Now you see it. Now you see it. Now you don't

Now you see it. Now you see it. Now you don't. No, I'm not stuttering. That sentence more accurately describes what happens when the visual cortex pays attention to sudden changes in the environment, according to Dr. Susana Martinez-Conde of the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix. After the sudden disappearance of an object, an after-image of it lingers behind for a very short time, but just long enough that the brain is distracted, and that distraction provides the cover for the magician's manipulation which the human eye is unlikely to see. Benedict Carey's article in today's Science Times is about a paper in Nature Reviews Neuroscience written by two neuroscientists and a magician, that explores how the magician exploits the compensatory strategies our brains have evolved to overcome the limits of our perceptive and attentional systems.

...the brain focuses conscious attention on one thing at a time [not everyone agrees with this], at the expense of others, regardless of where the eyes are pointing. In imaging studies, neuroscientists have found evidence that the brain suppresses activity in surround visual areas when concentrating on a specific task. Thus preoccupied, the brain may not consciously register actions witnessed by the eyes.

Perception is my research area, and performing on stage is my former life but my very first work when in my teens was as a magician. I had a business doing shows for kids' birthday parties and the like. Perhaps I really have come full circle. There are six film clips in the supplementary section of the Nature Review Neuroscience article of magicians doing various tricks that illustrate the phenomena discussed in the article. Enjoy the show.

Cultural prescription vs seeing art for pleasure (Other culture - Dali and Kirschner at MOMA)

From MOMA's website

We visited The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) yesterday and took in three exhibits - one on the architecture of modular housing which was fairly interesting, the giant Dali exhibit which I found an unfocused monster of a show, and the highlight for me: Kirschner and the Berlin Street. With shows like the Dali, I cannot understand what anyone finds pleasurable about them. One room after another was as crowded with canvases, boxes, and articles on the wall as the viewers were in the room. The conceit was to tie together his paintings and his film designs but as usual in these blockbuster shows, too many works meant I was able to see almost nothing at all. These big shows featuring popular artists end up attracting so many people to the gallery that we stood three deep to glance at little canvases hung too closely. Families line up with their children offering this experience as a kind of cultural prescription - no wonder there is so little appreciation for art in the U.S.

In stark contrast to the Dali was the tightly focused Kirschner and the Berlin Street, I knew I would like it just comparing the on-line descriptions of the two shows. The first thing you learn about the Dali in the intro is that it features 130 of his paintings. Wow - and how many cans of paint did he use to paint them? The exhibit of German expressionist Ernst Kirschner chooses only works painted or drawn between 1913 and 1915. They feature evocations of Berlin that narrow the streets with an angular perspective seeming to cut at the viewer like knives. The acid colors and 'primitivist' influence tell a story of a violent end to bourgeois politesse and places the prostitutes and dancers of the city center stage as World War I encroaches on an old way of life. It's ironic that the critics of the day (members of the bourgeoisie themselves) called these works primitive, as the paintings called to mind African masks, sculpture and dance that were making their way into the awareness of twentieth century artists. World War I would seem to indicate that the bourgeoisie were no less primitive. In this exhibit, boldly drawn lithographs, vivid paintings, and sketchbooks sit side-by-side so that you can see an evolution from rough idea to finished work. One can comfortably walk through the rooms in half an hour if one chooses and Kirschner, not having been in the employ of Warner Brothers, although well attended did not attract nearly the number of viewers the Dali did so you could actually see the paintings. Having just a few themes to focus on and a reasonable number of works spaced comfortably on the walls, one could string together one's own narrative and move back and forth among the images to relate vision and theme. The show is on through November 10.

Sunday Odds and Ends (Film - The Frozen River) (Books - Moonheart and The Good Doctor)

The film Frozen River opened recently in New York. There have been a number articles singing the unsung praises of the the lead actress, Melissa Leo, like this one in the Times. She's one of the many good actors out there who work all the time in film, in television, on stage, and you don't necessarily know exactly who they are. This is a little gem of a film - Leo's character, Ray, lives in a trailer with her two sons in upstate New York, near the Canadian border. With an absent husband who is addicted to gambling, a job at the dollar store, and a lack of ability to make good decisions, she is always a paycheck away from disaster. A relationship develops between her and a Native American woman (Lila, played by Misty Upham, pictured above) that gives Ray what she believes is an opportunity to better her life, and her life is materially grim, so she takes it and the tension that grips this otherwise quiet film begins. This is a film that belies expectations - expectations about friendship, expectations one might have about people living in trailers, expectations about the lengths people will go to better their circumstances. It is quietly and intensely acted. The work of the two women, along with Charlie McDermott, who plays Ray's 15-year-old son, is excellent. There are some scenes of unbelievable suspense - not the shoot-em-up kind, the kind where you can't make a sound. If this great little indie comes your way, be sure and see it.

Every so often, I get the hankering to read another of Charles de Lint's original fantasy novels. They're odd, joyous books - Moonheart is the third of his I've read. In them realistic, recognizable characters living slightly fringe-y lives (a bit like the characters in Anne Tyler's novels) in contemporary Ottowa encounter some evidence of a mythic-paranormal world and their lives are forever changed. In this one a young woman is orphaned by a car accident and raised by a very wealthy uncle. They work in an antique shop of wonderful old junk and live in a rambling house that functions as a sort of commune for people who live other than conventional lives. They encounter a bone disk in a box of junk that has sat in the back room of their shop since 1976 (this book was written in 1984). The trouble is that this disk had apparently recently been stolen from a collection of artifacts that are tied somehow to a mysterious powerful old man, Thomas Hengwr, a teacher of the Way. This teacher once released a young folk musician, Keiran, from jail who, in return, becomes his apprentice and learns the way. Keiran returns to Ottowa sensing something is amiss with Hengwr and begins being followed by a secret squad of police who investigate paranormal phenomena....I can just tell Keiran is going to end up living at the rambling house because there is something very...not normal about this house. Anyhoo, you get the idea. It is the plots that I always end up coming back to de Lint for. His books have a comfort to them - the characters are involved in art and arcane artifacts, they like Celtic folk music and brew many pots of tea and live in unusual houses, or on gorgeous wooded islands. These are very curl-upable stories but de Lint's writing is, especially in this particularly early novel, not sophisticated. Fluid, yes, it gets the job done, but he seems to have a hard time making choices - if he sets out to describe the desk of a character, we are treated to an paragraph-long list of artifact with no apparent discrimination - no prioritizing. Everything, it seems, is important, down to the brand name of the tape recorder playing the folk music of an artist I have never heard of. I'm sure in 1984 the fact that the tape recorder was an Aiwa may have had some significance, but now it is lost on me. He also seems to never have met a cliche he didn't like. Particularly his dialogue - it is written like bad television:

"They need some place to be," he'd replied. "Lord knows, the House is big enough. They come for the same reason that you and I and the regulars stay. To get away from the world outside for awhile."

"I can't deny them that. They're like us, Sairey. Different from the norm. And, as this is a place where difference is the norm, they can relax. There's no need to try and fit in because everything fits in here."

[...]

"You don't know how easy a place like this would be to burgle," he told Sara.

'"But if someone really wants to," Sara said, "a locked door or latched window isn't going to stop them. And besides, anyone's welcome here anyway."

"Not anyone, " Blue insisted.

"Well, Jamie's never turned anyone away."

"The House makes its own decisions about who stays and who goes..."

That is the House, with a CAPITAL -H. Okay, so they speak a bit like 1970s TV. A bit silly, yes, but if you're a fantasy fan, particularly a sub-genre known as Urban fantasy, the selling point of de Lint is original plots that stray from formula, and lovely characters. They are warm and joyous books and I needed a comfort read.

In a more literary part of the forest, John Self himself recently recommended Damon Galgut, a South African novelist who I had never heard of before. My library came up with his The Good Doctor in short order and I hadn't read but a single page yesterday before I knew I was going to like this book. In it, an idealistic young doctor comes to do a year of service in an isolated hospital run by a staff jaded by years of deprivation and disappointment.

I was sitting in the office in the late afternoon and he appeared suddenly in the doorway, carrying a suitcase in one hand and wearing plain clothes - jeans and a brown shirt - with his white coat on top. He looked young and lost and a bit bewildered, but that wasn't why I thought what I did. It was because of something else, something I could see in his face.

He said, 'Hello...? Is this the hospital?'

His voice was unexpectedly deep for somebody so tall and thin.

'Come in,' I said. Put down your bag.'

He came in, but he didn't put down the bag. He held it close while he looked around at the pink walls, the empty chairs, the dusty desk in the corner, the frail plants wilting in their pots. I could see that he thought there'd been some kind of mistake. I felt sorry for him.

This is the kind of writing I expect from a short story. Compact - it chooses exactly which details are most important to know. It wastes nothing. The first page and a half accomplishes character description, setting, and backstory all tightly packed together so that you are hardly aware he is accomplishing anything:

The room was in a separate wing. We had to cross an open space of ground, close to the parking lot. When he came in he must have walked this way, but now he looked at the path through the long grass, the ragged trees overhead dropping their burden of leaves, as if he'd never seen them before.

We have past and the future wrapped into those three sentences. So exact are they, I seem to perceive details never mentioned. Something about the description has me feeling heat and hearing the drone of insects. I feel myself squinting in the sun. And every so often he uses words just beautifully enough to remind me that he is writing, the ragged trees overhead dropping their burden of leaves - I love the burden of leaves because it evokes the fact the branch is dragged down without explicitly saying so. Lovely writing. I didn't get into bed until after midnight last night, but I find now that I had read two chapters before going to sleep. I'm really looking forward to reading more of this one, although I won't have much time as I'm meeting friends at MOMA today. There is so much on at the moment I'm not sure what I'm going to see - an architecture exhibit, Joseph Beuys, Kirschner and the Berlin Street, or the big Dali show. Hmmm.

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.

Writing my life

Suggested by Miko

Are there any particular worlds in books where you’d like to live?

Or where you certainly would NOT want to live?

What about authors? If you were a character, who would you trust to write your life?

As a teenager I had always wanted to be one of Salinger's Glass family (Franny and Zooey, Raise High The Roofbeams Carpenter and Seymour). They lived in one of those sprawling Upper West Side NYC apartments, they talked back to their mother, and they were all so smart, so well read. In retrospect I think it would have been rather chaotic and a few of the Glass children don't end up very happily despite their brilliance, but at the time I thought it would be idea.

I not only wanted to live in the Paris of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, on my first trip to Paris I was sure I would find it. And I wanted not merely to live in Paris but really, if the truth be told, at 27 rue de Fleurus -their "tiny pavillon of two stories with four small rooms, a kitchen and bath, and a very large atelier adjoining." I wanted my dinner cooked by their Helene and I wanted to meet their friends Picasso, Gris, and Braque and buy one of their artworks for a song and hang it in my own Parisian living room, when I had one. I would also have been happy living in the post-war Paris of May Sarton's Shadow of a Man - going to the theatre with Fontane, eating extraordinary lunches, and figuring out love.

I'm also generally attracted to worlds of fantasy books where phenomena invisible in our own world are made tangible - as in the His Dark Materials books of Philip Pullman - or in which magic is possible. To tesseract could be convenient every now and then or even having a good old fashioned wand like Harry P. The problem is that, in these worlds, generally those powers not granted us are given the characters in worlds in tremendous crisis. Wait a minute. Maybe that is us. Greater crisis. So maybe this is one of those cases where I should be careful what I wish for.

Much as I enjoy her books, I would not want to live in the world of an Iris Murdoch novel. Although some of them have beautiful homes, the people in them are usually in the midst of some romantic or existential crisis that inevitably ends in a tragedy - an impulsive act, a crime, a death. I'm also fascinated by Rohinton Mistry's worlds but would have no interest in inhabiting them. I think life in Mistry's rural or urban Indian settings would be too hot and too chaotic for me.

I'm not sure about the exact meaning of the last question - by write my life do you mean who would I want to record my life as I'm living it now? In that case, I could do with a compassionate eye and someone who understands that so much of what makes a life interesting is what is happening inside the person. I would go with Ethan Canin for that or Virginia Woolf would no doubt do my continuous inner monologue great justice. She would get me. However, if by write my life you mean who would I like to create a life for me other than the one I'm living? Then, hmmmm... I think I'll opt for Gregory Maguire. It would be excitingly imagined, a little magical, full of warmth - it would be a fairy tale and sometimes dangerous but I would feel safe in Maguire's hands. Plus everyone would read me and I would become a musical.

Artful and involving (Film - Tell No One)

Tell No One is a film that has everything - a good mystery, suspense, a great chase scene, a good love story, and terrific acting. Now, how often have you heard me say that? It is French, yes, so some of you might be stuck reading subtitles, but long passages of sophisticated dialogue are not the point here so you won't be reading much - this is a film built on plot. The plot is dense and intricate but the film does a great job of mapping it out - this is one of its strengths - it is clear what was done and by whom, but it doesn't accomplish that by presuming you're stupid. Director/co-writer Guillaume Canet knows how to use film to tell a complex story, flashbacks are used effectively, he employs an early memory of the central character to great effect. Music is used beautifully to convey atmosphere and to emphasize action with lyrics which specifically reference plot (he used a Jeff Buckley track of Lilac Wine which I love, so I admit to being biased). He writes scenes that concisely convey character so that the viewer immediately knows with whom they are dealing, but subsequent scenes continue to develop character, sometimes to build upon what we know already, other times to surprise us by contradicting it. I found that when the central character is on the run, I didn't just care because he was the lead - I cared about him because Canet established his kindness, his vulnerability not by formula - but through character detail - through human interaction that showed us what kind of man he was. And Francois Cluzet embodies that writing as a person rather than a film "character." That's what I appreciated most, how free the film was of cliche. The film also benefits from good casting - Nathalie Baye and Kristin Scott Thomas (who acts in French, I didn't know she could!) are very strong, and Cluzet gives a particularly subtle and open performance. This is film making of the strongest kind - artful and involving without being lofty - it's good film making for everybody.

Progress report

On July 3, 2008 there were 21 books to read prior to the start of classes. As of August 5th. 11 have been read, 4 are in progress, and another 4 are likely not to interest me right now. Ethan Canin's America, America replaces The Pickwick Papers. But I'm feeling impulsive about my reading, I'm getting that urge to break free of restrictions (even my own) prior to the start of school. There is some fiction on the way - Jeanette Winterson's Tanglewreck after Sheila's post on it, Catherine O'Flynn's What was Lost after Scott Pack's post on it, and Cal and Lamb by Bernard MacLaverty after John Self's raves and my reading of his novels Grace Notes and The Anatomy School, and it might be fitting to read some Solzhenitsyn, following his death this weekend. The Gulag Archipelago is on both my Russian and Chunkster challenges for this year.

America, America
The Informers
The Road Home - in progress
Breath
Thirteen
The Book Thief
Story of a Marriage (I'm wary of this one)
The Lazarus Project
Grace Notes
The Anatomy School
Proust and the Squid - in progress
Sensation & Perception - in progress
The Poetics of Mind - this will never happen
Attention - I'll dip into it
Neuroanatomy Through Clinical Cases - As above
Patient-Based Approaches to Cognitive Neuroscience
Red Cavalry - in progress
The Darling
The Changeling
White Noise
Reading David

Imagination is the accomplice of compassion (The Road Home by Rose Tremain)

I didn't think I was in the mood for the seriousness of Rose Tremain's The Road Home, a novel about a Russian widower, Lev, who immigrates to London to find a job after the lumber mill where he works goes belly-up. But her characters are so alive, her style so fluid and unlabored, I found I had read a third of the book before I went to sleep last night.

After some miles, as the sun came up, Lev took out a cigarette and stuck it between his lips, and the woman sitting next to him, a plump, contained person with moles like splashes of mud on her face, said quickly: 'I'm sorry, but there is no smoking allowed on this bus.'

Lev knew this, had known it in advance, had tried to prepare himself mentally for the long agony of it. But even an unlit cigarette was a companion - something to hold on to, something that had promise in it - and all he could be bothered to do now was to nod, just to show the woman that he'd heard what she'd said, reassure her that he wasn't going to cause trouble; because there they would have to sit for fifty hours or more, side by side with their separate aches and dreams, like a married couple. They would hear each other's snores and sighs, smell the food and drink each had brought with them, note the degree to which each was fearful or unafraid, make short forays into conversation. And then later, then they finally arrived in London, they would probably separate with barely a word or a look, walk out into a rainy morning, each alone and beginning a new life.

What strikes me most readily as I read is how the novel tests the judgments I sometimes make when I encounter an immigrant on the subway or bagging groceries. It accomplishes this not by lecturing the reader with sobering facts but by inviting us to imagine being in the shoes of an immigrant - their longing for distant family, finding a job when you know almost none of the language, understanding the rush of words as you're trained when people mostly speak in idiom and slang, what it's like have only $100 in your wallet and that must keep you until you land a job. Tremain makes a case for imagination as a necessary accomplice of compassion.

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.

Someone's idea of a good time is doing a silly meme (apparently mine)

As I am not far enough along in The Anatomy School yet to say anything more about it (I was out playing with friends yesterday), I think I'll escape with this little meme from Make Tea Not War.

1. My uncle once: Did what my five-year-old self considered marvelous magic tricks. He seemed to be able to make household objects disappear and reappear in the most extraordinary ways. I thought he was truly powerful until I discovered how my aunt and two cousins assisted him by distracting me and passing the objects around the room.

2. Never in my life: have I sky-dived (dove?) or eaten brains and I have no intention of starting now.

3. When I was five: ...I was just alive (A. A. Milne). I was also skinny and naturally blonde. Oh well.

4. High school was: 3 years of hell and 1 of heaven.

5. I will never forget: A week I had in the south of France with a certain Quebecois.

6. Once I met: Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn. I stammered.

7. There’s this girl I know: who insists she will never meet anyone right for her and I know she's wrong.

8. Once, at a bar: in White River Junction, Vermont I learned to drink vodka martinis The rest is history.

9. By noon, I’m usually: Hungry, although that is by no means confined to noon.

10. Last night: I ate sushi al fresco with The Ragazzo and my friend Kate. It had turned cool after torrential rains and it was a lovely night to be out in NYC.

11. If only I had: More tea, a lighter lap top, a faster brain, more time to read.

12. Next time I go to church: Will be a long time from now.

13. What worries me most: is the people I know who feel they can only be happy when others change.

14. When I turn my head left I see: A tall shelf with books on neuroscience, the printer, a Bose radio/CD player, some CDs, the phone, and my last Valentine's Day card from The Ragazzo, which is shaped like a Teddy Bear.

15. When I turn my head right I see: The teapot, then the window and out of it, a red brick building. The sun is shining.

16. You know I’m lying when: You see, I wish I knew this so that I could stop it. Then I might be a better liar. Unfortunately, I'm pretty transparent.

17. What I miss most about the Eighties is: My theatre company and the friends I made while working there.

18. If I were a character in Shakespeare I’d be: Leontes (I'm as flawed as he is) or Richard II (just to say "Let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings." God, that is that the most beautiful speech in the world). I'm getting too old to play Hamlet.

19. By this time next year: I hope to be one year older and have a full set of data for my experiments.

20. A better name for me would be: I'm good with the one I have, thanks.

21. I have a hard time understanding: People who think that everyone else thinks just like them.

22. If I ever go back to school, I’ll: I am back in school. Next question.

23. You know I like you if: I talk a lot while shifting from foot to foot.

24. If I ever won an award, the first person I would thank would be: The person giving it to me.

25. Take my advice, never: discuss autism and vaccines or marriage laws with me unless you want an earful.

26. My ideal breakfast is: Lots of fresh fruit, good tea, some small bready thing. Quiet.

27. A song I love but do not have is: Jeff Buckley singing Purcell's "When I'm laid in earth." I had gotten it on YouTube and had posted it here, but someone took it away.

28. If you visit my hometown, I suggest you: Use the subway and talk to people - get good recommendations from the natives about places to see, places to eat, and good theater. New Yorkers can be friendly, they talk to visitors, and it does not have to cost $400 per day. Honestly we have more to offer than the Hard Rock Cafe and Times Square.

29. Why won’t people: imagine things from others' perspectives?

30. If you spend a night at my house: You'll have to share our one bathroom.

31. I’d stop my wedding for: Someone has already stopped it. Some people apparently think that their love is better than mine, and that the laws in a non-sectarian democracy should reflect their private religious views and not afford me the same social, economic, and legal privileges (and there are 100s of them) they have if they choose to say 'I do.'

32. The world could do without: That's not my job.

33. I’d rather lick the belly of a cockroach than: Have as little insight, openness, and love for others as the people mentioned in #31.

34. My favourite blonde(s) is/are: probably not blond any more.

35. Paper clips are more useful than: A sharp stick in the eye. Actually, in a pinch, they can serve as a sharp stick in the eye.

36. If I do anything well it’s: Grumble, that and this tasty thing I make with pasta and zucchini.

37. And by the way: It's a beautiful day. I've had enough of this meme, but you feel free to join in the fun. I'm going for a walk, then I'm reading, and then I'm cooking. Happy Sunday.

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.

Goodbyes

What are your favourite final sentences from books? Is there a book that you liked specially because of its last sentence? Or a book, perhaps that you didn’t like but still remember simply because of the last line?

I read this question and realized, while I do have favorite endings I don't actually know the final sentence of any book except Virginia Woolf's The Waves:

"...Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!"

The waves broke on the shore.

Not bad, huh?


There was only one other ending I remembered by heart. That's not a sentence at all, but the sounding of an axe chopping down the tree in Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard. I'll give you the last sentence in the context of the entire last line of Firs, the old servant, and the stage directions that follow.

Firs: (goes up to the door and touches the handle) Locked. They've gone away... They forgot me...It's nothing...I'll sit here a while...And Leonid Andreich didn't put on his fur coat. I suppose, he must have gone away in his light one...(Sighs anxiously.) I just didn't look after it...Oh, these green young things - they never learn! (Mumbles something that cannot be understood.) Life just slipped by as if I'd never even lived... I'll lie down for a while... You just don't have any strength, none, nothing's lieft. nothing at all...Oh, you...silly galoot, you!...

He lies motionless. A sound is heard far off in the distance, as if coming from the sky. It is the sound of a string breaking that dies away sadly. A stillness falls, and nothing is heard but the sound of an axe striking a tree far away in the orchard.

"Oh, you silly galoot" or sometimes "Oh you bungler" chop, chop, chop. Chekhov really knew what he was doing.

But having gone and checked, there are a few other memorable ones. I'll present some of them in the context of their few last lines.

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein:

About six weeks ago Gertrude Stein said, it does not look to me as if you were ever going to write that autobiography. You know what I am going to do. I am going to write it for you. I am going to write it as simply as Defoe did the autobiography of Robinson Crusoe. And she has and this is it.

That book is a howl.


The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger:

Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.

Breath the new novel by Tim Winton (I am just crazy about this book):

They probably don't understand this, but it's important for me to show them that their father is a man who dances - who saves lives and carries the wounded, yes, but who also does something completely pointless and beautiful., and in this at least he should need no explanation.

I could be mean and post the ending of Anna Karenina, but in case you haven't read it, I won't. Someone told me the ending as I sat in a movie theater and Citizen Kane was about to start in my senior year in college. I was still reading it and I wanted to kill them.

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.

On Tim Winton

To follow up my enthusiastic review of Breath here are a few interviews with its elusive author, Tim Winton.

The Guardian

The Lumier Reader

Three Monkeys

Idiocy Update

Here, you may recall, was my little summer fantasy (with Ethan Canin's new book missing at picture time) declared on Thursday July 3, 2008. 21 books prior to the start of school (August 27). 14 of them were likely to be complete reads and the rest dipped into. I am happy to report that nine, yes nine, of these have been put to bed! They have been read, and most even enjoyed. Four more are in-the-works. That might look something like this:

America, America
The Informers
The Road Home
Breath
Thirteen
The Book Thief
Story of a Marriage (I'm wary of this one)
The Lazarus Project - in progress
Grace Notes
The Anatomy School
Proust and the Squid - in progress
Sensation & Perception - in progress
The Poetics of Mind - this will never happen
Attention - I'll dip into it
Neuroanatomy Through Clinical Cases - As above
Patient-Based Approaches to Cognitive Neuroscience
Red Cavalry - in progress
The Darling
The Changeling
White Noise
Reading David
The Pickwick Papers (I really removed this from the list at the start. It will never happen.)

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.

Beginnings

Here’s another idea about memorable first lines from books.

What are your favourite first sentences from books? Is there a book that you liked specially because of its first sentence? Or a book, perhaps that you didn’t like but still remember simply because of the first line?

My all-time favorite first line (I guess it's two lines, actually) is from Grace Paley's story The Loudest Voice from her collection The Little Disturbances of Man:

There is a certain place where dumb-waiters boom, doors slam, dishes crash; every window is a mother's mouth bidding the street shut up, go skate somewhere else, come home. My voice is the loudest.