Struggling with the concept of "never forget"

Sarah's Key - Tatiana de Rosnay (St. Martin's Griffin, 2007)

Let me start with the frivolous. I somehow found myself, in conversation with a friend, comparing this book to The Da Vinci Code. And then feeling terrible. What I meant is that both novels employ the use of short chapters to create a propulsive effect. You're driven to continue reading.

And secondly, I was drawn to the use of font (typeface? I never know when to use which term). The narrative cuts back and forth between a little girl in 1942 - and her efforts to save her brother when all the Jews in Paris were rounded up before being sent to death camps - and a middle-aged American expat reporter in 2002, whose investigation into the events of July 1942 unearths secrets that remained hidden for six decades. Um... where was I before I got caught up in that rambling sentence? Oh, right, the font. Each of these narrative lines employs a different font, which somehow both emphasizes the difference between them and adds internal coherence within each plotline. If that makes sense. (Also, can you do this on an e-reader? I'm guessing yes, but would like confirmation.)

This novel deals with some pretty horrific stuff. (Obviously.) But there's a lot of room for beauty without it being some sort of paean to the triumph of the human spirit. People act out of love, fear, hate, decency, confusion, and pride. Not everyone gets a happy ending. (Again, obviously.) But there's catharsis, and above it all rises American Julia's insistence that the truth should - must - out.

I feel sorta babbly. Like all the above were comments I would make in a book club discussion, rather than forming some sort of coherent reaction to the novel. This book, by the way, has Book Club written all over it. Which reminds me that I want to join a book club. All of which brings me back to the "babbly" point, and leads to the question of whether this is the sort of book that one must talk around, rather than through.

Trying to mix great literature and sunshine

Swann's Way - Marcel Proust (trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff) (Dover Publications, 1913, 1922, 2002)


So, I finally started on In Search of Lost Time. Or, since it's the Moncrieff translation, maybe I should call it Remembrance of Things Past. This has been hovering around as a thing I should do for years now. But it was a slog. I started on or around Memorial Day, and finished sometime last week.

Why I had problems with the book: for starters, I kept getting sleepy. This was a fun vacation-y month, and the amount of mental power involved in parsing these long loooooooooong sentences was more than I could handle. (By the way, there should be a limit on the number of clauses allowed in a single sentence.) Also, I couldn't really get into the narrator. I kept pushing through, because eventually we were going to go back in time and find out about how Swann fell in love and ended up in this ill-advised (per the narrator's family) marriage. Except that wasn't really any better. Until it was. What does the reader find so reassuring about the idea that love was similar enough a century(ish) ago? Is it just that Proust does such a good job of showing how a lover can persist in reformulating a relationship in his head, again and again, to rationalize and justify staying in a position that grows ever more untenable? At any rate, it was sort of fascinating. And then we jump back to our narrator, as he falls for Swann's young daughter...

And it all made me think maybe I'd keep reading after all. Except I know that I'd just fall back into the part where I was grumping my way through the work. So what do I do? Stop after volume one?

July 15

One Day - David Nicholls (Vintage Books, 2009)

One day a year.... on one day a year, starting in 1988, we check in on Dexter & Emma. That first time, they have just hooked up, right as they're graduating from college. It looks an awful lot like a one-night stand. But it's the beginning of a really powerful connection.

I'm a girl, and I've loved unrequitedly, so maybe I'm especially sensitive to how much work Emma puts into the relationship in its first years. (They actually reminded me a lot of Carley & Hunter in this book, which worried me.)

But I love the way it works. I love the development, how seeing them just once a year makes it so clear how much (and how little) they change - and how we never really end up where we think we are going.

I also starting thinking about the choice of dates. Mid-July... I can start in college, and realize that give-or-take a little, you would see a lot of me if you checked in on me then: getting on a plane for a solo trip to Italy, starting a long-term relationship that would shape me considerably, sitting on a beach wondering what on earth I was going to do now that I had a degree, feeling miserable in a job that didn't challenge me, signing the lease on my DC apartment (1999-2003). So my own life was in strange ways very close to the surface as I read, because it all felt so tangible.

You can't really talk about the plot without spoiling the whole thing. You just can't. Which is frustrating, because I really have a lot to say. I need to find someone else who has read it - hello anyone? this is a popular book based on circulation at my library, so I know you're out there - so I can vent and work through the difficult emotions. And the ways that I was prepared for a whole variety of plot twists, but unprepared perhaps precisely when I needed to be. I had troubled dreams last night because of you, David Nicholls. I just thought you should know.

Blank Slate

Man Walks Into a Room - Nicole Krauss
New York: Anchor Books, 2002

After the excitement of Stanford and Venice Blvd, I was able to get down to concentrating on the rest of Krauss' novel. It's haunting and minimalist and bizarre. It's not as deeply moving as The History of Love, but beautiful and interesting in its own right. The main character, Samson, a lit professor in his mid-30s, is found walking through the desert with no idea who he is. After a brain tumor is removed, his memory returns, but only through age 12. The last two dozen years: empty. But he embraces the emptiness, and his experiences as he puzzles through what it means and what it's worth to make connections with others make for a challenging and thought-provoking read. A couple moments that I highlighted:

• wanting to say to his estranged wife, with whom he cannot remember falling in love:

  "Tell me, was I the sort of person who took your elbow when cars passed on the street, touched your cheek while you talked, combed your wet hair, stopped by the side of the road in the country to point out certain constellations, standing behind you so that you had the advantage of leaning and looking up? and so on [...] But he didn't ask because he didn't know if he wanted the answers."

• on loneliness: "How can a mind know how alone it is until it brushes up against some other mind? [...] and now the magnitude of his own loss was impossible for Samson to ignore. It was breathtaking."
• and do I agree with this or not? How can you know for certain? "The mind cannot abide any presence but its own."
• Oh, and the epilogue. Which I wasn't expecting, but which completely fit.