had revealed, in chronological order, a mild case of diabetes, a blocked coronary artery - the anterior descending - and the need for immediate surgery.

As a professor of rhetoric, Gabriel (the father) has a reputation for revealing to students of language, politics, and law how language wields power.

'Who can tell me why this series of phrases moves us, what makes it effective?' An incautious student: 'We're moved by the ideas of...' My father: 'Nothing to do with ideas. Ideas don't matter, any brute can have ideas, and these, in particular, are not ideas but slogans. No, the series moves and convinces us through the repetition of the same phrase at the beginning of the clauses, something that you will all, from now on, do me the favour of calling anaphora.. And the next one to mention ideas will be shot.'

Not only does Vasquez capture the voice of a charismatic professor with this passage. It seems to me that he begins to reveal something about his character. Perhaps his obsession with form stems from his own reluctance to look beneath the surface of his country, the surface of himself. His armor against the past is as densely packed as the prose on the pages of this novel. This prose is welcomingly different in style from the more conversational Thirteen and more patient Grace Notes, the last two novels I read - but they were both interestingly also about uncovering memory. Something about the way Vasquez writes about this son's search for the truth about his father makes me not just plough through the events (although the story does interest me and the writing moves forward with energy) I constantly reflect and connect. The writing calls up memories of my grandfather, also a German Jewish immigrant, thoughts about other books I just read, how they use language, what books do in general, thoughts of world politics not only in Columbia but also the upcoming elections in my own country and our candidates' use of rhetoric. I guess this is what is meant by evocative writing.

One of those days, Sara asked me why I wanted to write about her life, and I thought it would have been easy to evade the question or throw out any old witticism, but to answer with something approaching the truth was as essential to me as it seemed to be, at that moment, to her. I could have said that there were things I needed to come to understand. That certain areas of my experience (in my country, with my people, at this time that I happened to be living) had escaped me, generally because my attention was taken up with other more banal ones, and I wanted to keep that from continuing to happen. To become aware: that was my intention , at once simple and pretentious; and to think about the past, oblige someone to remember it, was one way of doing it, arm wrestling against entropy, an attempt to make the disorder of the world, whose only destiny was a more intense disorder, stop, be put in shackles, for once defeated. I could have said that or part of it; in my favour I point out that I avoided these grandiloquent lies and chose more humble lies, or rather, incomplete lies. 'I want his approval, Sara,' I told her. ' I want him to look at me with respect. It matters more than anything ever has.'

Halfway through now, I am drawn forward by the current of the prose, like a quickly moving river. I want to know what happens, yes. But I am enjoying being inside a book driven by the passion to know something more important than who did it or the real (fake) story behind Opus Dei. This book looks deeply at events both personal and political. It is about telling the truth when one simple version of it doesn't exist and when language, if used properly, has the power to convince one of almost anything. It's about legacy and inheritance. It's about living with integrity. I feel like I'm reading a book that matters, and although that may just be an illusion created by the skill with which Vasquez has strung together his words, for the moment I'm convinced.

The Informers was a recommendation of Dovegreyreader (and a great one - thank you!) however it was not available in the U.S. when I looked, so I picked it up when I was in London.

Jonathan Livingston Taxi (Books - Thirteen by Sebatian Beaumont)

After reading Sebastian Beaumont's addictive novel Thirteen for a while, I just couldn't help noticing how much the cover reminded me of Jonathan Livingston Seagull - that book of photographs of seagulls that doubled as a book of 1970s advice on how to 'be.' Thirteen too could be read as a manual on how to live in the moment, but its tongue is more firmly planted in its cheek than Jonathan's is. Let us say that it is about a character who needs and uncovers such advice.

As I mentioned in my first post on this book, Thirteen concerns a failed businessman who turns taxi driver on the night shift on the advice of an old friend. He ends up picking up Valerie, who is very ill, from her home at number Thirteen Wish Road, but as it turns out, this address does not actually exist. At least it doesn't exist unless he's in the zone, or as the nurse says:

Thirteen is not a number, it is a state of mind.

Who the hell is The Nurse, you ask? Read the book. Many contemporary books are described as 'journeys' even when they're not. This one actually is - befitting a book about a taxi driver. Not just a journey around the streets of the city, a journey from depression to happiness or illness to wellness. Occasionally I rolled my eyes about passages such as this one:

It is now four-forty in the morning, and I am tired, but not unhappy, and I have a sense like I have never had before that I am ALIVE, and I would love, I would LOVE to meet The Nurse right now, because I think I would be in a position, for the first time in my life, to be able to listen to what she has to say.

Or

'Sometimes,' she says, 'I think there are two ways living life. Firstly, you can put your nose to the grindstone and don't ever look up. If you always look at the ground, you'll never be happy, but at least you'll never know that you're unhappy.' She pauses to look out of the window at the bright emptiness of Argos and Kentucky Fried Chicken. 'And secondly?' I ask. 'Yes, secondly,' she says, a little wistfully, 'you can choose to look up and out from yourself. But then, you'll always have to face the fact that you live in a world of suffering.' I look at her in the mirror and she seems fascinated, for some reason, by her fingernails. 'And the advantage of looking up and out?' 'No matter how painful it is,' she tells me, 'you'll always know that you are alive.'

It struck me upon reading this book, how many contemporary novels are about a recovery of one kind of another. Particularly in the colloquial sense of recovering one's health or balance, as opposed to, say, a lost locket. Sarah Salway's book Tell Me Everything (which I am absolutely crazy about) could be looked at as a saga of recovery. Thirteen is a more ironic tale, but an equally compelling read. I just couldn't stop. It is a mystery - and oddly you don't even know what the mystery is for a time. But as silly as the life lessons aspect sometimes could be, it was also full of truths and left me smiling, not at it so much as because of it. As Stephen, the central character, recovered himself, I felt better too. Beaumont creates a host of memorable characters - both in the regular Thirteen gang and also among the passengers Stephen ferries from place to place. You can feel the love come right off the page - my favorite may have been the young man trying to run away from home. He leaves the meter running so long as he finishes packing his luggage, that he only has enough money left to go to the end of his block. I also enjoyed the writer's skill, not just in the plotting of a tale that kept me guessing but also in more subtle creations of character. I particularly admired the transformation of the voice from a bitter but chatty narrator of a thirty-something guy in a contemporary TV show:

Okay, I'd better get the 'How I ended up in this predicament' bit over with. I thought I might say something dramatic and tragic like...

to:

I parked directly outside. The air was fresh and slightly salty, and I could see, in the street lighting from across the road, the new foliage on the trees that flanked the park...

One could say it is a transformation from someone whose face is to the grindstone, to someone who looks up and out of himself.... hmmm. This novel is compulsively readable, amusing, and smart about human nature. As enjoyable for its mystery as it is for its little truths about living life. I really enjoyed it.

Interestingly, both Thirteen and Tell Me Everything were recommendations of Scott Pack. Two for two, Scott! Actually, correction, that's three for three - I forgot about Electricity.

The Informers by Juan Gabriel Vaquez up next (a recommendation of Dovegreyreader). I'm loving it so far. And I'm continuing to plough through Sensation & Perception by E. Bruce Goldstein. Shop reading, but still interesting stuff.

Elsewhere is where I'd rather be...

I've just begun reading Thirteen by Sebastian Beaumont. In it, a guy's business goes bust and he mopes around for a while and then a friend makes him an offer:

'Don't you trust me?' he asked.


'Yes, but...'

'I know you. I respect you. I want the best for you. As you can't think of what to do, give me one reason why I shouldn't decide for you.'

I shrugged.

'Okay,' he said. Think about it. If you agree, I'll tell you to do something, and you must do it - unless you can think of a good reason not to. And "because I don't want to" isn't a good enough reason. You've go to be able to say, in all honest, that what I suggest would be damaging to you, psychologically. Only then will I let you off, and try to think of something else.'

I stared at him, breathless, because I knew he was serious, and breathless, too, because I was so tempted to take him up on his suggestion.

'Give me a year. A year,' he said. 'I'll give you my email address in California and you can send me regular bulletins. And any time you feel that you need to stop, then you must stop. But only if you need to. You'd have to define what you mean by "need," not me.'

I got up and went to have a piss, then went through to the kitchen to make us both coffee. In that short time, in just four or five minutes, I made my decision. Looking back on it, the way I jumped at his suggest was not because I thought he would solve my life for me: make me happy. If was just that things right then were so shit, that even if they remained shit after I'd started doing whatever it was that I'd agreed to do, at least they'd be no worse. And what bliss it would be to stop wondering, however briefly, what to do with myself.

My amateur psychologist side said, 'You're just refusing to take responsibility for your life.'

Well, alright, but this was at least finite.

One year.

One year.

'Okay,' I said when I came back into the room. 'I'll do it. I'll give you one year. When are you going to tell me what to do?'

'Now, if you like.'

'Okay.'

He shifted slightly, as though uncomfortable, and took a sip of coffee before looking at me, watching for my reaction.

'Become a taxi driver,' he said. 'Working on a night shift.'

And so he makes this modern-day Faustian bargain and the number thirteen begins cropping up in all sorts of strange ways. Ominous chord. That's all I'm going to say. That and it's really fun.



Elsewhere on the web... Curious Expeditions had a post about pneumatic mail systems called Pneu Yourk, Pneu York - very cool stuff.

© Denis Darzacq

Photographer Denis Darzacq has done a series entitled Hyper set in France's supermarkets. These images mock the notion that buying any product will revolutionize your life. It's on view at Lens Culture - great site. It will revolutionize your life. Batteries not included. Check with your doctor if you have hypertension.


That'll do. Wherever you are stay cool and read with aplomb.

Life on a different time scale (Books - Grace Notes by Bernard MacLaverty)

I remember being a guest on a public radio interview show in Chicago a number of years ago after having directed Virginia, a play about the life of Virginia Woolf written by Irish novelist Edna O'Brien from the writings of Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Vita Sackville West, and the biography by Woolf's nephew Quentin Bell. It was a project I had considerable difficulty getting done but I had loved it enough to keep pitching it to theaters for five years until one producer (thanks, Patrick) finally had the interest in and the guts to do it. It became surprisingly successful and played for months and some cast members and I were invited on to this radio show where the host basically told me I wasn't qualified to direct it because I was a man and proceeded to side-line me and speak only to the charismatic actress who played the title role. In addition to wounding my ego and being a silly point to make given that the production was such a hit, I thought it really missed the boat about what artists do. They imagine. A good production by a female director would have been equally valid and no doubt would have brought insights that I hadn't had about the material and how it reflected Woolf's life and work, but it would not necessarily have been any better for her having had two X chromosomes and all the attendant bits that those usually confer upon the recipient. Can only old men direct King Lear? What about the insights the director should have about Cordelia - should that actress work with a woman and the king with a man? How old should he be? 50, as Lear might have been to be "old" in his day or 90 as he would be now? Perhaps we should only hire directors who have shared the same zip code as their characters, as they will have the proper geographical insight. You get my point. I think this talk show host might have had a bit problem with Bernard MacLaverty's Grace Notes, as his central character was not only a woman, but a pregnant one who gives birth, nurses, suffers depression that might be post-partum, and deals with her relationships with her mother and abusive boyfriend. I found it a real example of creative imagination.

MacLaverty brings a great deal of imagination not merely to imagining the fact of his character's sex, but to having her body, experiencing the pain of her depression, the certainty it will never leave, and the feeling of lightness and surprise when it does. He also tackles the job of finding words to describe music, Catherine is a composer, what it is like to hear sounds inside your head - not hallucinations - music one knows is not real but which one hears nonetheless. What one might do with those sounds if they are the raw materials for one's creative art, and what it is like to face the finality of one's composition and deal with the amorphous and interior having become indelible and public. When he uses musical terminology to describe the music, e.g. describing a phrase as "fugue-like" I found it far less effective that when he went for simile and metaphor:

Darkening and growing, rising and falling by the narrowest of interval. Plaiting bread. Her mother's hands, three pallid strands, pale fingers over and under, in and out. Weaving. Like ornament in the Book of Kells. Under and over, out and in. Like pale fingers interlocked in prayer. Grace notes with a vaguely Celtic flavour. More and more threads slowly and imperceptibly surround what the violins are saying, repeating over and over again to themselves.

I also enjoyed his description of an creator dealing with making their art in the undeniable presence of their feelings

But she didn't dare mention the worst thing of all. To write something really dark, despairing even, is so much better than being silent. If you're depressed your mind says there's no point in writing anything. You just want to sit with your mouth hanging open - your mind full of scorpions. There was no formula for getting around that.

MacLaverty also writes passages in the book during which Catherine deals not with the idea of depression, but with the small realities that are the experience of it:

She turned in the bed - tried to bunch up her pillows to be more comfortable. Tried to stop worrying. The repetition of thoughts which caused her pain amazed her. Why did she continually do it? Like picking at a scab on her. Or her tongue probing as the socket of a recently pulled tooth. It prevent ed healing and she knew it prevented healing. Yet she did it. The best way to stop doing it was to invite other things into her head. But then there was always the underlying knowledge that she was thinking of this thing to stop thinking about what she didn't want to think about.

I found this book full of patiently described insights about being inside of difficult human feelings, and that is the kind of novel I really value. There are two choices this book makes that are difficult. One is the reliance it places on the reader having some familiarity with classical music. It makes numerous references not only to good old Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, but also to the composers Britten, and Messiaen, to Poulenc and his Gloria, to Janacek's Galgolitic Mass and piano sonata. Laverty references sounds Catherine hears in a Ukranian church as being like the voices of Pinza or Christoff. These are specific references that are very familiar to me and added a lot of visceral substance to the descriptions. I'm not sure what reading this novel would be like if those were just words. The second choice he makes is a structural one. Laverty chooses to tell this story in two sections - the first is Catherine's return home following the death of her father her struggle to reconcile her identity as a modern woman with her past and the more "traditional" lives of her parents and childhood neighbors- an composer of edgy modern music among people who love a good old fashioned song you can hum and tap your foot to, a mother of a child had out-of-wedlock among devout Catholics, someone dealing with depression versus a generation who didn't speak of feelings and dealt with them through prayer and hard work. She comes home after a long estrangement and must walk through the conflict , the impatience, the guilt that this produces. And MacLaverty offers us no pat answers. But, as if to some way respond to what lies behind her experience of this visit home, he offers us the book's second section of events which occurred earlier in time, during which she met and left her lover, had her child, and composed an important piece of music. It reveals the person behind the behavior of the first part but it does not explain away the conflicts or provide resolution. He plays with time throughout the novel - quickly moving back and forth in any given moment. This is a more radical movement of the book's "present" and its effect is best described by a passage in the book during which a composer whom Catherine meets in school speaks to the students:

Huang Zaio Gang had talked about time - about how in music it could shrink and expand. Again making small chopping motions with his hand and little movements of his head, he had said that time could be sectioned and moved around. Music was not linear as some people would have us believe. In the two monumental movements of the Beethoven opus 111 time could stop altogether - like a yoga slowing his heartbeat. The arietta was music from a different planet - a different timescale - out among the stars, free from the laws of time and space. No matter how many times he heard the 'adagio molto semplice e cantabile' he was forced to accept that the world, and our place within it, was infinitely mysterious.

This post along with this one constitute my thoughts on Bernard MacLaverty's Grace Notes.

Next up - Thirteen by Sebastian Beaumont. Scott Pack raved about this one and I'm hooked.

Wanderings in a mind filled with music (Books - Grace Notes by Bernard MacLaverty)

George Bernard Shaw, James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats, Edna O'Brien, John McGahern, and now Bernard MacLaverty. It's such a cliche, I know, but what is it about being raised on that little bog-infested patch of intense green surrounded by two seas and an ocean that means you're going to grow up to string together the English language to create such glorious stories? Maybe, as Sheila and I mused last night as we indulged ourselves in an evening of wine and talk, it's the pub culture. Nights of stories and songs, the wheels greased by a little Guinness. Maybe it's the Guinness! Now wouldn't that be an ad campaign?

I had not heard of Bernard MacLaverty before reading John Self's enticing post on his latest book - Matters of Life and Death. If I can't convince you, maybe John will. I started with Grace Notes in which Catherine, a composer suffering with depression, returns home for her father's funeral. Her father owned a pub and she returns home to a tumult of activity while her brain moves its own private, circuitous path through thoughts of her musical mentor, her father, her grandmother, her depression - it's too early in my reading yet to make total sense of route - as she tries to take in the details of what is happening. It's wonderous how MacLaverty's prose slips in and out of time, from memory to the present and back again, like a thief. He creates that wandering of the mind with such powerful verisimilitude that at times I feel like he was in my own mind describing it. It's partly the musicality of the wanderings, the constant reference to musical sound that makes that true for me - I too have a head filled with music - my own private soundtrack - that almost never stops.

He rattled the rods against the skin of the drum, testing it. The drum was so big in relation to the man that Catherine thought of a penny-farthing.

'They're made of goat skin,' said her father. 'King Billygoat skin. You could smell the stink of it from Omagh.'

When she'd heard the drums in her home their rhythm had been fudged by distance and the sound had become an indistinct rumble. Now here, close up, it was a different thing altogether. Her father leaned over to her ear as if to shout something above the noise of the drumming, but instead shook his head. When the drums ceased, he whispered to her, 'They're supposed to be able to play different rhythms, different tunes - Lilliburlero and what have you - but it all sound the same to me. A bloody dundering. On the Twelfth they thump them so hard and so long they bleed their wrists. Against the rim. Sheer bloody bigotry.' Catherine stared at the flailing sticks, felt her eardrums pummelled. 'They practise out here above the town to let the Catholics know they're in charge. This is their way of saying the Prods rule the roost.'

But Cathrine was thrilled by the sound, could distinguish the left hand's rhythm from the right. She tried to keep time with her toes inside her shoes. There were slaps and duns on the off-beats, complex rhythms she couldn't begin to write down - even now, never mind then. The two sticks working independently. The hand stripping each other up. A ripple bounding back and interfering with the other ripples which had first started it. The drums were battered so loud she felt the vibrations in her body, was sure the sky and the air about her were pounding to the beat. It didn't exactly make her want to dance, more to sway. But there was an edge as well - of fear, of tribal war drumming. The gathering of men turned to stare across the road.

MacLaverty creates the feeling of returning home, the hollow unreality of death in the house when you haven't expected it, in just the way I remember my return home when my father died. The dynamics and rhythm are so completely different from the above paragraphs - hushed as opposed to thunderous, not a frantic pace, but slow movements that land first on one detail and then another - like a butterfly landing on a flower and lingering to drink deep - it makes me think of the acting exercises I used to do with my students.

'Aw darlin.' Mrs McCarthy awkwardly touched Catherine's hand and slid past her, out of the room. Catherine stepped over the threshold. Think of something else. Don't look. She'd always slept in this room. The light coming through the drawn curtains was yellow. The window was open about an inch and the curtains moved in the draught. Nylon and slithery. The coffin was on the bed. She kept her eyes away from it. It rested on the one of the patchwork quilts Granny Boyd had made. The design of the quilt had an odd name which she could not remember. It was either Grandmother's Flower Garden or The Drunkard's Path. The lid of the coffin was propped upright beside the wardrobe. His name had already been etched on the brass plate. How did they do it so quickly? On the wall - all her music certificates. It was her father who'd insisted they be framed. When she was young she'd accepted them but later they just embarrassed her. There was a wooden crucifix, the wood of the cross dark, the Christ figure pale. Two candles burned on the bedside table. The room smelt strongly of perfume. She traced it to a bowl of potpourri on the mantelpiece. Were they trying to mask the smell of decay? She must look at him. She stepped nearer and the floor board at that side of the bed. squeaked as it had always done. Outside the hammering and sawing continued. Men shouting to one another. She made herself look directly into the coffin at her father.

'Aw Jesus...' It was him and it wasn't him. Another changeling. He was robed in a white shroud, his hands joined as if in prayer. His fingers were waxy, yellowish - interlaced and tied in that position by rosary beads. He looked strange lying on his back like this. Everything seemed exaggerated - his nostrils were cavernous, his nose looked more hooked, his eyebrows bushier. His lips were blue-black and his skin was darker than she had ever remembered it. With his eyes shut the face had lost all its animation, did not seem like her father. A dead face. The face of a dead man was exactly what it was. She imagined him behind the bar smiling - throwing back his head and laughing. She would never see that again...

Just one more:

She did not go back to the kitchen but instead went into the living-room. Geraldine had opened the window and the place smelt better. Catherine moved about, looking - touching. The black upright piano. The piano stool with the squeaking strut. She lifted the padded seat to look inside. The stool lid had a brass support which sounded like scissors as it openend. It clicked into place to prop open the seat. The topmost piece of sheet music was 'Down by the Sally Gardens'. She openend the lid of the piano. The keys were more yellowed than she remembered. She pressed a three-finger chord, pressed it so gently that the hammers did not engage. Silence.

One day, when she was only three or four, she'd slipped away from the kitchen as her mother baked and listened to the radio. On this particular day the piano lid was open. Catherine had reached up above her head and pressed the keys as softly as she could. No sound came from them. She had to press harder to make the sound come. It frightened her when it did. Dark, deep, thundery. The booming faded away and the noise of the birds outside came back. She tried further up the piano where the notes were nicer, not so frightening. She pressed a single note, again and again. It wasn't the note which made her feel funny - it was the sound it made as it faded away. The afterwards. It made her feel lonely. She was scared that, no matter how hard her mother tried, she would never find her in this room. And she would always be lost. She would always be isolated. The piano stool had a lose strut. There was no glue in the socket and it could be twisted so that it made a dry squeaking sound. she would do this until she tired of it. People who came into the house and played the piano took the music sheets out of the seat and put them on the front of the piano, looked at them and played. Sometimes they sang at the same time. Sometimes people came in and could play without any sheets. Like Frankie Lennon. Then she heard her mother's voice calling her from the kitchen. She didn't dare answer because her mother sounded angry. Her mother flung open the door and saw her standing at the piano. She strode across the room, picked Catherine up and slammed the lid of the piano shut so hard it made the whole instrument tingle and hum. Then she banged the seat of the piano stool closed.

'Fingers,' she shouted. 'A child could lose her fingers through sheer bloody carelessness. And then where would we be?'

She was surprise to see a CD player and a dozen or so CDs stacked beside her father's records...

Walking through my childhood home following the death of my father touching things, I too remember that alternation between frantic preparations to be made - preparations for which I wasn't prepared - and wandering through memories looking for clues to what made my father my father and what made me me.

Not-for-Tourists Guide to Dyslexia (Books - Reading David by Lissa Weinstein, Ph.D.)

My advisor at school had loaned this book to me months ago, as I am training in her child neuropsychology lab. Lissa Weinstein (the author - a clinical psychologist and also a prof at my program) has a son, David, who was diagnosed with dyslexia. Reading David chronicles their parallel experiences from first noticing the problem through around 5th grade. Both mother and son write (once the son is articulate enough to contribute) and the mere presence of his sections tell a story all by themselves. The book is not only arranged chronologically it was actually written as the events unfolded, i.e. mother and son do not try to remember long after the fact what happened. The writing gave them each an outlet for their frustrations. It also gave David a grown-up and meaningful, and positive activity that involved language, which was otherwise a source of misery for him.

Dyslexia, Dr. Weinstein tells us straight from the National Institute of Child Health is:

one of several distinct learning disabilities. It is a specific language based disorder of constitutional origin, characterized by difficulties in single word decoding, usually reflecting insufficient phonological processing abilities. These difficulties in single word decoding are often unexpected in relation to age and other cognitive and academic abilities; they are not the result of generalized developmental disability or sensory impairment. Dyslexia is manifested by variable difficulty with different forms of language, often including , in addition to reading problems, a conspicuous problem with acquiring proficiency in writing and spelling.

It is Dr. Weinstein's habit that whenever she faces a big challenge, she ends up at the library reading about it. Rather than leaving us to face this technical definition alone, Weinstein breaks it down into its component parts, explaining and reflecting on each one. The book has several strengths, and one of them is Dr. Weinstein's ability to explain everything in accessible terms. She is a deft storyteller - using colorful, clear language to describe not only what is going on but how it feels to her, and she allows her son to explain for himself how he feels. She clearly wants this to be the NFT (not for tourists) guide to dyslexia and wants both parent and child to go to it not only for information but for emotional support. This is apparent in the other strength of this book - Dr. Weinstein's honest unstinting observation of herself and the openness with which she puts on the page her fears for her sons future, her sense of inadequacy as a parent, her anger at the events and, at times, her son. It's a relief to read a story-of-an-illness book (not my favorite genre) that is not sentimental. People are not perfect (and I don't mean the people with the diagnosis) but rather the people around them. It may be irrational or unattractive to get angry at your child for not acquiring the ability to read with the same amazing seemingly automatic ease as most other children, and it may not portray one in the best light to admit to those feelings, but they are common and Weinstein's ability to identify them in herself and own up to them is refreshingly honest and will, I'm sure, be useful to others in the same role who think they are failing for feeling angry.

There are some very good sections in which Dr. Weinstein describes how she fooled herself into thinking that David was just a unique original and didn't really have a problem so that she could delay getting him tested.

These errors were something different from troubling speech sounds. These were near misses, mistaken efforts to describe a picture that he recognizes but can't retrieve the exact name. I'd heard these funny things in his speech before, him using big words when little ones would do, like saying, "It's a blustery day" at age two and a half instead of, "It's raining." In my mind, I'd defined him as an unusual child with a huge vocabulary.

There are also several good sections on her frustration at not being able to carry over her professional knowledge or distance into situations where she needed to make a decision about or advocate for her own son. Another on her son's anger and fear at his differences:

"You made this happen to me. You made me look at the letters when I wasn't ready. You made me hate them. You made me feel stupid." The veins are popping on his forehead. He's held this in a long time. His bitterness is a rodent, running so rapidly across the room that a moment later we tell ourselves we've never seen it.

And a very funny section about his inability to spell, except when it comes to profanity:

"F-U-C-K, That's fuck. I can spell that correctly." David takes a moment to view his handiwork on the thirty Post-it notes he's using to decorate the kitchen instead of doing his homework. There are other words too, like B-I-T-C-H and S-H-I-T. They are all spelled correctly, with the exception of K-I-K MY A-S-S. It's a pity, because kick is one of his spelling words.

"Why can you spell all the curse words right, David?"

"It's easy. You can sound them out."

That can't be correct. Because by any logic, if you can spell fuck with its silent "c," you should be able to put that same "c" in kick. If you can spell bitch the right way, you shouldnn't be wpelling witch as "witz." So what is it?

Dirty words are E-X-C-I-T-I-N-G. David like to write them, say them over and over, and look at them. The thrill gets him past his wish not to see and his difficulty memorizing. Eventually, he could be taught to connect bitch and witch.

Which echoes David's own advice in the Lessons Learned chapter that mother and son wrote together, in which he tells other children who are dyslexic that they will learn to read. Aside from the disadvantage of sometimes having the mother/son sections repeat each other too closely, it's one of the pleasures of the book to witness David's growth in confidence in the humor of his later sections in which he advises fellow travelers how to avoid homework. "Start a fight with your brother," he advises. "This is sure-fire!" or

Figure our what your parents are really interested in. Do they like your drawings? Start drawing. Do they like you to be curious about things? Now is a good time to ask questions. This works best if there's something your mom or dad want to show you or teach you about. For example, my dad loves rock and roll. He's always getting these videos from the video store on the history of rock and roll. Homework time is an especially good opportunity to offer Dad some alone time with you. Maybe you should watch that video he got out. When I tried this, Dad had no clue. I thought Mommy would hit the ceiling. She kept yelling "Larry, he has to do his homework! What are you doing?" She didn't yell at me, though. She yelled at Dad.

Future Ferris Bueller? Could be. But David has sober advice for kids like himself as well offered in a section he insisted on calling Permanent Scars. His function in the book is to voice some of the feelings kids like himself might have but are unable to express. This could be useful for helping a parent understand what it might be like for their child to be inside the problem of dyslexia and I can imagine it being equally useful for a child who will often assume that other people have not gone through what they are experiencing and that there is no way out. Dr. Weinstein also offers concise paragraphs in this section as well on issues such as Getting Evaluated, Getting Help, What you Can Do, and Life Lessons which might be be entitled What you Can't Do.

Dr. Weinstein and her son have opened themselves up to the reader in a personal, fast-moving story that should offer practical advise and companionship for others on the same journey.

Bernard LacLaverty's Grace Notes is up next...gorgeous writing!