Book #30: The Travelling Life

"But the truth is also that there is an answering impulse of subservience in him, part of him wants to give in, I see shadows thrown up in grappling contortions on the roof of the cave."  -Damon Galgut, In a Strange Room

I was planning on giving this book to a friend for her birthday, but now, a third of the way in, I don't know, I just might have to get her something else.  Even if In a Strange Room weren't a finalist for the Man Booker Prize, I still wouldn't have been able to put it down.  What is it about this dark narrative that immediately drew me in?  The first novella "The Follower" is deceptively simple: a young white South African man named Damon treks through the mountains of Lesotho under the spell of a mysterious German man named Reiner, a philosopher of sorts.  Although Damon claims not be in love with Reiner - preferring to think of their relationship as a "dark passion," an accidental interlude - it soon becomes clear that he's deeply, obsessively in love with this man and his every attempt to maintain emotional distance is bound for failure.

So intense are his feelings that he's devised a strange technique for telling his story.  The story is for the most part told in the third person, but every so often it slips into the first person, as in the passage above.  While this technique at first throws the reader off - for a moment, I thought there were three characters, a menage-a-trois - it's well worth the experiment.  For the technique pays off by opening up meanings and raising questions about what happens to you when you travel and fall in love.  The minimalist prose conveys perfectly the way that life and your identity get pared down to the bare essentials and the feeling of weightlessness can be very liberating at first; it's as if you have the freedom to create yourself anew, be anyone, try anything.  In this sense, it's as if Damon, the narrator-traveller, is watching himself in a film.  (I remember that feeling from my year in Berlin.  Back in grad school, I suddenly sold all my possessions, except my laptop and two suitcases full of books, and moved to Berlin, not knowing anyone, having chosen the place more or less randomly because I'd fallen out of love and I'd overheard some artists talking about how it was easy and cheap for foreigners to rent short-term housing there.  And all the while, I didn't feel like me, I felt deliciously free of me, like a girl in a film). 

This sense of distance, it seems to me, is what Galgut is trying to convey in writing most of the work in the third person.  And yet the "I" surfaces at key moments of passion, memory, betrayal - exposing how the work isn't entirely fiction, it hovers on the cusp of memoir.  

Photo from: here

Book #29: The Art of Impotence

“Oh Jake,” Brett said, “we could have had such a damned good time together.”
“Yes,” I said. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”  -Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

Time to buckle down.  My heart still aflutter from the good news of last week, it was time to make headway on finishing chapter seven of my literary memoir.  This chapter focuses on The Sun Also Rises, which was an important novel for me and my dad to read together.  There's something strangely alluring about Jake Barnes' impotence, and I found myself remembering and reflecting on a conversation we had on this topic. 

"You really feel Jake's suffering," Daddy said.  "But he never seems wimpy or unmanly.  I like the guy."

Injured in the First World War, Jake has lost his balls, so to speak, but that doesn’t stop women from falling in love with him. I smiled. Daddy was becoming more observant about the text, ever since he took up reading as his new retirement hobby and asked me - his languishing English professor daughter - to put together a reading list.

I had to admit that I liked Jake, too. What is it about Jake Barnes that makes him so likable even though the guy’s a prick? He’s mean to friends who annoy him for being suck-ups, like Robert Cohn, but he’s loyal to a fault to other friends, like Brett Ashley, who walks all over him. Throughout it all, Jake affects an air of solitary cool; he seems the perfect lone ranger. At night, however, his true feelings come out.

After an evening of heavy drinking with his friends at all the hotspots in Paris, he comes home to an empty flat, piss drunk and alone. The waves of loneliness wash over him and the reality of his impotence comes crashing down. Although he tries to find the humour in it, the joke only goes so far and he breaks down in tears. Brett drops by early in the morning and through the haze of sleep, he mistakes her as a prostitute. So it’s fair to say that he doesn’t trust her, but that doesn’t change the fact that he’s hopelessly in love with her. Brett’s demand for intimacy is tantalizing torture.

“What do you think of Jake and Brett’s relationship?” I asked Daddy.

“It’s painful to watch them together,” he said. “Yet they’re clearly so much in love.”

I could remember people saying the same thing about me and Josh, my old boyfriend from undergrad days. All our breakups and tearful reconciliations left our friends and families perplexed.

As I thought back, it occurred to me that perhaps this is the beautiful thing about Jake's impotence.  It allows us as readers to relive that turbulent, thrilling, adolescent feeling of being in love with someone with whom you just can't get it together.  The dynamics of desire and despair take on a life of their own.  Haven't we all been in that excruciating position before? 

Photo from: here

At Last ... My Book Has a Home!

I probably mentioned some time ago that I've been working on a book.  It's called The Reading List and it's a memoir about my miserable career as an English professor and search for a new career, which pushed me to the brink of a breakdown three summers ago, and all the while I was seeking distraction from my career blues by looking for love in all the wrong places, drowning in the Grey Goose.  My father, grappling with his own demons, decided to take up reading as his new hobby and who better to recommend a reading list than his erudite daughter?  Except I wasn't feeling very erudite at the time. 

Still, we bond over literature in other - unexpected - ways and this opens a whole new dimension to our relationship....  (More on this later).

Anyway, a few months ago, I sent my book proposal around to a few publishers and then waited.... and waited.... and faced some perfectly diplomatic rejection emails, which pointed out its merits and drawbacks, but no matter how many times I read them amounted to the same thing.  I pretended that I was fine with it - really, I was, I wasn't grinding my teeth at night more than usual, despite my throbbing jaw - and I could accept that my memoir (half written) might never see the light of day.  At the urging of a friend, I began work on another project, an historical novel, and half convinced myself that I'm a novelist at heart, not a memoirist after all.   

All this changed the other night, when I was at a friend's birthday party (my agent actually) and he introduced me to a lovely young woman, Sandra, who turned out to be a publisher.  She runs a small press that focuses on next generation multicultural literature. 

"She wants to publish your book," my agent whispered to me. 

I blinked and the room began to spin gently, even though I hadn't had a drop of wine (I was on cold medication, feeling very uncool to be at a party not drinking), but yes, my cheeks were getting hot, as if I might have quaffed an entire bottle.

"I've read your manuscript and I love it," Sandra said, smiling warmly.  "Let's do it!  Let's publish your book."

Sandra and I stood by the wall chatting in our high heels for the next four-and-a-half hours and we exchanged many giddy emails last week and this morning we signed a contract.  She and her father, who founded the press, shook my hand and hugged me and the room was filled with good karma, if I may say so myself, and I'm not the kind of person who usually says things like "karma."

Ever since I was six years old, you see, I've wanted to be a writer.  Much more than I ever wanted to be a professor.  That first godawful career was just a detour (which, ironically, has given me something to write about).

So now the clock is ticking.  I have until April to complete the second half of the book.


Photo from: here

Book #28: Like Jewels and Stones

“The words, hard and bright, are like jewels within her. But they’re also like stones.” -Dawn Promislow, Jewels and Other Stories

I met Dawn Promislow about a year ago in a program called Diaspora Dialogues. It fosters the creation of diasporic literature by pairing established writers with emerging writers of various multicultural backgrounds. Dawn and I were both “emerging writers” and we gravitated to each other at a poetry reading. We started chatting about this and that – our favourite writers’ use of dialect, the colonial tragedies of places we know (I used to live in Trinidad and Dawn grew up in South Africa), among other lighter topics of conversation, like “following” Virginia Woolf in our heads…..

Last week, I was delighted to attend the book launch at Type Books for Dawn’s first book, Jewels and Other Stories. It’s a beautiful weaving together of such a variety of stories, all set in South Africa: a doctor takes an unexpected risk to draw his black servant’s son into the family; a young white girl tries to give her nanny the contents of her piggy bank, not realizing the wedge she’ll drive into the family; a receptionist and drug dealer’s love affair gone awry yields a strange kind of insight about love and chance. These are just a few of the vivid characters you meet in the fourteen stories, which flew by so quickly, too quickly. Now I feel I must go back and read them again.

The resistance movement gathering momentum in the 70s forms the backdrop of many of the stories, although the stories always remain focused on the characters themselves – ordinary people’s desires, fears, hopes. I felt they were all people whom I already knew in some way from my own life, and “Isn’t that the way we would react?” I kept thinking to myself, if we were caught up in violent upheaval and change.

I was struck by what Dawn said by way of introducing her book at the book launch; she said that some years ago she had wanted to write about South Africa, but felt ambivalent and paralyzed because so much had already been written. So she said that she decided simply to “create voices” and see where they would take her, and at the end, she’d found no answers. No answers at all. I thought about what she’d said and it dawned on me that this is the very thing about literature: it doesn’t need to deliver grand answers, it doesn’t need to judge. Indeed, my favourite stories have a kind of openness that teases the mind by providing a slice of life that, the more you think about it, contains a world that glimmers beyond the present. Gestures to more to come.

Btw, since completing Jewels, Dawn has a written a very beautiful, evocative story published in the online journal MTLS.  You can read her story here.

Photo from: here

Book #27: Better Than Therapy

“The butcher had come out and smacked his hands together and rubbed them back and forth, and he’d laid a steak on the stainless steel cutting board and turned on the saw, and he’d cubed it for her. Little stiff cubes with frost fibres in the purplish flesh, and this, Helen realizes now, is herself, her own heart, sliding back and forth under the blade.” -Lisa Moore, February

Life is a veil of tears for Helen O’Mara, when she loses her husband in the sinking of the oil rig Ocean Ranger during a storm off the coast of Newfoundland. Lisa Moore’s latest novel February gives a masterly glimpse of her struggle to hold together some semblance of normal life – taking care of her four kids, cooking fish sticks, trying to make ends meet by taking a crappy job as a cocktail waitress (and being mistaken as a prostitute on her walk home at four in the morning). These ordinary yet absurd moments underscore for Helen that her life will never be the same. For much of the novel, she is emotionally paralyzed just letting this fact sink in.

The tragedy of her husband’s death and its endless ripple effects replay in her mind with an immediacy that doesn’t allow her to assign the disaster to the past. Surely, this is why Moore chooses to narrate many of these memories in the present tense; they are all too vivid at the forefront of Helen’s mind to be told as flashbacks. The most mundane activities, like going to the butcher, risk overwhelming her, flooding her with raw emotion. Yet these moments are strangely beautiful because we see Helen standing outside herself and slowly, painstakingly, finding the resources to heal herself and move on.

Isn’t this the great thing about literature? The novels that I love reading over and over again – Toni Morrison’s Sula, Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth – have this deeply therapeutic effect. Although I could never have admitted this in my former life as a lit prof (my colleagues in the English department would have scoffed), the truth is that I’ve never been drawn to literature because I wanted to learn more about a certain period of history, philosophy or theory of any kind. Literature offers a much more primitive kind of experience that consoles and helps me relive the moments when I was so depressed my whole body felt laden with weights.

I remember all too clearly, for instance, my ballet teacher putting her hands on my eleven-year-old hips. Monique her name was. She pushed and prodded my hips into an awkward position and I toppled over, but not before she had felt the imbalance, my imbalance. She told my mother that my spine curves like an S and my mother took me to see the doctor and he referred me to an orthopedic surgeon and thus began a surreal phase of passing from x-ray machines to a fiberglass brace to operating table…. I think I just sort of curled into myself and hid in a closet in my head for those three years…. I recall the struggle to get up and get dressed in the morning, the numb, disjointed feeling as if my body were a marionette puppet, hands and feet hanging limp in midair.

It must have been during this time that I developed a penchant for sadness and sad literature. To identify through reading with another’s grief and triumph over that grief can be a very consoling, beautiful thing. February brought all those extreme emotions back and I fell in love with the journey all over again.

Photo from: here

Book #26: Outlaw Women

"My children were of me alone, of the wild blood boiling along the earth, of me and all that lived; of none and of all.  Then I found I had Jewel."   -William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

I've been sleepless thinking about who my grandmother really was.  You see, I've been toying with writing a section of my novel in her voice.  Over the weekend, I had brunch with my dad and we listened to a tape recording of her talking about her childhood, the war, falling in love in an internment camp....  My dad made the tape during a trip to Cape Cod a few years ago, shortly before her Parkinson's got bad.  The tape intrigues yet frustrates me, because all the while I feel that my grandmother is trying to say what's expected of her.  She's trying to preserve for posterity an image of herself as the good daughter, the self-suffering wife, the devoted mother.

I long to gain access to the other side of her identity - the secrets and unspoken truths she harboured all her life.  The moments when she surprised herself by acting out of character.  What she would say, if she could speak from beyond the grave.

This is the kernel imbedded in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, which I was reading over the weekend for the first time (even ex English profs haven't read everything by Faulkner).  It's the story of Addie Bundren on her deathbed and into the afterlife, told from the perspectives of fifteen different narrators, including her four legitimate children and one love child, Jewel.  Before dying, she expresses her wish to be buried in her hometown, Jefferson, Mississippi, and the novel chronicles her family's efforts to honour that wish, dragging her homemade casket by horse and carriage across the brutal landscape.  While all the narrators have their own unique ways of seeing Addie, the section where she reflects upon her life from beyond the grave makes all the other sections pale.  What we get is Addie's scathing denunciation of her marriage (which seems hardly more than a random occurence) and her ambivalent meditation on motherhood.  Motherhood seems to draw out her sadistic streak, and although she is possessive of her children, she is no less repulsed by them, a steady flow of babies who arrive without rhyme or reason.  Ironically, Jewel is closest to her heart, perhaps because he is the only one born of desire.  All these taboos are laid bare - with poignancy and beauty - in Addie's monologue.

I'm reminded of something Toni Morrison once said in an interview: "Outlaw women who don't follow the rules are always interesting to me, because they push themselves, and us, to the edge.  The women who step outside the borders, or who think other thoughts, define the limits of civilization, but also challenge it."  (No coincidence that Morrison wrote her master's thesis on Faulkner).

Listening to the tape of my grandmother, I find myself listening not so much to what she's saying as much as to her stammers, repetitions and evasions and I wonder what repressed "outlaw" possibilities they mask over.

Photo from: here

Book #25: That Accident Which Pricks Me....

"This second element which will disturb the studium I shall therefore call punctum; for punctum is also: sting, speck, cut, little hole - and also a cast of the dice.  A photograph's punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)."   -Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

Since my father retired, he has been digging into family history.  The other day while I was at work, he sent me the above photo, which he found upon googling "Minidoka" - the camp where my grandmother was interned during the Second World War.  "I think your grandmother is in this photo," his email read.  "Third girl from the right, in profile.  Zoom in."

And there she is. 

A whoosh of gratitude came over me - had the camera caught her a moment before or after, her face might have been obscured, like the girl on the far right.  Quelle chance!  Then weird thoughts started rushing through my mind.  I found myself looking at the styling of her hair and wondering how, while living in an internment camp, she could manage to keep it freshly curled and glossy (while I, from the comfort of home, can barely make the effort to blow dry).  But imprisoned and made to rake mud, my grandmother would not let herself go and, though I knew that should make me happy, it made me feel sad.  Her dress remains smartly pressed, despite everything.  And while the other girls are working, she appears to me to be only pretending to work - something about the whimsical tilt of her head.  She's caught in a moment of fantasy or denial, her mind a thousand miles away.

The frailties and defenses of her personality seem to be encapsulated in that image....  For the grandmother I knew some fifty years later was a complex, cryptic woman.  She was often cool and remote in person, but had a penchant for florid language (I recall receiving a postcard that said "the stars are like chrysanthemums" and thinking, Huh?).  She shied away from talking about the past, even when my father would press her, until the very final days of her life when she began to give in.  She was a woman who seemed ill prepared to be a mother or grandmother, preferring to play the role of a younger aunt, dressing half her age.

It was as if she always wanted to remain a girl - as if some beautiful moment in her adolescence had been stolen away.

Looking at this photo makes me think of Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida, which I read years ago (back in my geeky, academic days).  At the time, I thought I understood what Barthes meant in coining the terms punctum and studium to describe two different and opposed kinds of experience upon looking at photographs.  By studium, he means the cultural and political dimensions of a photograph, all the ways in which it can be rationally discussed and made comprehensible to an audience.  By sharp contrast, punctum refers to a viewer's private experience of a photo - a purely subjective response.  To experience punctum is to feel idiosyncratic details jump out and grab you with such emotional force that you feel pierced, wounded. 

At the time of reading Camera Lucida, I had been deeply moved by certain photos which I'd viewed in various museums, galleries and books.  But I cannot say that I'd felt pierced.  Until now.


Photo from: here