Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited - Vladimir Nabokov (Wideview/Perigree, 1966)
I have really mixed feelings about Nabokov. I am pretty sure I like his fiction, although I find it challenging. I definitely don't like his opinion that it makes no sense to try to translate Eugene Onegin in verge (why is Pushkin so popular on this blog lately?). And I am not a fan of his decisions on how to transliterate. Ys in confusing places, and the rendering of the Cyrillic "Х" (normally "kh" as in "Khrushchev") as "H," the decision to just use the masculine form of the last name for women (Anna Karenin, instead of Karenina).
Oh wait, I'm digressing. In his autobiography, he also just doesn't seem like the most pleasant guy to be around. Arrogant, homophobic and with a clearly complicated relationship with his gay brother (11 months his junior), and certainly convinced he was the smartest guy in the room (which, unfortunately, he usually was). Plus early in this autobiography (composed of a series of essays and revised over time) he discloses that he read and wrote in English before he did in Russian. So English was virtually a native tongue to him, and my awe of his prowess has to be played down just the teeniest bit.
All that said, this is a masterful work. I've seen it said (and of course I can't provide citations, bad librarian) that this is the best autobiography of the twentieth century. I'm willing to believe it. What he does with language... I'm not sure anyone can beat him. In whatever tongue. But while I admire him all the more for having read this memoir, I'm not sure I like him.
(Not mentioned above but also worth noting: a glorious look at late imperial aristocracy/intelligentsia, and a vivid portrayal of how those folk fled for their lives as the Bolsheviks took control)
Showing posts with label memoir. Show all posts
Showing posts with label memoir. Show all posts
Friday, February 14, 2014
Wednesday, June 19, 2013
One woman's 20th century
Personal History - Katharine Graham (Vintage Books, 1998)
If some scholar from the far off future wanted a single source for understanding 20th century America, he or she could do far worse than Graham's memoir. Born in 1917 and writing on the cusp of her 80th birthday, Graham was a player - or next to the players - in many of the most dramatic moments of the century. Daughter of two luminaries, wife to a man who took to advising Kennedy & Johnson as a side gig, publisher of The Washington Post during Watergate.... the list goes on and on.
This thing is a brick, and chock full of detail. She begins with her parents' histories, and how they met. She both does and doesn't hold back - there is plenty Graham leaves off the page, but she is also pretty direct about the failings of those around her. For instance, I found myself wondering if the reader will end up believing that her relationship with her mother was actually more fraught than it really was. And I saw complaints on Goodreads about all the name dropping. And yes, the names are really EVERYWHERE. You do occasionally wonder if there were ever moments in her life without other famous people around. And this sometimes seems to hide how much she doesn't tell. There is lots of "and we spent many dinners/vacations/whatevers quite pleasantly together," and plenty of pointing out rumors of her romances with various beaux. I have to believe that some of the rumors here and there may have been founded, although she doesn't say much. But the line "and I can attest to his virility," tossed off about some luminary, left me almost desperate to find out more.
There's plenty about life in the Washington elite, and about being a young wife during World War II. And about her mother's, father's, and husband's various political activities. In all honesty, up almost to the point of her husband's death, the "Kay Graham" character in the memoir has little agency. I can't tell whether this was truly the case, or whether it's how she perceived her own life, but it does mean that the book picks up quite a bit of speed after the mid-1960s.
For one thing, there's Watergate. Information about the newspaper - how it was acquired, what the business was like, how it grew, etc. - is all throughout the book, but once she takes over, you get all of the excitement of politicians' hostility to Post coverage and how that culminated in Watergate. And then the chapter on Watergate ends and you immediately move into a huge labor crisis. I didn't find Graham a wholly reliable narrator on this matter, but her treatment of it was fascinating.
Historians of feminism could find much to consider in this memoir too. Graham broke glass ceilings, but consciously reflects back upon what it meant to be a woman throughout the decades, and ways in which it changed over time. She speaks for a specific race and class, but it's enlightening all the same.
Reading this was an undertaking, and I'm sincerely glad to have it behind me. But it was a fascinating read, and I'm looking forward to trying to find the book the right new home.
If some scholar from the far off future wanted a single source for understanding 20th century America, he or she could do far worse than Graham's memoir. Born in 1917 and writing on the cusp of her 80th birthday, Graham was a player - or next to the players - in many of the most dramatic moments of the century. Daughter of two luminaries, wife to a man who took to advising Kennedy & Johnson as a side gig, publisher of The Washington Post during Watergate.... the list goes on and on.
This thing is a brick, and chock full of detail. She begins with her parents' histories, and how they met. She both does and doesn't hold back - there is plenty Graham leaves off the page, but she is also pretty direct about the failings of those around her. For instance, I found myself wondering if the reader will end up believing that her relationship with her mother was actually more fraught than it really was. And I saw complaints on Goodreads about all the name dropping. And yes, the names are really EVERYWHERE. You do occasionally wonder if there were ever moments in her life without other famous people around. And this sometimes seems to hide how much she doesn't tell. There is lots of "and we spent many dinners/vacations/whatevers quite pleasantly together," and plenty of pointing out rumors of her romances with various beaux. I have to believe that some of the rumors here and there may have been founded, although she doesn't say much. But the line "and I can attest to his virility," tossed off about some luminary, left me almost desperate to find out more.
There's plenty about life in the Washington elite, and about being a young wife during World War II. And about her mother's, father's, and husband's various political activities. In all honesty, up almost to the point of her husband's death, the "Kay Graham" character in the memoir has little agency. I can't tell whether this was truly the case, or whether it's how she perceived her own life, but it does mean that the book picks up quite a bit of speed after the mid-1960s.
For one thing, there's Watergate. Information about the newspaper - how it was acquired, what the business was like, how it grew, etc. - is all throughout the book, but once she takes over, you get all of the excitement of politicians' hostility to Post coverage and how that culminated in Watergate. And then the chapter on Watergate ends and you immediately move into a huge labor crisis. I didn't find Graham a wholly reliable narrator on this matter, but her treatment of it was fascinating.
Historians of feminism could find much to consider in this memoir too. Graham broke glass ceilings, but consciously reflects back upon what it meant to be a woman throughout the decades, and ways in which it changed over time. She speaks for a specific race and class, but it's enlightening all the same.
Reading this was an undertaking, and I'm sincerely glad to have it behind me. But it was a fascinating read, and I'm looking forward to trying to find the book the right new home.
Monday, November 19, 2012
Snakes and snails....
This Boy's Life: Tobias Wolff (Harper & Row, 1989)
In short: a memoir of a kid growing up in the school of hard knocks during the 1950s and 60s. Tobias and his mom move around a lot, as she tries to get away from an abusive boyfriend and eventually form a new family. (Meanwhile his dad and brother are living among the wealthy on the East Coast, although heaven knows we get enough hints that this situation isn't without its perils.)
Toby becomes Jack, and dreams big dreams, but along the way he is a liar, a thief, a truant, and a general hoodlum. Possibly nothing really outside the ordinary boundaries of being a working-class boy at the time, but it was hard for this girl reader to identify.
Also, I was completely distracted by marginalia. This copy previously belonged to someone who read the book for school - guessing high school. And she had plenty to say about the book. She was very troubled by the men in the story (with good enough reason, I'll admit) and had plenty of smiley faces for the mom. Marginalia tells you so much about a reader and the times in which that reader lives and ... well, anyway, it was fun.
The best part of the book (for me) came at the very end, with this line:
In short: a memoir of a kid growing up in the school of hard knocks during the 1950s and 60s. Tobias and his mom move around a lot, as she tries to get away from an abusive boyfriend and eventually form a new family. (Meanwhile his dad and brother are living among the wealthy on the East Coast, although heaven knows we get enough hints that this situation isn't without its perils.)
Toby becomes Jack, and dreams big dreams, but along the way he is a liar, a thief, a truant, and a general hoodlum. Possibly nothing really outside the ordinary boundaries of being a working-class boy at the time, but it was hard for this girl reader to identify.
Also, I was completely distracted by marginalia. This copy previously belonged to someone who read the book for school - guessing high school. And she had plenty to say about the book. She was very troubled by the men in the story (with good enough reason, I'll admit) and had plenty of smiley faces for the mom. Marginalia tells you so much about a reader and the times in which that reader lives and ... well, anyway, it was fun.
The best part of the book (for me) came at the very end, with this line:
When we are green, still half-created, we believe that our dreams are rights, that the world is disposed to act in our best interests, and that falling and dying are for quitters. We live on the innocent and monstrous assurance that we alone, of all the people ever born, have a special arrangement whereby we will be allowed to stay green forever.This quote struck such a chord for me. My teenage reader, on the other hand, let it slide by unremarked.
Monday, December 05, 2011
Sex and hockey in DeLillo's America
Amazons: An Intimate Memoir by the First Woman Ever to Play in the National Hockey League - Cleo Birdwell (better known as Don DeLillo) (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1980)
Apparently DeLillo has pretty much disowned this book, omitting it from official bibliographies and blocking its republication. (As a result, this book was tough to track down in a library.) I'm not entirely sure why. I mean, it's not great literature, but it brings in much of the absurdity that I found in White Noise (and one of the same characters, for that matter).
But I didn't read it because of DeLillo. In fact, if I remember correctly, I heard about the book well before I found out Birdwell was a pseudonym. You know me, I'm a sucker for hockey books. And for complaining about how unrealistic they are. And this one offers ample opportunity.
Cleo is a rookie for the Rangers. And the first woman to play in the NHL. So she gets a lot of attention, naturally. But apparently she is like Taylor Hall or something, the rate at which she seems to score. And speaking of scoring, there is plenty of that off the ice. It seems like everyone circling the team eventually succumbs to the belief that sex with her will ... I don't know, do something. And despite assertions that make her seem sorta meh about most, if not all these men, she is usually a willing participant. In some of the weirdest sex scenes I've read in a while.
And then there is the former player who shares her apartment, a man suffering from some bizarre affliction and whose search (aided by Cleo) ends with him spending months asleep in a machine. The way in which this whole scenario is normalized is what I remember best about DeLillo from past forays into his work. And it hints at something deeper than "Cleo plays hockey and has lots of sex." But I just couldn't get my finger on it.
Apparently DeLillo has pretty much disowned this book, omitting it from official bibliographies and blocking its republication. (As a result, this book was tough to track down in a library.) I'm not entirely sure why. I mean, it's not great literature, but it brings in much of the absurdity that I found in White Noise (and one of the same characters, for that matter).
But I didn't read it because of DeLillo. In fact, if I remember correctly, I heard about the book well before I found out Birdwell was a pseudonym. You know me, I'm a sucker for hockey books. And for complaining about how unrealistic they are. And this one offers ample opportunity.
Cleo is a rookie for the Rangers. And the first woman to play in the NHL. So she gets a lot of attention, naturally. But apparently she is like Taylor Hall or something, the rate at which she seems to score. And speaking of scoring, there is plenty of that off the ice. It seems like everyone circling the team eventually succumbs to the belief that sex with her will ... I don't know, do something. And despite assertions that make her seem sorta meh about most, if not all these men, she is usually a willing participant. In some of the weirdest sex scenes I've read in a while.
And then there is the former player who shares her apartment, a man suffering from some bizarre affliction and whose search (aided by Cleo) ends with him spending months asleep in a machine. The way in which this whole scenario is normalized is what I remember best about DeLillo from past forays into his work. And it hints at something deeper than "Cleo plays hockey and has lots of sex." But I just couldn't get my finger on it.
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Irish Times
No News at Throat Lake - Lawrence Donegan (Pocket Books, 2000)
So let's say you play bass guitar in a rock/pop band in the 1980s. But what you really dreamed of doing was writing for the Guardian. So when the band fizzles out, you do that. But then somehow you decide what you really want to do is live in a the boonies of County Donegal. If this is you, you'd be Donegan.
Despite leaving his old world behind him for a ramshackle home in an Irish cottage, he doesn't leave behind journalism, and ends up writing for the local Tirconaill Tribune. This memoir, then, is a combination of Donegan's attempts to adjust to a new pace of life, the stories that come his way thanks to this quirky newspaper, and his immersion in the world of Gaelic football.
It's light and amusing, and strangely dated feeling. The year he spent in Ireland is circa 1998, and I guess it's just hitting me now what a long time ago that really was. I wouldn't mind going back in time, and to a picturesque locale like Creeslough. Anyone with a time machine?
So let's say you play bass guitar in a rock/pop band in the 1980s. But what you really dreamed of doing was writing for the Guardian. So when the band fizzles out, you do that. But then somehow you decide what you really want to do is live in a the boonies of County Donegal. If this is you, you'd be Donegan.
Despite leaving his old world behind him for a ramshackle home in an Irish cottage, he doesn't leave behind journalism, and ends up writing for the local Tirconaill Tribune. This memoir, then, is a combination of Donegan's attempts to adjust to a new pace of life, the stories that come his way thanks to this quirky newspaper, and his immersion in the world of Gaelic football.
It's light and amusing, and strangely dated feeling. The year he spent in Ireland is circa 1998, and I guess it's just hitting me now what a long time ago that really was. I wouldn't mind going back in time, and to a picturesque locale like Creeslough. Anyone with a time machine?
Saturday, July 31, 2010
WTF Lion
Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller (Penguin Books, 2004)
I bought this book when I came across it cheap. I had heard good things about Fuller's earlier Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight and was taken with the excerpt from this work that had appeared in the New Yorker (natch). Then it sat around for years, waiting for me. And I don't know why the time was now, but it was. And let me tell you, this book blew me away.
Fuller grew up in what was Rhodesia, and then Zambia. But in this book she is in the US, married, with two small children. Except she's back at her parents' home in Zambia. And she meets this man, who she calls K, a veteran of the wars in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe and Mozambique. He has demons, and she ends up with what I can only describe as severe cognitive dissonance upon her return to Wyoming. So when she ends up back in Africa a year later, and sees him again, somehow she hatches a plan that they will travel back into Zimbabwe and Mozambique, that through this he may exorcise the past, and she will understand it, understand this war that was the backdrop for her childhood.
But there is so much more going on here. I can't even describe it. I felt like I fell down the rabbit hole as I was reading. But I also felt intensely present, thanks to the minute and vivid detail. And I kept trying to work my way through the silences to understand the relationship between this man and this woman. She uses him, in this way that writers use people, but I wonder if she is using him less - or differently - than she imagines. There's just too much there.
And since I can't manage to coherently explain my reaction to these larger themes, I'll just point out of few of the other places, where Fuller's careful and cutting description shines through.
What I do know is this: the blurb on the back cover describes K as "strangely charismatic" and I can think of no better term, for him and for the book. It was troubling, terrifying, beautiful, and utterly captivating.
I bought this book when I came across it cheap. I had heard good things about Fuller's earlier Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight and was taken with the excerpt from this work that had appeared in the New Yorker (natch). Then it sat around for years, waiting for me. And I don't know why the time was now, but it was. And let me tell you, this book blew me away.
Fuller grew up in what was Rhodesia, and then Zambia. But in this book she is in the US, married, with two small children. Except she's back at her parents' home in Zambia. And she meets this man, who she calls K, a veteran of the wars in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe and Mozambique. He has demons, and she ends up with what I can only describe as severe cognitive dissonance upon her return to Wyoming. So when she ends up back in Africa a year later, and sees him again, somehow she hatches a plan that they will travel back into Zimbabwe and Mozambique, that through this he may exorcise the past, and she will understand it, understand this war that was the backdrop for her childhood.
But there is so much more going on here. I can't even describe it. I felt like I fell down the rabbit hole as I was reading. But I also felt intensely present, thanks to the minute and vivid detail. And I kept trying to work my way through the silences to understand the relationship between this man and this woman. She uses him, in this way that writers use people, but I wonder if she is using him less - or differently - than she imagines. There's just too much there.
And since I can't manage to coherently explain my reaction to these larger themes, I'll just point out of few of the other places, where Fuller's careful and cutting description shines through.
- During a drought in the region, that somehow skirted the little area near her parents': "in the whole of central and southern Africa they [the news teams] couldn't find people more conveniently desperate--by which I mean desperate and close to both an international airport and a five-star hotel"
- "The engine of Dad's boat, in common with almost everything mechanical on the fish farm, had quirks of temperament that required an intimate knowledge of the psychology of machines to operate."
- A bullfrog, given to Fuller's mother as food but freed by her when she can't bring herself to actually cook him, "leaped under the firewood pile and glared at us with a mixture of alarm and disdain for the next several days."
- And the frog is nothing compared to the animal that prompted the title of this post, which is the actual note I made while reading: K knows a guy who knows a guy - another war veteran, and an important character in this story - who has a "pet" lion. Mambo launches himself at Fuller, only to be stymied time and again by K, who goes all Cesar Milan on him. Mambo's efforts to get at her, which seem like something out of a cartoon (like Lucifer and the mice in Cinderella) continue intermittently for the next 50 pages. And then there is a drunken fight between two men, after which "the lion trotted out of the shadows and started rubbing against their legs, purring resoundingly." To which, I continue to maintain, WTF. The lion is the 160 lb. feline representation of how utterly incomprehensible this world is to a person coming from my background.
What I do know is this: the blurb on the back cover describes K as "strangely charismatic" and I can think of no better term, for him and for the book. It was troubling, terrifying, beautiful, and utterly captivating.
Saturday, May 22, 2010
Locavores, or I feel bad about my diet
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle - Barbara Kingsolver (HarperCollins, 2007)
So it may or may not be the case that at one point the reader sat down with both this book on a year of local eating and a bag from McDonalds. I can promise you that if it were the case, this reader was aware of how incongruous and embarrassing it was.
In short, Kingsolver and her family (husband, two daughters) moved full-time to their property in Virginia, and after some time settling in, embarked on a year of knowing the provenance of their food. Most of it, they grew themselves (either in the plant or animal husbandry sense). While this was a big commitment (duh) this was a foodie family that had roots in the world of fresh, local, home-grown food. They had grown up with gardens; they cooked with fresh ingredients; the youngest had already been raising chickens. This contributed to the success of their project - imagine if they didn't already know how to cook - and helped communicate that the kinds of lifestyle changes involved are not (or at least don't need to be) great hardships. On the other hand, they started out from a point so far beyond where many American families currently reside... it's easy to get overwhelmed and think, this will never work for me.
I'm not a cook. I don't get excited about it. I wish I did. It seems so romantic in Kingsolver's description. It makes me want to try harder. At the very least, maybe I'll start going to farmer's markets again so that at least I know what's in season, even if I refuse to give up my bananas. (Hell, I live in Southern California - I have more access to fresh produce than almost anyone else in the country.)
As the book was winding down, I was planning this post around a frustration that I didn't real feel connected to what was happening in their lives. I didn't get a sense of adventure. I didn't see how it fit into the rest of the narrative of their lives (and apparently it was an eventful year). And then I got to the chapter about turkey mating and was utterly won over. And then I came to the final chapter, where Kingsolver confronts my troubles as a reader:
Plus, seriously, fresh and local food. I promise.
So it may or may not be the case that at one point the reader sat down with both this book on a year of local eating and a bag from McDonalds. I can promise you that if it were the case, this reader was aware of how incongruous and embarrassing it was.
In short, Kingsolver and her family (husband, two daughters) moved full-time to their property in Virginia, and after some time settling in, embarked on a year of knowing the provenance of their food. Most of it, they grew themselves (either in the plant or animal husbandry sense). While this was a big commitment (duh) this was a foodie family that had roots in the world of fresh, local, home-grown food. They had grown up with gardens; they cooked with fresh ingredients; the youngest had already been raising chickens. This contributed to the success of their project - imagine if they didn't already know how to cook - and helped communicate that the kinds of lifestyle changes involved are not (or at least don't need to be) great hardships. On the other hand, they started out from a point so far beyond where many American families currently reside... it's easy to get overwhelmed and think, this will never work for me.
I'm not a cook. I don't get excited about it. I wish I did. It seems so romantic in Kingsolver's description. It makes me want to try harder. At the very least, maybe I'll start going to farmer's markets again so that at least I know what's in season, even if I refuse to give up my bananas. (Hell, I live in Southern California - I have more access to fresh produce than almost anyone else in the country.)
As the book was winding down, I was planning this post around a frustration that I didn't real feel connected to what was happening in their lives. I didn't get a sense of adventure. I didn't see how it fit into the rest of the narrative of their lives (and apparently it was an eventful year). And then I got to the chapter about turkey mating and was utterly won over. And then I came to the final chapter, where Kingsolver confronts my troubles as a reader:
I am old enough to know I should never, ever, trust I've explained anything perfectly. Some part of the audience will always remain at large, confused or plain unconvinced. As I wind up this account, I'm weighing that. Is it possible to explain the year we had?This question, more than anything, made me feel comfortable with the book. It acknowledged the distance that would always remain, and I appreciated that.
Plus, seriously, fresh and local food. I promise.
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Too many people: My experience at the 2010 Festival of Books
I had been telling everyone that there were about 30,000 too many people at the LA Times Festival of Books this past Saturday. (It turns out there were about 130,000 attendees total over the weekend, so my numbers sound about right.) Honestly, I was so cranky about being there that I almost just left. I'm not sure what happened to the fun, awesome festivals I remember from my first years back in Los Angeles.
And then I think I figured it out. I snagged a panel ticket - just to something, anything really - and ended up at "Memoir: All the Single Ladies." (Ahem, that is me near the left edge of the picture, bent over something.) This totally made the festival worthwhile for me. The panels are the reason to go. They don't need to be favorite authors, and they certainly shouldn't be the political panels - those are chaos. My hour listening to these four women was perfect. And I also just happen to fit right into their demographic. But I liked that they were funny and self-deprecating and thoughtful, etc.
I also loved this line from Julie Klausner: "I hate when women do things that are good for their career and shitty to other women." Yay for solidarity.
Someday, if I survive this semester, I will get to read for fun again, and I will pick up these books....
And then I think I figured it out. I snagged a panel ticket - just to something, anything really - and ended up at "Memoir: All the Single Ladies." (Ahem, that is me near the left edge of the picture, bent over something.) This totally made the festival worthwhile for me. The panels are the reason to go. They don't need to be favorite authors, and they certainly shouldn't be the political panels - those are chaos. My hour listening to these four women was perfect. And I also just happen to fit right into their demographic. But I liked that they were funny and self-deprecating and thoughtful, etc.
I also loved this line from Julie Klausner: "I hate when women do things that are good for their career and shitty to other women." Yay for solidarity.
Someday, if I survive this semester, I will get to read for fun again, and I will pick up these books....
Friday, March 05, 2010
A portrait of the president as a young man
Dreams from My Father - Barack Obama (Three Rivers Press, 1995, 2004)
I'm not the first to ask, but I still have to wonder if Obama thought he would run for president when he wrote this book. Not so much because of the cocaine and racial tension, but because he is so thoughtful and honest (at least, he comes off as honest) about his own personal struggles with his identity. I don't read a lot of political memoir, but I gather than overcoming one's demons is a popular trope in the field. But this seems like more than that. It's a different kind of journey.
Anyway, it's frustrating to now, a year after Obama's inauguration, be reading the memoir that everyone else read back in 2004 or at least by 2007. In part because there was a lot I already knew, but in part because you realize which parts didn't garner attention. I heard about Jeremiah Wright (obviously) but not about how what it was like to search for a spiritual home while working with - and seeing the flaws of - so many of Chicago's church leaders. Or about what family meant to his relatives in Africa, and the tensions of responsibilities. I also found myself wondering so much why I always thought of his mother's daughter as his sister, but his father's children as his half-siblings. What are my own biases?
He incorporates a lot of dialogue, which gives the book a feeling more sometimes of a novel, b/c you know much of the dialogue is reimagined in order to get at what Obama felt to be fundamentally true, even if it's not quite what happened. This is something I've always found fascinating about autobiography.
And Obama is often a beautiful writer, and as I said before, a thoughtful one. Such as in passages like this:
It's been a challenging year for Obama, and I can't guess how the remainder of his term will play out. But reading this book reminded me why it was so important that we elect him.
I'm not the first to ask, but I still have to wonder if Obama thought he would run for president when he wrote this book. Not so much because of the cocaine and racial tension, but because he is so thoughtful and honest (at least, he comes off as honest) about his own personal struggles with his identity. I don't read a lot of political memoir, but I gather than overcoming one's demons is a popular trope in the field. But this seems like more than that. It's a different kind of journey.
Anyway, it's frustrating to now, a year after Obama's inauguration, be reading the memoir that everyone else read back in 2004 or at least by 2007. In part because there was a lot I already knew, but in part because you realize which parts didn't garner attention. I heard about Jeremiah Wright (obviously) but not about how what it was like to search for a spiritual home while working with - and seeing the flaws of - so many of Chicago's church leaders. Or about what family meant to his relatives in Africa, and the tensions of responsibilities. I also found myself wondering so much why I always thought of his mother's daughter as his sister, but his father's children as his half-siblings. What are my own biases?
He incorporates a lot of dialogue, which gives the book a feeling more sometimes of a novel, b/c you know much of the dialogue is reimagined in order to get at what Obama felt to be fundamentally true, even if it's not quite what happened. This is something I've always found fascinating about autobiography.
And Obama is often a beautiful writer, and as I said before, a thoughtful one. Such as in passages like this:
What is a family? Is it just a genetic chain, parents and offspring, people like me? Or is it a social construct, an economic unit, optimal for child rearing and divisions of labor? Or is it something else entirely: a store of shared memories, say? An ambit of love? A reach across the void?
It's been a challenging year for Obama, and I can't guess how the remainder of his term will play out. But reading this book reminded me why it was so important that we elect him.
Sunday, February 07, 2010
WASPS!
Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor - Tad Friend (Little, Brown & Co., 2009)
Carolline says I am obsessed with WASPs. This may be true. I have fantasies about living in a Ralph Lauren ad. (That pic is not the best example. Anyhoo...) I also really like cable knit sweaters. However, I am pretty sure I do not live well on the East Coast. So....
Tad Friend is a staff writer for the New Yorker, so obviously I like his writing. (I don't understand why he's their Calif. writer when he's based in Brooklyn, but whatever.) He's also a Wasp. (I like it better all capitalized, like in the previous paragraph, but I'll bow to his usage for the rest of this post.) He's from what may prove to have been the last generation of Wasps to actually be Waspy. The book is a memoir of his family, on both parents' sides, and the wacky, wonderful, and often tragic turns their lives took. I added it to my list based on a recommendation that made it sound hilarious. It is not hilarious. It is however entertaining and often touching.
Among the themes that appear again and again: abandonment, emotional distance, drinking, thrift, not quite living up to promises of success, divorce and remarriage, homes that had names, and lots and lots of nicknames. The narrative is told out of chronological order, which was absolutely the right way to tell it. There are ways in which there is a grand narrative of Tad moving from childhood through to his post-college years, failed relationships, and eventual marriage. But mostly we move back and forth through years and between families. I had trouble keeping people straight at times, even with the very welcome family tree at the beginning of the book.
In some ways an elegy to a world that is slipping away, I think Friend ultimately paints a hopeful picture of the future. Not because he has embraced his Wasp heritage, or rejected it, but because he has made his peace with it.
I don't read a lot of memoirs - it's not really my genre, which is strange since it's history, after all - but I liked this one. It felt like the world it described, and allowed me to feel it too.
(PS - Friend's appraisal of certain attitudes toward privilege and success and working too hard made me aware of the ways in which places like Stanford still embody parts of the Wasp ethos. This could be a longer discussion, but I'll leave it at that.)
Carolline says I am obsessed with WASPs. This may be true. I have fantasies about living in a Ralph Lauren ad. (That pic is not the best example. Anyhoo...) I also really like cable knit sweaters. However, I am pretty sure I do not live well on the East Coast. So....
Tad Friend is a staff writer for the New Yorker, so obviously I like his writing. (I don't understand why he's their Calif. writer when he's based in Brooklyn, but whatever.) He's also a Wasp. (I like it better all capitalized, like in the previous paragraph, but I'll bow to his usage for the rest of this post.) He's from what may prove to have been the last generation of Wasps to actually be Waspy. The book is a memoir of his family, on both parents' sides, and the wacky, wonderful, and often tragic turns their lives took. I added it to my list based on a recommendation that made it sound hilarious. It is not hilarious. It is however entertaining and often touching.
Among the themes that appear again and again: abandonment, emotional distance, drinking, thrift, not quite living up to promises of success, divorce and remarriage, homes that had names, and lots and lots of nicknames. The narrative is told out of chronological order, which was absolutely the right way to tell it. There are ways in which there is a grand narrative of Tad moving from childhood through to his post-college years, failed relationships, and eventual marriage. But mostly we move back and forth through years and between families. I had trouble keeping people straight at times, even with the very welcome family tree at the beginning of the book.
In some ways an elegy to a world that is slipping away, I think Friend ultimately paints a hopeful picture of the future. Not because he has embraced his Wasp heritage, or rejected it, but because he has made his peace with it.
I don't read a lot of memoirs - it's not really my genre, which is strange since it's history, after all - but I liked this one. It felt like the world it described, and allowed me to feel it too.
(PS - Friend's appraisal of certain attitudes toward privilege and success and working too hard made me aware of the ways in which places like Stanford still embody parts of the Wasp ethos. This could be a longer discussion, but I'll leave it at that.)
Sunday, September 28, 2008
Library girl (that would be me)
I've been busy with school. The bulk of my reading has had to do with information science, or management theory (or political blogs or the ever-present New Yorkers, which have gotten the best of me again.) And even my airplane reading on the flight back from Hawaii turned out to be related to school...
Which takes me to Quiet, Please: Dispatches from a Public Librarian, from McSweeney's contributer and Anaheim librarian Scott Douglas. Douglas is about my age. Except he started working as a library page in college, and then went straight to library school. So he's been official for something like 5 or 6 years. And working in libraries for more like 10. (Also, most of my classmates are already longtime employees of some library or another. This makes me nervous for my future career prospects. How am I going to get hired when everyone else already has way more experience? Answer: quit my day job and get unpaid internships?) Anyway, I'm going to say that Douglas has certain writing quirks that mark him as part of the Dave Eggers cadre. (I'm not sure what I even mean by that, and am afraid of getting myself into trouble, so I'm just going to link to a wiki post for Eggers, and make a vague reference to a sort of self-referential, insouciant, nerdy hipsterism.) He also reminded me - with his penchant for wanting to share more information than he can possibly fit in through use of footnotes and "for shelving" asides - of David Foster Wallace, which just makes me sad.
Anyway. Douglas is funny. I laughed. He is good at noting the ridiculous. Yet everytime he edges toward being mean, he tries to take a step back, and I believe he is fundamentally a good guy who just happens to love telling a good story. None of the story of his time in school at SJSU or his early days at the library particularly makes me excited about what lies ahead. In fact, I sat at the airport wondering if I could run out of there and just live on my uncle's couch in Honolulu and swim in his building's beautiful new saltwater pool. But that's a life dilemma for another moment.
And Douglas isn't all "working in a library with librarians is C.R.A.Z.Y." He mocks them, and says they really don't read (working with books too much kills some of the joy, like Dr. Franzblau in this episode). But still, libraries will always be "the gateway to something greater." And the community that they inspire as they serve the community (tortured sentence structure, I know) is really something special.
Which takes me to Quiet, Please: Dispatches from a Public Librarian, from McSweeney's contributer and Anaheim librarian Scott Douglas. Douglas is about my age. Except he started working as a library page in college, and then went straight to library school. So he's been official for something like 5 or 6 years. And working in libraries for more like 10. (Also, most of my classmates are already longtime employees of some library or another. This makes me nervous for my future career prospects. How am I going to get hired when everyone else already has way more experience? Answer: quit my day job and get unpaid internships?) Anyway, I'm going to say that Douglas has certain writing quirks that mark him as part of the Dave Eggers cadre. (I'm not sure what I even mean by that, and am afraid of getting myself into trouble, so I'm just going to link to a wiki post for Eggers, and make a vague reference to a sort of self-referential, insouciant, nerdy hipsterism.) He also reminded me - with his penchant for wanting to share more information than he can possibly fit in through use of footnotes and "for shelving" asides - of David Foster Wallace, which just makes me sad.
Anyway. Douglas is funny. I laughed. He is good at noting the ridiculous. Yet everytime he edges toward being mean, he tries to take a step back, and I believe he is fundamentally a good guy who just happens to love telling a good story. None of the story of his time in school at SJSU or his early days at the library particularly makes me excited about what lies ahead. In fact, I sat at the airport wondering if I could run out of there and just live on my uncle's couch in Honolulu and swim in his building's beautiful new saltwater pool. But that's a life dilemma for another moment.
And Douglas isn't all "working in a library with librarians is C.R.A.Z.Y." He mocks them, and says they really don't read (working with books too much kills some of the joy, like Dr. Franzblau in this episode). But still, libraries will always be "the gateway to something greater." And the community that they inspire as they serve the community (tortured sentence structure, I know) is really something special.
Sunday, August 03, 2008
Oh dear lord
From My Name is Will:
Lovely. Just lovely. Anyone wondering how I came to exist, there's your answer right there.
He probably would get laid at the Faire. He'd been to a Renaissance Faire once before, near L.A., a few month ago - May, was it? - and he'd gotten lucky, way lucky. Jesus, he'd fantasized about it dozens of times since. There was this game, Drench-a-Wench, that involved sling-shotting a wet sponge at an array of wanton maids sitting on a little bleacher of hay bales. If you hit one, you got a kiss. He'd wondered how long that game could possibly last with a new STD being discovered every day. Just for fun, he'd played. [He hits and kisses some blonde, and that was fine and then notices an exotic brunette checking him out, and she says...] "Truly, I am shocked, sir. Paying for thy kisses when thou couldst surely get them free."
Lovely. Just lovely. Anyone wondering how I came to exist, there's your answer right there.
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Persepolis, or why a country that changes its name along isn't always so stable
It took awhile to get there, but I finally got my library copy of The Complete Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi, and read it in 3 sittings on Sunday. (The complete version, by the way is Persepolis 1 & 2 - or 1-4 in the French. So it takes you from her childhood in Iran through schooling in Vienna and back to Iran for college and young adulthood.)
Without wanting to look for proof of this, I am sure that others have written more eloquently that I will about the ability of the graphic novel to address trauma and tragedy. (See also: Maus, by Art Spiegelman) Because in some ways it is really seeing the innocence in Marji's big dark eyes that hits home... but without feeling so overwhelming that the reader just turns away. (I was discussing this recently in terms of the way we deal with war veterans, and how our guilt in some ways makes us unwilling to hear and understand them.)
I'm not sure what all to say about the book. I am glad I got the complete version and got through everything at once. But I think that reading about the younger Satrapi separately from her teenage and older self would have been good. Clearly, the Islamic Revolution and its impact is a central theme throughout - but in many other ways the child and the teen have very different stories. All very eventful though. To say the least.
This is one of those times where I wish I felt more willing to write an insightful review. But I am not there. Maybe because there was an earthquake - and it's still earthquake weather - or maybe just because so much has already been said about Persepolis, the book and when it came out as a film as well. And I have yet to see the film. But I will.
(Oh, and I've written about memoirs of life in Islamic Iran before (and here). Just wanted to mention.)
PS - I loved the artwork. I was particularly fond of the depiction of all the little girls in their veils, and God, and more disturbingly the ghosts of the all the lives lost.
Without wanting to look for proof of this, I am sure that others have written more eloquently that I will about the ability of the graphic novel to address trauma and tragedy. (See also: Maus, by Art Spiegelman) Because in some ways it is really seeing the innocence in Marji's big dark eyes that hits home... but without feeling so overwhelming that the reader just turns away. (I was discussing this recently in terms of the way we deal with war veterans, and how our guilt in some ways makes us unwilling to hear and understand them.)
I'm not sure what all to say about the book. I am glad I got the complete version and got through everything at once. But I think that reading about the younger Satrapi separately from her teenage and older self would have been good. Clearly, the Islamic Revolution and its impact is a central theme throughout - but in many other ways the child and the teen have very different stories. All very eventful though. To say the least.
This is one of those times where I wish I felt more willing to write an insightful review. But I am not there. Maybe because there was an earthquake - and it's still earthquake weather - or maybe just because so much has already been said about Persepolis, the book and when it came out as a film as well. And I have yet to see the film. But I will.
(Oh, and I've written about memoirs of life in Islamic Iran before (and here). Just wanted to mention.)
PS - I loved the artwork. I was particularly fond of the depiction of all the little girls in their veils, and God, and more disturbingly the ghosts of the all the lives lost.
Sunday, June 22, 2008
The Places We Go For Love
A thematic, dual review...
First up is book club selection Candide, which was fun to revisit for the first time since high school. Voltaire is funny and also complicated. I felt like I wasn't deep enough when I was reading it, if that makes sense. But it's an impressively modern-feeling satire, skewering our beliefs in progress, our obsession with money and being right, and of course our hypocrisy about most everything. The translation I chose was a recent one, from 2005, by Burton Raffel. Comparing mine with other club readers' editions today, I'm pretty fond of Raffel's, with one exception. He notes in an introduction that "il faut cultiver notre jardin" has been mistranslated for ages now. Since garden/jardin meant something closer to "fields," he ends the book with "we need to work our fields." Are you kidding me? Sometimes you've just got to go with the famous line. Which isn't to say that it's not useful to know that Candide isn't just talking about pruning roses but actually tending to crops and plants intended for use. But dude, "we need to work our fields"? Yuck.
(PS - To make it clear for readers who have forgotten or never experienced the novella, it fits into my theme because Candide's rather ridiculous travels and travails all stem from his love for Cunegonde and desire to be with her.)
Next up is yet another of my Eastern European ex-pat books, this one a memoir by journalist Jennifer Beth Cohen. The title, Lying Together, provides a delicious double-meaning that frames her Cohen's affair with the one who got away, a fellow college student and Russophile that at the start of the action is working in St. Petersberg and has leads Cohen needs for a story. Within weeks they are engaged and she is on a plane. And that's where the fun begins. I can't believe how much happens in what I believe is apparently just 11 months. Maybe there was an extra year there that I missed. Dunno. Anyway, Cohen does a fantastic job of recreating the seduction of a good scoop, and the heady first days of love, and the heady crazy capitalism of 1990s Russia. But when Jennifer & Kevin start to fall apart, things get hazy and the book loses focus. Which is fine, b/c by then it's almost over and for a book that you can read in just about one sitting (despite the heat! oh the heat in Los Angeles this weekend!) you can forgiven a weak ending when it's got a strong beginning. Plus it mimics their deterioration.
(PS for this one - do you ever mark pages and notes on bookmarks when you are reading and then come back to them and wonder why exactly you felt this passage was worth noting?)
First up is book club selection Candide, which was fun to revisit for the first time since high school. Voltaire is funny and also complicated. I felt like I wasn't deep enough when I was reading it, if that makes sense. But it's an impressively modern-feeling satire, skewering our beliefs in progress, our obsession with money and being right, and of course our hypocrisy about most everything. The translation I chose was a recent one, from 2005, by Burton Raffel. Comparing mine with other club readers' editions today, I'm pretty fond of Raffel's, with one exception. He notes in an introduction that "il faut cultiver notre jardin" has been mistranslated for ages now. Since garden/jardin meant something closer to "fields," he ends the book with "we need to work our fields." Are you kidding me? Sometimes you've just got to go with the famous line. Which isn't to say that it's not useful to know that Candide isn't just talking about pruning roses but actually tending to crops and plants intended for use. But dude, "we need to work our fields"? Yuck.
(PS - To make it clear for readers who have forgotten or never experienced the novella, it fits into my theme because Candide's rather ridiculous travels and travails all stem from his love for Cunegonde and desire to be with her.)
Next up is yet another of my Eastern European ex-pat books, this one a memoir by journalist Jennifer Beth Cohen. The title, Lying Together, provides a delicious double-meaning that frames her Cohen's affair with the one who got away, a fellow college student and Russophile that at the start of the action is working in St. Petersberg and has leads Cohen needs for a story. Within weeks they are engaged and she is on a plane. And that's where the fun begins. I can't believe how much happens in what I believe is apparently just 11 months. Maybe there was an extra year there that I missed. Dunno. Anyway, Cohen does a fantastic job of recreating the seduction of a good scoop, and the heady first days of love, and the heady crazy capitalism of 1990s Russia. But when Jennifer & Kevin start to fall apart, things get hazy and the book loses focus. Which is fine, b/c by then it's almost over and for a book that you can read in just about one sitting (despite the heat! oh the heat in Los Angeles this weekend!) you can forgiven a weak ending when it's got a strong beginning. Plus it mimics their deterioration.
(PS for this one - do you ever mark pages and notes on bookmarks when you are reading and then come back to them and wonder why exactly you felt this passage was worth noting?)
Wednesday, May 07, 2008
Eat Pray Love
Elizabeth Gilbert's tale of her year exploring the above verbs in Italy, India, and Indonesia has been a book club favorite and enjoying a loooooooong run on the best-seller list. I am a self-styled iconoclast. If everyone else loves it, I am emphatically not interested. Until I am.
So I put it on my library hold list, and waited and waited. And then finally read it. Including reading almost the entire Italy section in one sitting after work and before a meeting. I was set to find it shallow, or silly, or obnoxiously wise. And it was those things, but it was also witty and ridiculous and honest and real. So thumbs up to Gilbert, who starts off extremely strong, and then even as it wanes in the second half, has established enough likability for the reader to see her through.
Enough. Some passages that made me smile:
I have to admit, I looked around when I read this, guilty, because there was a moment where I recognized this scenario a little too much. This next one though....
I read that and wondered, how did Gilbert ever make it past Italy? But I guess I'm glad she did.
So I put it on my library hold list, and waited and waited. And then finally read it. Including reading almost the entire Italy section in one sitting after work and before a meeting. I was set to find it shallow, or silly, or obnoxiously wise. And it was those things, but it was also witty and ridiculous and honest and real. So thumbs up to Gilbert, who starts off extremely strong, and then even as it wanes in the second half, has established enough likability for the reader to see her through.
Enough. Some passages that made me smile:
David's sudden emotional back-stepping probably would've been a catastrophe for me eve under the best of circumstances, given that I am the planet's most affectionate life-form (something like a cross between a golden retriever and a barnacle), but this was my very worst of circumstances. [...] His wishdrawal only made me more needy, and my neediness only advanced his withdrawals, until soon he was retreating under fire of my weeping pleas of "Where are you going? What happened to us?
(Dating tip: Men LOVE this.)
I have to admit, I looked around when I read this, guilty, because there was a moment where I recognized this scenario a little too much. This next one though....
So Sofie and I have come to Pizzeria da Michele, and these pies we have just ordered - one for each of us - are making us lose our minds. I love my pizza so much, in fact, that I have come to believe in my delirium that my pizza might actually love me, in return. I am having a relationship with this pizza, almost an affair. Meanwhile, Sofie is practically in tears over hers, she's having a metaphysical crisis about it, she's begging me, "Why do they even bother trying to make pizza in Stockholm? Why do we even bother eating food at all in Stockholm?"
I read that and wondered, how did Gilbert ever make it past Italy? But I guess I'm glad she did.
Thursday, October 18, 2007
When someone else's life hits too close to home
Yesterday I had some free time between work and a meeting, so I happily sat down with my tea latte (and later a scone) and finished John Lanchester's Family Romance. Somehow I had it set in my mind that it was a novel, so I was surprised when I first opened it and discovered it was a memoir of the author's English & Irish expat parents. And their secrets.
Lanchester's mother is the more compelling parent, not only because she had an enormous secret and a fascinating pre-mom life. She was also a more dominant character in his life - and much of the book is about how Lanchester makes peace with her and all of who she was. His father is somehow blurrier, and I found him sorrowful, a man who never stood up and made his own destiny.
It's a fascinating book about relationships and families. The secrets we tell our loved ones, and the secrets we allow to be told. But the final 50 pages I read on Wednesday changed the whole book for me, and turned it into something far more personal. Suddenly I could identify intensely with Lanchester - as he begins to write about his struggles with anxiety, struggles that began while in grad school at Oxford. Now in addition to being an only child and having a mother with a past that she didn't share in full (although I made that connection late) we both knew what it was like to suffer through a panic attack, and to know that another one was right around the corner. To live with that strange and unreasonable dread. His descriptions of the physiological and the mental response were so real to me, I find myself floundering as I search for the right way to phrase the recognition and empathy I felt. But now it was no longer a book about him, it was also a book about me, and that altered my reaction to it in unexpected ways.
So, since I can't recapture what the book was to me before, I will share a few passages from the first half of the book that struck me:
about his father - "The experience of being loved by someone tells you a great deal about that person, almost as much as loving them does, but differently. Love has many textures. W.H. Auden said - it was one of his most beautiful ideas - that when you love people you are seeing them as they really are."
hmm, this one is also about his father - "You may think that most people live inside their own heads, but plenty of them don't. In fact, if you do think that, you're almost certainly one of the minority whose primary life is internal."
Strange how his mother was the more vibrant, real of the pair, and yet it was in writing about his father that Lanchester most touched me.
Lanchester's mother is the more compelling parent, not only because she had an enormous secret and a fascinating pre-mom life. She was also a more dominant character in his life - and much of the book is about how Lanchester makes peace with her and all of who she was. His father is somehow blurrier, and I found him sorrowful, a man who never stood up and made his own destiny.
It's a fascinating book about relationships and families. The secrets we tell our loved ones, and the secrets we allow to be told. But the final 50 pages I read on Wednesday changed the whole book for me, and turned it into something far more personal. Suddenly I could identify intensely with Lanchester - as he begins to write about his struggles with anxiety, struggles that began while in grad school at Oxford. Now in addition to being an only child and having a mother with a past that she didn't share in full (although I made that connection late) we both knew what it was like to suffer through a panic attack, and to know that another one was right around the corner. To live with that strange and unreasonable dread. His descriptions of the physiological and the mental response were so real to me, I find myself floundering as I search for the right way to phrase the recognition and empathy I felt. But now it was no longer a book about him, it was also a book about me, and that altered my reaction to it in unexpected ways.
So, since I can't recapture what the book was to me before, I will share a few passages from the first half of the book that struck me:
about his father - "The experience of being loved by someone tells you a great deal about that person, almost as much as loving them does, but differently. Love has many textures. W.H. Auden said - it was one of his most beautiful ideas - that when you love people you are seeing them as they really are."
hmm, this one is also about his father - "You may think that most people live inside their own heads, but plenty of them don't. In fact, if you do think that, you're almost certainly one of the minority whose primary life is internal."
Strange how his mother was the more vibrant, real of the pair, and yet it was in writing about his father that Lanchester most touched me.
Friday, October 12, 2007
Memories
In my last post, oh so long ago, I wrote about England - where I was making memories, to sound cheesy - and Peter Nadas - whose novel was about memories.
Returning to real life in Los Angeles meant that it was difficult to get through the last 200 pages, much harder than it was on an airplane. And because A Book of Memories is so disjointed, reading catch as catch can just made it even more confusing. But I finally succeeded. (The "I'm not going to sleep until it's finished" proclamation helped.)
What struck me about the three narrators is how well (and yet how poorly) they read other people. How everyday occurrences were charged with meaning. How openly they stated their flaws, and yet so often told something less than the truth. It's the kind of book that seems designed to come from a place like Communist Hungary, with a confused and complicated history, and where people were never quite in charge of their own destiny.
Some passages, beginning with a evocative depiction of falling in love:
and more:
Returning to real life in Los Angeles meant that it was difficult to get through the last 200 pages, much harder than it was on an airplane. And because A Book of Memories is so disjointed, reading catch as catch can just made it even more confusing. But I finally succeeded. (The "I'm not going to sleep until it's finished" proclamation helped.)
What struck me about the three narrators is how well (and yet how poorly) they read other people. How everyday occurrences were charged with meaning. How openly they stated their flaws, and yet so often told something less than the truth. It's the kind of book that seems designed to come from a place like Communist Hungary, with a confused and complicated history, and where people were never quite in charge of their own destiny.
Some passages, beginning with a evocative depiction of falling in love:
We told each other stories, and even that would not be an accurate description of the feverish urging to relate and the eager curiosity to listen to each other's words with which we tried to complement the contact of our bodies, our constant physical presence in each other
and more:
Lovers walk around wearing each other's body, and they wear and radiate into the world their common physicality.
Saturday, September 29, 2007
Greetings from Merrie Olde England!
First and foremost, helloooo from London. I have spent the week wandering about, doing a mix of touristy and non-touristy things. (Where does shopping at H&M fit in?) This morning, however, is about finding a coffee shop and reading my book.
What is my vacation book, you ask? Well, it's a tome: A Book of Memories, by Peter Nadas, a Hungarian writer. Originally published in the mid-1980s, it has that strange Eastern European intellectual coming to terms with a totalitarian regime by avoiding it sort of vibe. (See: Milan Kundera) Also like Kundera, Nadas is a very sensual and sexual writer. Memories is a mix of memoirs, which mix and intertwine until I sometimes am not sure who is talking. His main character, to this point, is a young writer who grew up in Stalinist and post-Stalinist Hungary, and is lately of East Berlin. He is beautiful and seductive, and emotional and sensitive and yet manipulative and almost sadistic. And sexually, it seems he is drawn to most everyone, and most everyone is drawn to him. Yet this doesn't come off as crude, as it might in other hands.
Nadas is a beautiful stylist, yet the prose can be difficult for an English-speaking reader. It is flowery, and looooong, which sentences extending for lines and lines, and paragraphs for pages. Plus, while not quite stream-of-consciousness, the narrators will break off on detailed tangents, and then return to their central narrative without missing a beat. (Whether the reader can do so remains to be seen.)
I marked a few passages from the first third of the novel, but most of them are either so long, or so unclear out of context, that I will limit myself to sharing just one:
Like every moment we want to be significant, this one, too, turns out to be insignificant; we have to remind ourselves afterward that what we have been waiting for so eagerly is actually here, has finally come, and nothing has changed, everything is the same, it's simply here, the waiting is over.
Sunday, September 16, 2007
Baggage
Last Sunday, I read a book in two sittings. I had forgotten how to do that, and it was glorious. The book in question was Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, a fictionalized collection of essays about the Vietnam War and its impact on those who served.
The title essay speaks to the heart of the tragedy that was Vietnam - the things they carried included supplies, weapons, trinkets, superstitions, drugs, fear, cowardice, and bravado.
A few passages:
And an observation as relevant today as ever:
And strangely enough, I may have been most affected by the last chapter, "The Lives of the Dead," where O'Brien discusses childhood love and loss.
I had never heard of this book until this spring, when I saw a theatrical adaptation, which was ambitious but a bit of a disaster. Which is a shame, because O'Brien's creation is powerful and fundamentally honest.
The title essay speaks to the heart of the tragedy that was Vietnam - the things they carried included supplies, weapons, trinkets, superstitions, drugs, fear, cowardice, and bravado.
A few passages:
[T]he war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That's what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.
And an observation as relevant today as ever:
The only certainty that summer [of 1968] was moral confusion. It was my view then, and still is, that you don't make war without knowing why. Knowledge, of course, is always imperfect, but it seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause. You can't fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can't make them undead.
And strangely enough, I may have been most affected by the last chapter, "The Lives of the Dead," where O'Brien discusses childhood love and loss.
But this too is true: stories can save us. I'm forty-three years old, and a writer now, and even still, right here, I keep dreaming Linda Alive. And Ted Lavender too, and Kiowa, and Curt Lemon, and [more]. They're all dead. But in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world.
I had never heard of this book until this spring, when I saw a theatrical adaptation, which was ambitious but a bit of a disaster. Which is a shame, because O'Brien's creation is powerful and fundamentally honest.
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
Growing Up Groovy and Clueless
...such is the subtitle of Susan Jane Gilman's Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress, a book swap find. Gilman is ridiculously quotable, and I came to the end of the book wondering why I hadn't marked some of my favorite quotes to share with you.
She embraces the big personality that so many of us have when we aren't too scared to show it. Or at least, she does enough of the time. And her experiences - so like what we've all been through (except the big breasts, I never had to deal with that) are poignant and ridiculous and very very real.
All of which is preface to the line that comes at the tail end of the book, where she writes of her first days sticking out like a sore thumb in Geneva: "No matter what I did, everything about me was quintessentially American. On the streets of Geneva, I was an enormous, star-spangled, overzealous puppy." And who hasn't felt like that?
Also of note is the blurb by Frank McCourt. Mainly b/c you eventually find that Gilman went to Stuyvesant. And if I remember correctly, McCourt taught there. Was she one of his students? Are any of my teachers off becoming famous? (If so, let me know.)
I'm pretty sure most women can relate to some part of Gilman's book. For me, it was mostly her childhood, growing up the daughter of hippies and also a drama queen. But one who also tried to escape the notice of her Mean Girl fellow students. For others, it may be the rock OBSESSIONS of her teenage years and the gossiping about every "romantic" encounter. College seemed pretty familiar to me. And I'm still young enough that I'm working on my 20s and early 30s. I hope it turns out well for me too... :)
She embraces the big personality that so many of us have when we aren't too scared to show it. Or at least, she does enough of the time. And her experiences - so like what we've all been through (except the big breasts, I never had to deal with that) are poignant and ridiculous and very very real.
All of which is preface to the line that comes at the tail end of the book, where she writes of her first days sticking out like a sore thumb in Geneva: "No matter what I did, everything about me was quintessentially American. On the streets of Geneva, I was an enormous, star-spangled, overzealous puppy." And who hasn't felt like that?
Also of note is the blurb by Frank McCourt. Mainly b/c you eventually find that Gilman went to Stuyvesant. And if I remember correctly, McCourt taught there. Was she one of his students? Are any of my teachers off becoming famous? (If so, let me know.)
I'm pretty sure most women can relate to some part of Gilman's book. For me, it was mostly her childhood, growing up the daughter of hippies and also a drama queen. But one who also tried to escape the notice of her Mean Girl fellow students. For others, it may be the rock OBSESSIONS of her teenage years and the gossiping about every "romantic" encounter. College seemed pretty familiar to me. And I'm still young enough that I'm working on my 20s and early 30s. I hope it turns out well for me too... :)
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