Category Archives: What is literature for?

August 24, 2012 · 9:17 pm

“When one knows thee, then alien there is none, then no door is shut. Oh, grant me my prayer that I may never lose the touch of the one in the play of the many.”–Rabindranath Tagore

In the quote I have added to my post for today, Tagore brings up the issue of the many and the one, and asks that he be always able to see each person as an individual, not just one person lost in a crowd, a sea of possibly opposed faces.  He also suggests that knowing even one person well is an entryway into knowledge of others in general.  This is a very complex statement of quite laudable values, and one which bears upon the book of short fiction by another Indian author, Jhumpa Lahiri, the winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Her book Interpreter of Maladies, the title of which was taken from one of her stories by that title,  not only won the Pulitzer Prize, but was also a Pen/Hemingway Award winner and was selected by the New Yorker as a “Debut of the Year.”  The most intriguing thing about the relationship between the author and her book is in fact the degree to which she herself is an “interpreter of maladies,” the maladies of alienation and separation visited upon people either moving from one continent to another or from one state of being to another.  In each of her nine stories, whether they are stories of families travelling between India and the U. S. for love or work or recreation or whether they are portraits of unique and unusual loves and characters, she traverses the boundaries, both those which keep her characters separate and those which, being overcome, unite them more firmly to each other.  And as she does so, her characters and their dilemmas, however firmly they may be rooted in cultures which don’t understand each other intuitively, become the objects of a further development of intuition.  Just as Tagore says, understanding one person’s motives and concerns, even if they are very different from yours, and though the understanding may be hard won and have developed from a totally alien perspective, shakes one’s faith in the notion of alienation and causes readers to extend their minds to the faiths and concerns of others.  Suddenly, one can imagine the person as being like oneself after all; one can at least understand.

From the first story, “A Temporary Matter,” in which a young couple deals with the conditions of having been deprived of their child, the subject of alienation is strong.  In order to overcome the separation which has been occasioned by their mutual grief, they begin to confide in each other about things they’ve never before told.  Their reconciliation is made bittersweet by the recognition that they have perhaps never really known the other person fully.

“When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine,” the second story, shows an Indian family joining forces in their support of a man from Dacca, a Pakistani (before Bangladesh became separate) who has some different traditions from themselves.  The story is told from the point of view of the young daughter of the house, for whom Mr. Pirzada brings treats every evening, missing as he does his own seven daughters.  He nervously watches the news on their television in a town near Boston, since he is unable to be with his own family in Dacca.  The manner in which the American society around them isolates the newcomer with his own hard luck is portrayed by a scene in which the young daughter is prevented by a teacher from following up on her interest in the geography and history of the region Mr. Pirzada is from.  The family must wait with Mr. Pirzada to find out if his family survived the conflict or not.  The ending is reported obliquely, not only by the news broadcasts the family continues to watch on their television set, but also by the letters Mr. Pirzada writes them after he leaves Boston to return to Dacca.  Clearly, it is up to neighbors to act locally in order to overcome cultural blindnesses.

In “Interpreter of Maladies,” Mr. Das and his wife, who were raised in the States and who are visiting India and various tourist sites there for the first time, rely on their guide, Mr. Kapasi, to show them around and inform them of local traditions.  Mrs. Das, however, upon finding out that Mr. Kapasi works for a doctor as a language interpreter, assumes incorrectly that he is a sort of psychologist who can help her with her problems.  Mr. Kapasi, meanwhile, has been misunderstanding Mrs. Das to mean that she wants to be special friends.  Gradually, though Mrs. Das has a rude awakening in discovering her error, Mr. Kapasi’s cover of polite and correct behavior aids him in preserving his equilibrium and delivering the family from a crisis which has arisen due to their own inability to adjust to their environment.  It is Mr. Kapasi in this case who has the epiphany, or perhaps the moment of wisdom, when he realizes just how the Dases see him:  for they are people who are estranged from the land of their origins, and are rather ordinary “ugly American” tourists.  Thus, he has correctly deduced their malady.

“A Real Durwan” is a tragic sort of story to which even someone unfamiliar with the idea of what a “durwan” is (a sort of underprivileged charperson) can relate.  It takes place in an Indian setting, where Boori Ma, the staircase sweeper and door guard of an apartment building, each day chants up and down the stairwells as she sweeps the tale of where she used to live (a much better place) and the life she used to live (how grand), and though the other residents of the building where she sleeps in an old quilt under the mailboxes don’t entirely believe her, until the landlord moves, they all treat her with a guarded respect.  The sad outcome is derived, ironically, from a promise the landlord makes to get her better sleeping arrangements, perhaps because it leads Boori Ma to “count her chickens before they’e hatched.”  Her friend the landlord forgets, with unfortunate consequences for Boori Ma, because the building has recently had a facelift and the other residents have become prideful, just as they blame Boori Ma for having been all her years there.  Was she telling the truth all that time, or only fabricating?  The ending doesn’t resolve this issue; it only portrays how the Wheel of Fortune can betray any one of us at any moment who is without friends.

In “Sexy,” a seasonal story if ever there was one, a young woman, Miranda, who is having a love affair with a married Indian man, learns the difference between seasonal and perpetual.  The story features a background plot of another love affair with a married person:  Miranda’s friend Laxmi also has a cousin who now knows that she’s being cheated on by her husband, a frequent traveller on airplanes between Delhi and Montreal.  Instead of coming home to the cousin in the Boston area, that husband has picked up with a younger woman he met on a flight.  The story in the background acts as a foil for Miranda’s relationship; besotted as she is with Dev, her own married man, the words of a young boy she’s babysitting for, who tells her she’s sexy just as Dev did previously, awaken her to what is actually happening.  She plans what to tell Dev, but the change of seasons, a sort of fate, articulates her points for her, in a fine and neatly handled end to the story.

The next piece of fiction, “Mrs. Sen’s,” tells the story of a friendship between a young boy, Eliot, and the Indian woman, Mrs. Sen, who babysits for him.  As Eliot watches Mrs. Sen chop vegetables and deal with her various fears and insecurities about living in a new community outside of Boston (where her husband teaches mathematics), he begins to understand something about her points of reference.  For one, she previously had a chauffeur, and now Mr. Sen is insisting that she learn to drive.  She is worried by the fact that she feels alone and isolated in the building where she lives, too far away for other people to hear her if she screams.  When she encounters further difficulty with the driving, it is in fact Eliot who hears her crying in the bathroom as Mr. Sen apologizes to Eliot’s mother for having involved him in an accident.  Eliot hears her, and has thus understood something about her fear and her difficulties.  And with this, he has gone through a learning experience of his own.

“This Blessed House” is a deceptively simple story about the nature of tolerance and belief.  When Twinkle and Sanjeev begin to find Christian ornaments hidden in every nook and cranny of their new home, Twinkle celebrates them, though she is a Hindu, by putting them all up on the mantel.  The objects by and large have no real artistic value, they are obviously the result of a sincere and devout observance, however one without much taste.  But as everything continues to go well for the young couple, Twinkle insists on retaining the objects, which costs Sanjeev something severe in the way of his ability to tolerate them.  It’s not, in fact that Twinkle is changing her religion:  she seems simply to regard the objects as good luck charms, and despite Sanjeev’s embarrassment when they have friends over, the couple’s lucky popularity is clearly a result of Twinkle’s open and receptive personality.  It becomes clear by the end of the story that despite disdaining Twinkle’s good luck charms themselves, Sanjeev cannot resist the charm of Twinkle herself.  He has a dark moment of the soul, as it’s called, when he realizes just what this will entail.

When we first begin the story “The Treatment of Bibi Haldar,” we have to wonder ourselves just what is wrong with Bibi.  From the description of the many different kinds of medical treatment and advice she has received, not all of them equally reputable, we have to ask if perhaps she is an unacknowledged hysteric, or perhaps if she suffers an unknown form of epilepsy.  Her fits are looked upon with sympathy by her friends and neighbors, which she has in spite of being closely quarantined by her family.  It’s only when Bibi’s own preferred solution and a chance event that it turns out no one can trace coincide that she finds herself an ordinary member of society.  This story seems to suggest that ordinary human interaction and good-heartedness can guide people to accept what seems at first like a totally anomalous situation, something which comes about without the sanction of restrictions and family rule.  Bibi is after all human, not a demon as her cousin’s wife, with whom she lives on and off, sees it; people may be demonized by someone around them, it is clear, but there are equally those prepared to accept what they don’t understand.

Finally, in “The Third and Final Continent” the book ends with a sort of summary story about the way in which a person originally difficult to understand in their ideas and motives can come to symbolize something precious for someone from an entirely different society.  A young Indian man leaves his home in 1964 to go to Boston and study, and to work in the MIT library system.  While there, he is at first situated in a YMCA, but soon moves to another room in a private house for the summer before his wife can come over from India to join him.  He meets a real eccentric in the owner of the house, Mrs. Croft.  At first, it takes some real practice of patience and conscious good will on his part to meet her halfway.  Soon, however, he meets her daughter and learns things about her that cause him to feel a genuine empathy for her.  Later, when he moves into another house with his wife, he still thinks of Mrs. Croft as an essential part of his establishing himself in America, and goes to see her.  The results of his interest in her affect the rest of his life, and become a watchword for his family as well.  As the story concludes in the character’s voice at the end, “….[T]here are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept.  As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.”  Luckily for us, we have Jhumpa Lahiri’s work of imagination to fall back on, so that if such things are beyond us for the time being, we can always find a translator, in fact an “interpreter” of our “maladies.”

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August 19, 2012 · 8:53 pm

“The school of hard knocks is an accelerated curriculum.”–Menander

In Gertrude Stein:  A Biography of Her Work, the scholar/critic Donald Sutherland says, “Gertrude Stein uses the simplest possible words, the common words used by everybody, and a version of the most popular phrasing, to express the most complicated thing….[S]he uses repetition and dislocation to make the word bear all the meaning it has….one has to give her work word by word the deliberate attention one gives to something written in italics.”  This is certainly true of one of her early works, a collection of three stories called Three Lives, which is much more readable than her later more experimental works.  Still, even with this early work, the “repetitions and dislocations” of language would confuse an inexperienced, simple reader who was reading mainly for the story and who was also launching a fledgling attempt to get a sense of the English written language.  This would be true even were the reader going only for the story of the characters’ emotions and nothing else.

Thus it is that though I have routinely read very challenging poetry and prose both, I have no enthusiasm for the works of Gertrude Stein in general, except to view them as experiments, perhaps necessary stages the written English language had to go through (or perhaps “confront” is the correct word) in order to be renovated.  Something similar could be said of the novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet in terms at least of what they have contributed in English translation:  they are amazingly like each other, and seem all to go about language developments in the same way.  Yet they were at the time they were written part of a focus to objectify the narrative voice or experiment with it in a way which was begun but not finished by people like Ernest Hemingway.  Still, Hemingway is readable, whereas often Gertrude Stein is simply difficult, mainly meant for people who like romans à clef, word puzzles, and guessing games.  One way around this difficulty with Stein, if you are determined to read things she has written other than Three Lives, is to look over a copy of editor Renate Stendhal’s biography in captions, short quotes, and pictures entitled Gertrude Stein:  In Words and Pictures, a thick photographic history of Stein’s life which enables the reader to see better the things and people Stein was referring to in her novels and poetry, and to get a better sense of the time in which she lived.  I looked at that, but I also read Three Lives, mainly because it was the one thing of hers I felt I could read well from start to finish.  Here’s what I found and what I feel I can honestly offer about the collection of stories:

The stories are three sobering portraits of three different women’s lives in America in the early 1900’s.  The first woman, who is the main character of “The Good Anna,” Anna Federner, is “of solid lower middle-class german stock” (the lower-case “g” in german is as Stein uses it throughout the book).  The entire story is concerned with incidents relating to Anna’s employers’ lives (she is a sort of housekeeper and a general factotum), her dogs’ lives, and her conflicts with the scheming and lack of generosity she sometimes encounters.  For, she is good to others; it is not just a title, it is her title, this is the source of what she is, some short-sighted errors aside.  She comes to a dismal but quite ordinary end and the story ends simultaneously.

“Melanctha,” the second story, while different from the first story in that it speaks of a young African American woman and her intrigues and relationships with men and with women, ends similarly.  Though more enigmatic in nature and more amoral, just as the prose about her is more enigmatic in its starkly expressed picture, without narrative sympathy or reserve, Melanctha too comes to a bad end, but without having noticeably distinguished herself by unmotivated kindness to others, as the first character, the “good” Anna did.  There is also a certain amount of dated treatment of black people’s issues in the book, for all that it is Gertrude Stein writing, and for all that she was in sympathy herself with the African American struggle for rights in her own time.

In the third story, “The Gentle Lena,” the shortest of the three stories, Lena is described as “patient, gentle, sweet and german.”  She too starts out life as a servant, brought over to the U. S. to serve.  Though her life is called “peaceful” by the narrative voice, her fellow nursemaids tease her, apparently because she is not intelligent or quick-witted and will believe anything they tell her.  Her basic incomprehension of what is going on around her is shown quite clearly in Stein’s recording style:  it isn’t a language barrier problem, because it persists even when she is with other German people.  For example, we are told that Lena did not enjoy her life in Germany, but that she herself is unaware of this.  Stein quite simply tells us why, with no preamble or laborious psychologizing to indicate special insight (and this is true though Stein herself was a gifted student of the American psychologist William James before she went to live in France).  Lena’s life only slightly improves materially when she gets married and has her husband’s three children, and it improves not at all emotionally, for after going into what used to be termed “a decline,” she too dies, with no moral to the story, in true Steinian fashion.

What can be said about these three lives?  First of all, that they are simply that:  three lives, varied in some specifics, but each of them ending where we all end.  Yet, they do so without the least fanfare or blare of symbolism, imagery, or obvious rhetoric.  And that they are no better, or happier, or more rewarded with heroic status is the point I believe we are meant to take away.  Since they are all three women, this can possibly be interpreted to be a feminist moral if one is so inclined, yet Stein doesn’t assign any moral at all.  The final point is perhaps that there are so many unremarkable lives, which so many of us live, and that we are lucky even to be as well-remembered as these characters are, either by the other “characters” in our lives or by writers like Stein.

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August 17, 2012 · 2:26 pm

“An evil mind is a constant solace.”–Unknown

Have you ever watched an anti-hero, whom you know to be an anti-hero if not an outright villain, get away with murder in a novel, and find yourself hoping that he will continue to do so for the pure (or not so pure) comic pleasure it gives you to see him go from incident to incident, triumphant but flawed?  And of course, because he is so flawed you can laugh at him freely, and not invest real sympathy in his travails the way you would for a noble hero or heroine.  In this case, the reader himself or herself becomes a receptacle of a certain sort of selfishness in allowing such sympathy to exist:  that is, while you don’t give the character any true respect or empathy, you can still enjoy the course of his actions and, if and when he meets his inevitable nemesis, have nothing to mourn for except perhaps in having to stop following an enjoyable read.  It is in this sense alone that the reader imitates sympathetically the character Michael Beard’s “evil mind,” a “constant solace” to Beard and one unknown to the other characters, whose misunderstandings of his actions are all fairly humorous.

Michael Beard is the anti-hero of Ian McEwan’s 2010 book Solar, and a literal murder is exactly what it looks like he will get away with, though his tribulations mount up in a very funny way as if he is being punished by fate.  Beard, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist past his prime, is making a living through public speaking engagements, through a remote sort of participation in some corporations as an advisor, and lackadaisically through working along with a government project on global warming.  On the home front, Beard has freed himself time after time from his entanglements with women, until he one day wakes up to the fact that his latest wife has in fact turned the tables on him in this regard.  With murder in his heart Beard approaches the situation, only to be relieved of responsibility through a bizarre accident, for which the wrong man is later blamed and arrested.

It would appear through most of the novel that Beard has what is known as “the devil’s own luck”; all he has to do is resent someone or something, and bad things happen, but not to him.  And to counterpoint his involvement with the “dark side,” Beard has the satirical version of “the mark of the beast” on him, a melanoma on his hand that, were he sincerely concerned with solar problems and global warming and its after-effects, would have been dealt with safely.  Yet, he is also a figure of fun, just as the devil(s) in medieval morality plays often were:  for example, when Beard participates in a polar expedition to view a glacier, he makes a hilarious mistake.  Badly needing to pee while he is out on the iceberg on a snowmobile, Beard makes his typical error of being badly adjusted to his circumstances on earth by peeing in a sub-zero temperature, with comically disastrous results.  For as the saying goes among men, “it’s cold enough to freeze your pecker off.”

A more serious challenge to the comic devil known as Beard is the fact that he takes little care of his health in general and is obviously living on borrowed time, not only because of the events due to his bad actions, which are snowballing behind him, but due also to a mounting stress and heart condition resulting from the fact that he is monumentally selfish, even to himself.

The one love of Beard’s life is his little daughter, Catriona, who stands alone as a challenge to all that Beard is and has done wrongly.  Will Beard free himself from a life-long habit of cynicism and casual indifference to the rights of others, or will he get his just deserts just when he is close to redemption?  To some extent, the reader must figure this out.  One thing is certain:  Solar is a wonderful satirical masterpiece, and Beard is the traditional “satyr” at its center.

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August 14, 2012 · 4:02 pm

“No jury in the world would convict him/her….”–common saying

Today I would like to comment on a story which I found anthologized in The Best  American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike and Katrina Kenison in 2000.  It has been anthologized in other collections as well, I believe, though incredibly enough (considering that it was written at a time before women got the vote) it was first published in 1917 in a periodical called Every Week.  It’s the short story “A Jury of Her Peers,” by Susan Glaspell.  Though I’ve sort of hinted at the symbolic outcome in the title of my post, you will get a great deal more out of the experience of the story by actually reading it, regardless of anything I might write about it (it’s one of those “it helps to have  been there” stories).

As we all know, justice is often (maybe even usually) a partial thing.  Just think of how long media, public, and private debates about any but the most extremely obvious and egregious breaches of law or custom can go on.  In this story, the topics dealt with are things such as community responsibility towards members (in the fellowship of women, for example, something almost forbidden by the tight fellowship of the male bonding in the story, which makes fun of the women’s ties); the manner in which surroundings can reveal a person’s life to an attentive viewer; and fellow feeling as the source of true justice.

The women in this story are two married women who go with their husbands (one the sheriff) and a third man (a prosecuting attorney) to view the scene of where, it is suspected, a woman killed her husband.  At first, though one woman is more clearly open-minded and views things from her own ability to relate to other women, both of the women stand unresisting in their husbands’ shadows.  Things begin to change, however, when the men go upstairs in the house of the murdered man to view the “scene of the crime” and the women stay downstairs by the fire, intending only to find and take some of the accused woman’s possessions to her where she waits in custody in the jailhouse.  The women down below get a chance, instead, to view things which make it obvious how the woman bore up under her husband’s bad treatment:  they see that she was isolated and alone (though not by choice), that she made do with unnecessarily shabby clothes and home goods, and that she was not only negligently but cruelly treated in a casual, despicable way by a man accounted a “good” man by his peers.  Meanwhile, the men stay mostly in the top of the house, certain that their wives are the stereotypical “good” women (ones who provide for and abide by their husbands’ wills); when they do confront the women, their attitudes are sexist, condescending, and full of undeserved criticism of the accused woman (for not keeping a good clean house, for example, or for leaving things half done).  Though the men have reached the correct answer (for we are fairly sure throughout the story that the woman is somehow responsible for her husband’s death), they have done so for the wrong reasons, and in an entirely wrong spirit.

It is the women who, with simple innocent curiosity are led to the truly correct answers regarding the murder, though they start by knowingly suppressing the details they are finding downstairs from the men; the men josh and joke them about what they are doing and handling, not for a moment seeing how it connects; and the more they discover, the more we are led to question the nature of evidence, and whether or not the women will reveal what they have “seen.”

As with every jury, some of the members start on one side, some on another, and at first the most timorous of the two women (the sheriff’s wife, whom the men joke about as “married to the law”) is Mrs. Peters.  When she is finally and fully persuaded by Mrs. Hale of the injustice with which the accused woman was treated by her husband, even of the psychological brutality which has no outright link with physical punishment in the story, we read “It was as if something within her not herself had spoken, and it found in Mrs. Peters something she did not know as herself.”  These two women are the informal “jury” of the story:  though Mrs. Wright, the accused woman, was to a degree less fortunate than they, that they truly are “a jury of her peers” is born out by the way in which they both quickly reach the same conclusions from the same evidence and comparison of it with what they know of their own lives.

The climax of the story comes when the men arrive back downstairs, fully convinced that they have seen “the scene of the crime” (while the women whom they laugh at and condescend to have been viewing downstairs the “scene” of another “crime” entirely).  They say in the women’s hearing that what they actually need is a motive, something which would explain the woman’s actions.  What will the women do?  All they have to do is surpress their knowledge of the other “story” they have pieced together (just as the woman who was arrested was said to be “piecing together” a quilt, an important symbol in the story):  should they live within the foolish, silent limitation their husbands have set for them?  Or, perhaps, they can speak to the men about what they know (which the shy, quiet Mrs. Peters would certainly prefer).  Does Mrs. Hale (as in “hale and hearty”) persuade Mrs. Peters, or does Mrs. Peters lead Mrs. Hale to give way?  There’s no assurance for them either way that their actions will make any difference to the outcome.  And yet, there’s the story they now share between them.  Man or woman, become a part of their community, and read the story.  Though I’ve done a lot of hinting about how things proceed, it’s always better and more rewarding to see for yourself!

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August 13, 2012 · 5:22 pm

“Hell is other people.”–Jean-Paul Sartre

Buckets and buckets of ink have been spilled debating the topic of what constitutes a short long story (a short novel) and what makes up a long short story (to still qualify it as a short story).  And where does the novella fit into this system, exactly?  Also, there is the series of considerations about form and content which insist that what makes a short story or novel is not only a question of length, but has formal aspects as well.  Though I’m not going to rehash any of these arguments today–aren’t you glad?–I would just point out that this book I plan to discuss, The Stepdaughter, by Caroline Blackwood, is one of the shortest epistolary pieces of fiction I’ve ever read, with both a (strong but illusory) sense of length in the form, as might occur in a novel or novella, and a twisted ending such as one might expect to find in a short story.

In Sartre’s play “Huit Clos” (translated most often as “No Exit”), when we are told “hell is other people,” we can probably all relate imaginatively to the experience being articulated, thinking perhaps of some time or other when someone else made themselves intolerable to us.  Yet, there is a deeper meaning lurking here, and Blackwood’s novel brings it out.  Sometimes, the people around us as we ourselves imagine them to be are actually much worse than the actual people, once we get to know them a little better.  Sadly, we lose all too many opportunities to do this, and repent of it too late.  As well, sometimes a whole group of people can be adversely affected and made to suspect, resent, or misinterpret each other because of the actions of one self-centered person in their midst.  Such a character is the husband figure, Arnold, in this book.

This epistolary novel (a novel written in letters) is produced in the voice of a woman known only as “J.”   She writes letters to a sort of imaginary friend, known either as “Dear….” or “Dear So-and-So.”  The letters at first are said to be “written in [her] head,” though later it seems that she is actually writing letters; at least, she excuses herself from a conversation by saying that she has letters to write.  She always signs off in a somewhat self-indulgent style, with an adverb or adverbial phrase like “In all haste as usual,” “Dismally,” “Bitterly,” “Yours miserably,” or sometimes simply “Yrs. ever.”

Her situation is this:  she shares an expensive apartment in Manhattan (provided by her soon-to-be ex-husband) with her 4 year old daughter, an introverted, fat teenage daughter passed on from her husband’s previous marriage (Renata), and an au pair.  While she is filled with rage that her husband goes away to France with a new, younger, French girlfriend and plans to leave her, her rage is expressed at first by being mutely directed outward towards the people with whom she lives.  She seems to have little self-knowledge, but instead detests first the au pair, then Renata; finally, she reveals that she no longer takes pleasure either in her friends and their offers to help or in spending time with her own little daughter.

But startling revelations are in store for “J.”  As she (and the book’s narrative, following her state of mind) pass from Part 1) resentment and rage through Part 2) opening up and understanding to Part 3) frantic fear of loss, she makes a decision to tell Renata that her husband, Arnold, Renata’s putative father, has left her.  When she does, the story begin its progress toward a truly agonizing dénouement as Renata, the previous bump on a log who did nothing much but bake instant cakes and consume them all herself, takes a hand in the action.  The experience of this short novel (or novella, or long short story) is to make one realize yet again how dependent we are not only upon what we think we share with other people, but also upon what they think they share with us:  missing reciprocity is the unspoken story in this book.

Though Caroline Blackwood has written other books by now, this was her first novel, published in paperback form by Penguin Books in 1984 (the date of first release in hardback was 1976).  Yet, it is not at all dated; for many, many women, particularly those grouped around the central figure of a male “character” like Arnold, who at worst is a conniving, serially-monogamous-while-still-cheating-near-the-end-of-a-relationship monster, and at the best is insincere and ambivalent, these issues still need to be aired.  And Arnold is a central mystery, for we never hear his voice except through the women’s quotes and interpretations of what he says.  Fiction can here fulfill one of its major functions; it can allow us to be other selves, and to learn from the experience, even to see where we ourselves have gone wrong.  I don’t mean either that this book is meant only for women:  I suspect that many men attentive to fiction might find “The Stepdaughter” worthwhile reading as well.

And lastly, I would like to raise a mourning paean over a distribution catalog that has now been discontinued.  “A Common Reader” catalog, whose home was situated at 141 Tompkins Avenue in Pleasantville, NY (doesn’t it just sound bookish and fun?) was the place I obtained “The Stepdaughter”; it was in fact a place from which I ordered most of the books that I bought from the United Kingdom.  I wanted to pass the full address and phone number along (for the benefit of some Luddites such as I have been who still love to get boxes in the mail from “real” book companies), but when I went to wikipedia to research them, it seems they ran from 1986-2006 and were then discontinued.  Such a short time, and they provided me with so much pleasure!  Goodbye old friend!  (I still haven’t bought a Kindle, so though I read some fiction and poetry from the Internet, I technically haven’t deserted.)  To my own readers, I’d say:  read, read, read, though, that’s the main thing, regardless of where you get your reading from–and I’ll be writing again soon!

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August 12, 2012 · 3:23 pm

“All good things which exist are the fruits of originality.”–John Stuart Mill

It’s been a number of days now since I last did a post on the many wonderful (new to me) blogsites I’ve been reading, and I think it’s about time to do another five.  Though most of them are about some angle or variety of literature or literary life, and some have original literary compositions on them, some disperse their topics rather more broadly.  I read them for different things, as I’ve said before, though mostly I stick pretty closely to subjects relating to books and writing.  This is because as I’ve aged, I’ve begun to get a sense of my own mortality, and I know there’s not time to read everything out there that I might want to dabble in, and so have made my own interests a little narrower.  And except for the occasional off-topic post, that quality of narrowness may help my readers to identify what they can come to my site for, too.  Again, most if not all of my reading choices have recently been Freshly Pressed.

Having made the rule of mostly literary things, I’m now going to provide the exception that “proves” (tests) the rule.  The blogsite “Miss Royal Disaster” is at http://missroyaldisaster.wordpress.com , and it features a lot of different issues in modern life.  The theme page is truly luscious with a gorgeous heart of a flower on it.  The topics here range from the societal to the personal, from ecological concerns to makeup issues, and the author, though making the occasional unchecked typo, is never at a loss for words.  Especially on articles such as “animals on the edge of extinction” (which includes beautiful photographs of some of the animals in question) and the post on “hydrogen cars,” the blogger comes into her stride.  Her health and wellness issues are also very informative.  There have been recent posts on vegetarianism and vegan diet which were highly readable likewise.  But lest you think that “fun” is left out, there is a category for that (including a short bit on breaking up with a boyfriend, not exactly my idea of fun).  There are features such as a review of “Snow White and the Huntsman:  A Modern Fairy Tale.”  Also, you’ll find an advice column, and a section on psychology.  All in all, though one has to wonder if the author of the blog will be able to keep up with all the subjects she’s assigned herself, and though these topics are covered in an informal manner and using a colloquial style, she has shown a devotion to a wide range of subjects which may be of interest to nearly everyone.

NARRATIVE–  At http://richardgilbert.me/ , this blogsite is for a kind of literature I haven’t previously had much interest in, inasmuch as I’ve always taken an extreme literary purist’s (and perhaps an ignoramus’s) view that there’s sometimes a kind of self-indulgence in memoir writing, as opposed to “pure” fiction.  I’ve often avoided autobiography for the same reason.  But Richard Gilbert, a memoirist, specialist in memoirs, and academician who has “returned to the land” by way of farming and who currently wears all these hats at once, is fast convincing me otherwise.  I now treasure the list he has on his website as a list I can refer to while reading up on some of the people involved.  He has a wonderfully visually appealing site which contains a wide range of writerly activities, interests, and obsessions, such as “how stories make us human,” “on hating a memoirist,” and “my wild summer reading and revising.”  There are also others.  He has the occasional film review and a goodreads link under “narrative bookshelf.”  The tags on this site cover by name not only a huge number of well-known writers, but also songwriters, radio personalities, politicians, and a lot of people who use and live out narratives on the world stage.  One could read forever on and from this site, I get the feeling, and still not totally exhaust Gilbert’s erudition and humanity.

Nutshells & Mosquito Wings–at http://christinalay.wordpress.com/ .  The blog is subtitled “A Fantasy Writer’s Journey Through Reality.”  This site focuses on a transposition of the stuff of reality with its corresponding myth value, or perhaps vice versa, as in the post in which Christina ponders the symbolic import of a toad turning up in the kitchen, an event dealt with using an appropriate amout of humor.  Indeed, a resolute sense of humor pervades nearly all of her posts here, even though in her post “Victorian Mansion Seeks Spirits” she speaks half-seriously of how spirits “haunt” an old house in which many different fortunes have been met.  “The Agony of Empathy” is a subject she confronts in dealing with how an earlier sort of fantasy writer, Alexander Dumas, forces empathy on his readers in The Count of Monte Cristo.  Empathy is after all an essential experience in reading and writing good fantasy, whose fictional situations may be utterly strange to us, but whose human emotions should not be.  Next, she joins us in a post called “For the Love of Adverbs,” which excites my sympathy and is both apt and comic, and a subject of interest these days when even Hemingway is becoming a little out-of-date, though still essential reading.  Finally, Christina puts up a thoughtful post on the nature of God.  Handled with characteristic humor and good nature and a great deal of honesty from a contemporary point of view, it allows us all to find some sense of balance as writers and as people.

First We Read, Then We Write–at http://deborahrosereeves.wordpress.com/ .  This blog also has a goodreads link, but it is a good read all by itself.  Subtitled “Reviews, Ruminations, Reflections, Reveries,” this is what it is about, playing over many different aspects of the literary field.  Currently living in Portland, OR, Deborah defines herself as “a writer, a restless wanderer, and a recent woodworker.”  Her degrees are in English and Women and Gender Studies, and her toughmindedness in writing about things literary is tempered and balanced by a true humanity which keeps the doors open to new understandings.  She is by turns realistic, funny, and heartwarming in her blogs and posts, while avoiding the adverse of these qualities, not being pretentious, rude, or lacrimose.  It’s quite clear from the professionalism and taut quality of this blog that the blogger has taken her own injunction seriously:  first she reads, then she writes.  She never meanders around her subject without fulfilling its potential, except of course when meandering and releasing potential for others is the point.  This is clearly one of the best blogs I’ve seen lately.

beautifullittlesarajevo–at http://beautifullittlesarajevo.wordpress.com/ .  The work of another recent Portlander,  this blog, which is subtitled “A Place for Pretty Things” has as its declared topics food, photography, and writing.  The photography is highly evocative, some of it in stark and beautiful black-and-white, other parts in half-tones or equally beautiful color.  There is a sparse feel to the site, which gives it a surrealistic or film noir quality even including some of the color photographs, curiously.  In the food section, there are few words except to extol a healthy diet; but then, the pictures included are in the outworn but apposite saying “worth a thousand words.”  Such delicious looking delights are in the photographs that one salivates just at the pictures.  Now, how does one get to Portland, which the blogger says is a food-friendly city, in the blink of an eye?  Just look at the pictures, and don’t blink!  This is home cooking, from the blogger herself.  The literary part of the blog is equally innovative and gorgeous with “poems” that aren’t actually poems, because as the blogger states categorically, “I Hate Poetry.”  Yet the proliferation of word pictures, the lovely word pictures, say “poem” to me.  Anyway, whatever the pieces are called, “prose fragments,” perhaps, the blogger has written them well, and I hope to see more of them shortly.  If we don’t agree exactly on what makes a poem, we can all agree on one thing:  the writer has an eye for beauty, wherever it occurs.

And that’s my blog for today.  I hope you can get around to these sites if you haven’t already (I mean, you may be impatiently throwing bread pellets at me and yelling, “We already knew that one!”).  I have five or six more sites already chosen to write upon, but I like to leave some space between the days I do this so that I’m not just sponging off other people’s blogs constantly.  Until tomorrow, hang on tight, and hang loose!  (And congratulations to all the folks who participated fairly and squarely in the Olympics).

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August 6, 2012 · 2:13 pm

“Always be smarter than the people who hire you.”–Lena Horne

The French author Muriel Barbery’s highly acclaimed novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog (translated into English in 2008 by Alison Anderson) is a book for and about self-directed readers and smart people, particularly frustrated ones. In it, a hôtel building’s concierge, Renée Michel, unprepossessing physically and getting on in years, hides behind the concierge stereotype.  After all, this is all that is expected or wanted of her by the vast majority of the building’s inhabitants.  But behind her mask, she is a self-taught intellectual (an autodidact, to use the correct term) who reads and/or comprehends everything from philosophy to fine music and art, with a generous smattering of topics her employers are themselves too ignorant and worldly truly to understand.  The book goes a long way to prove that wealth is not necessarily a sign of intelligence, nor is intelligence an index to personal income and status.

The second heroine of the book is a pre-teen named Paloma Joss, who is also very gifted, and who understands too much to feel comfortable with her family’s privileged lifestyle.  Paloma lives in the hôtel, but isn’t planning to continue that way for long:  she contemplates setting things on fire, but then confusedly though valiantly decides to commit suicide on her thirteenth birthday.  She keeps a journal of “Profound Thoughts,” and some of them truly are profound.

The status quo and equilibrium of the building’s social system are disturbed, however, when a wealthy but unusually modest Japanese gentleman moves in.  For he sees through Renée’s cover almost at once, perceiving her as a kindred soul (he is not only wealthy but is also intelligent, educated, and genuinely well-bred).  He is clearly determined not to allow the concierge to continue to hide out behind her mask of dullness.  She and he and Paloma become acquaintances and then friends, all three of them joining to defy the class and age barriers that would keep them apart.

I won’t reveal the startling and moving ending except to quote Renée:  “The paths of God are all too explicit for those who pride themselves on their ability to decipher them….”  Paloma’s voice ends the novel, which is only fitting, especially since she is thought of by the concierge as “the daughter I never had,” and is at the ending a voice of hope.  She is thus a member of one of those human families we all make for ourselves, sometimes consisting partly of actual relations, sometimes not.  Amongst them, Renée, Paloma, and Ozu (their new friend) have sketched out the parameters that bound what people, rich or poor, can aspire to achieve–the territory is boundless.

This book, lest you think it a solemn, preachy text, is constructed of many comic moments, both when sketching out characters through their dialogue, and in the actual events that happen to people when they least expect it.  One of my favorite moments occurs when Renée is shyly visiting Ozu, and makes a trip to his bathroom, only to find that his toilet plays music at top volume when flushed.

Barbery has in this book successfully mingled the nobler aspects of the human race with the humorous and the painful to show that everywhere a human being is, so there is a potential fellow just hiding and waiting to be found by an appreciator.  May we all keep this in mind as we meet other people, and may we hope to find in them something we can relate to, however sad, funny, ironic, or small.

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August 5, 2012 · 5:08 pm

“Tell me what you eat, and I shall tell you what you are.”–Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

Yes, I know we’ve all heard the remark before that’s posted as my title today.  But did you know that Brillat-Savarin wrote a whole book of aphorisms about food and eating called “The Physiology of Taste”?  I didn’t, before today, when I looked up the quote to see where it came from.  Anyway, you’ll have to take my word for it, but I’m an elf.

Why am I an elf, and what do I eat that makes me one?  Well, the so-called “waybread of the elves,” of course (along with a judiciously tall glass of milk–waybread is a little bit dryish and full of delicious crumbs, just as it should be, so milk goes with it just fine!).  End this vain pretense, you say, come out from behind that elvish persona and reveal a real subject that someone can sink a literary tooth into.  Well, that’s exactly what I’m doing; but I’d better explain.

Several of the interesting folks whose works have been in Freshly Pressed lately and who write on books or literature have recently commented on what they eat or drink while writing, or reading, or they’ve just shared recipes as a periodic feature on their posts.  So, in the interests of combining the literary with the culinary, here’s my own offering in that light, along with an excellent recipe for “waybread of the elves” (at least, that’s what I call it–the originator of the recipe was much more modest and less histrionic).

Back in the days when I had recently become a teenager and was babysitting my brother, who was five years younger than I was, I had just re-read Tolkien’s Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings for the second time.  One particular summer, time was hanging particularly heavily on my brother’s and my hands, and I proposed to him that I read Tolkien to him to get us through the long, hot summer days when it was too scorching or humid to be outside in the sun and we were stuck inside.  Quickly, so enchanted was my brother with the book and I with my own voice communicating the story by reading aloud to someone whom I had often previously aggravated and pestered, that we kept it up until the entire book was done.  We had real meals, of course, either cooked up ahead of time by my mom, provided by my grandmother (who lived close by and could look in on us from time to time), or dreamed up by ourselves.  But I had recently discovered another book as well, a book called Old Timey Recipes, a series of recipes collected from the Appalachian area by someone named Phyllis Connor, and I had a favorite recipe in it:  her recipe for butter cookies.  The plot begins to thicken, you say, or at least the dough.

Now, lest you run away with the idea that these cookies were like the effete, overly sweet, LITTLE cookies that come in those tins at Christmas, I would like to tell you that you’d be misinformed:  these so-called butter cookies, especially when made entirely with butter the way (I confess) I changed the recipe to make them, come out nothing like a sweet cookie but much more like what’s correctly called shortbread, or shortbread cookies.  That is, when they emerge at the correct time from the oven, they’re not yellowish, but rather lightish buff color with slightly browned edges and bottom.  And with a contribution of imagination from Tolkien, you can easily imagine them wrapped in preserving leaves by the elves to sustain weary travellers on their way, and you can even imagine how they taste after several days’ travel, filling and innervating, because cookies made entirely with butter don’t go rancid the way cookies made even partially with margarine can.  Instead, they age, though they may get slightly softer; hence, you can imagine Sam’s grief and sense of loss as he sees Gollum’s nasty work of crumbling the cookies and throwing them down the mountainside in Mordor.

I know one thing:  to the despair of my mother, who kept asking where all of the butter and milk were disappearing to while she was gone, my brother and I ate copious amounts of waybread and drank milk all summer long (some elves drink milk, too!) while we read through Tolkien.  Finally, my brother read the books to himself by preference another time, since I was at this later time occupied with other things.  And now, he’s reading the books to his child, doing all the different voices as he no doubt imagined them for himself (since I made no attempt to reproduce accents when I read to him, doing instead only the emotional tonalities and nuances).

And now that I have dragged you through this piece of back history, here’s the recipe:  like all old timey recipes, it leaves some details out, such as the information that if you cut these cookies with an old-fashioned biscuit cutter (a large one), it’ll look more like standard shortbreads, or that you bake these on an ungreased pan, or that actual baking time if your oven is accurate is 12-15 minutes (check often in the last 3 minutes).  Or, that you can press out the dough gently with your hands.  Also, as I said before, the cookies will keep better if you use all butter, but I want to give you the exact recipe as I first encountered it:

“Cream 1/2 cup butter, 1/2 cup shortening, and 3/4 cup sugar until fluffy.  Add 1 beaten egg and 2 teaspoons vanilla.  Sift together 3 cups flour, 1/2 teaspoon baking powder, 1/8 teaspoon salt.  Add this to cream mixture very gradually.  Roll out on a pastry cloth [doughboard is fine] and cut into desired shapes.  A cookie press may be used [unnecessary].  Bake at 375 degrees until light brown.”  And that’s it.

There are other recipes in the book which were mainly of historical interest to me, such as recipes for parsnip wine, home brew, and moonshine.  And there is one which I’ve never tried, but which some people still swear by:  hog jowls and turnip greens.  Corn fritters, dandelion greens, grandmother’s spice cake (the third one of these I have tried, and it’s very good), you name it.  If it’s an Appalachian traditional recipe, chances are some version of it appears here (though since some of the recipes are very old and don’t supply cooking times or temperatures, you may have to improvise).  I first bought the book in 1970 or so, in a sort of “hippyish” place which also sold beads, incense, and quirky jewelry.  A few years ago (about 5), I was in a gift shop in Appalachia, and I sighted the book again!  Evidently, it is still continuing to sell.  My edition is the 3rd edition; I was distracted at the time and so happy to see my old friend on the bookshelf that I unfortunately can’t tell you what edition it’s in now.  But if you want a copy, I can tell you that it’s published in Bluefield, WV.  Put that together with Phyllis Connor’s name and the title of the book, and you may be fortunate enough to locate a distributor/supplier, especially with the Internet being the haven for information that it is these days.

And whether you get a copy or only follow my revised recipe, be sure and bake a recipe of waybread for your favorite elves and Tolkien fans (even if you’re the only elf you know for 40 miles!).  You surely can’t go wrong, whether in summer, spring, fall, or even winter to supply hungry literary “travellers” with sustenance.  (And keep in mind that waybread burns the hands of minions of the Dark Lord, just in case there are any grumps around!).

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August 4, 2012 · 3:47 pm

“You will see something new./Two things. And I call them/Thing One and Thing Two.”–Dr. Seuss

Hello again, friends and readers.  And about Thing One and Thing Two….

Here’s Thing One–Since I first began blogging on July 4 (no significance intended; I wasn’t in revolution against anything in particular), I’ve been turning out slightly over a post a day if you average it all out.  My mind is aswim, of course, with all the good books and essays that still remain to be written upon.  Still, my thinking processes are also bogged down with what to say, as I ask myself how I remember the writing best from when I first encountered it, and try to compare that with how I feel now about the same material.  For, I think we have relationships with books the same way we do with people, or almost.  Just to support that contention, perhaps weakly, what about that friend or relative who’s been divorced from someone for 15 years or so, and yet who can still only dish about that one relationship, as if nothing else matters?  That relationship and divorce is clearly the “novel of life” they’re hooked on.  And whether we want to hear it or not, they go over it and over it and over it, still looking for clues as to what makes the other person tick.  There are books too which don’t give up their secrets easily, and which continue  to tantalize:  they’re just a lot more fun than a worn-out relationship, though I suppose we have to hope we can all learn both from books and from life, eventually.

So–and here’s Thing Two–since I’ve been writing and have written a little more than a blog a day (only about 4 of my topics previous to this one are non-literary), I feel that today I need a break from literature, to look around me, to (above all!) read and review more books.  Thus, without much–or at least extended–apology, I’m going to take today off, while I read some more of Daniel Heath Justice’s gripping fantasy novel trilogy The Way of Thorn and Thunder:  The Kynship Chronicles.  Though it may be a while before I will be able to do a review of this hefty read (and already, just 3 chapters in, I can tell that it’s one of those books you can’t help but read in large chunks because you just can’t set it aside), I hope to share it with you before October sometime.  Better yet, get a copy and read along:  the trilogy is available in its revised edition as a single volume from Amazon.com.  I promise, you won’t be disappointed.  It may be available on Kindle as well (I don’t currently have a Kindle), and I read on Google that it is available online.  Daniel Heath Justice is originally from Colorado, but is now a Canadian citizen and is a member of the Cherokee Nation.  Most recently, he has taught Aboriginal literatures at the University of Toronto, and is going on to the University of British Columbia.  To follow his insights about Aboriginal literature and such modern related movie topics as “Avatar,” just  Google his name–there’s plenty there to keep an avid reader busy.

And this is my blog for today.  Keep reading, and please pass along any comments, questions, or recommendations for reading that you would like to share.  I hope to have another post up tomorrow or Monday (today’s Saturday in my part of the world).

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August 2, 2012 · 7:32 pm

The mystery of the book(s)–“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”–Jorge Luis Borges

As I’ve confessed before, I’m a bibliophile only in the sense that I collect books rather indiscriminately as to edition and date of publication, and try to read as many of them as I can.  I also read ones from the library which I don’t have the means to collect.  So, many a bibliophile in the other sense (the person who acquires and hoards and buys and occasionally deals in rare books) would probably scorn my collection.  But I’d like to say for the record that even though I can’t collect rare books, I too have picked up an older book in my hands, one which perhaps someone in a bookstore has told me is a first edition by an author I like.  I too have gently turned through the pages, caressed them, pressed them toward my face and smelled the odor of old paper, even.  And whether you’re simply a read-a-holic like me or a more demanding collector of rare editions and old manuscripts and scrolls, I think you will find the book I am about to recommend entrancing; it deals with the romance and mystery of the book, and also with the topic of “demonic” possession, whether by a book or an author or a person.

The book is The Club Dumas by Arturo Pérez-Reverte.  It starts with the death by hanging of a bibliophile, who leaves behind him a partial manuscript, a possibly original copy of a chapter of The Three Musketeers.  The central character of the story (though not the initiating narrator) is Lucas Corso, a book finder who finds rare and unusual books for people with the money to pay for them.  He is asked to authenticate the chapter, and he also has another mission on hand:  to find out whether any or all of the periodically re-surfacing copies of a demonology text known as The Book of the Nine Doors of the Kingdom of Shadows (supposedly a manual for summoning the devil) are real, still exist, and are genuine.  He expects his investigations to take him from Spain to Paris and Portugal.  What he doesn’t expect is to be pursued and harrassed by a mysterious chauffeur in a Jaguar and others, and to be drawn into a web of deceit, crime and jockeying for position in a game he only half knows the rules of, but which is based upon the game he knows rather better:  i.e., negotiating, not always honestly or scrupulously, for special texts.

The author gives a picture of Lucas Corso through the eyes of Boris Balkan, who compares himself to the Doctor Watson figure of the story, and to whom Corso later reveals the whole story.  Corso is described thusly:  “Corso was taking notes.  Precise, unscrupulous, and deadly as a black mamba was how one of his acquaintances described him later when Corso’s name came up in conversation.  He had a singular way of facing people, peering through his crooked glasses and slowly nodding in agreement, with a reasonable, well-meaning, but doubtful expression, like a whore tolerantly listening to a romantic sonnet.  As if he was giving you a chance to correct yourself before it was too late.”  What a hero, right?  And also, as one reads later, what a female romantic interest:  he meets her on a train, and the first thing she says to him is “I know you.”  She is described briefly in this manner:  “Close up, her green eyes seemed even lighter, like liquid crystal, and luminous against her suntanned skin.  It was only March, and with her hair parted like a boy’s, her tan made her look unusual, sporty, pleasantly ambiguous.  She was tall, slim, and supple.  And very young.”  When he first asks her her name, she tells him it is Irene Adler, which of course is a reference to Holmes’s “woman that got away.”  This first chapter in which the two of them meet has a quote from a J. Cazotte:  “The truth is that the devil is very cunning.  The truth is that he is not always as ugly as they say.”  The problem is that nearly everyone in the book shows an abnormal amount of cunning, so that one really begins to feel that it’s a book itself on demonology.  Certainly, it has a series of prints in it from some of the texts Corso encounters which look like altered Tarot cards, and which bear a special significance to what he’s searching for.  He tries repeatedly to separate the threads he’s following with Dumas from those of the demonology he’s also trying to cover, while being both pursued and threatened (and mystified) by the pursuit.  The final lines of the book elliptically read:  “[Corso] was laughing under his breath, like a cruel wolf, as he leaned over to light his last cigarette.  Books play that kind of trick, he thought.  And everyone gets the devil he deserves.”  Don’t think that I’ve ruined your read, however:  in this case as in many another, “the devil is in the details.”

So, whether you yourself have ever been consumed as by a devil to find and purchase a particular edition of a book or manuscript, or whether you’ve previously thought such obsessions obscure or boring, you’ll surely find this book an exciting mystery:  whether you view Paradise as a library or take a darker view of being stricken with book fever, I feel certain this mystery/adventure will keep you reading steadily from start to finish.

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