Lost in a Painting

The Museum Guard - Howard Norman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998)

This is one of those novels that creates a deep sense of unease from the start. Maybe it's because you find out right away that something is not right with DeFoe's romantic relationship, or because of the telling of his parents' horrific death when he was a child. Not only their death, but the way that adults tried - ineptly, as all efforts must surely be - to protect him from some of the worst of the blow. Or maybe it's just 1938, and a growing awareness of the tragedies already taking place in Hitler's Germany.

At any rate, nothing feels right in DeFoe's Halifax: neither in the residential hotels where most everyone seems to live, nor in the art museum where he guards an unpretentious collection.

Much of the first half of the novel was taken up by my wondering why his girlfriend was so cruel to him. I think I used the term "jerking him around" quite a bit. I was not impressed. But as she falls further and further under the spell of one particular painting, everything gets so convoluted, that you just want the train wreck to actually occur, the crash to happen. It's like watching a disaster in slow motion.

Despite my saying slow motion, the pacing is both fast and slow. Just when I began to feel I understand Norman's rhythms, it would switch up again. Considering how consistently I've reached for cheerier books over several months, this was a departure for me. And a difficult one. I need some sunshine.

One exchange, though, between DeFoe and Miss Delbo, the museum's tour guide, stopped me in my tracks. Somehow, it seemed the truest and most familiar moment in the whole book.

Miss Delbo: Imogen is lost to you, DeFoe. I may as well state it now as later. You aren't -- forgive my bluntness -- you aren't a man who recognizes his own nature.

DeFoe: I recognize a lot of it. I just don't know what to do with what I recognize.

A Memory Palace

Great House - Nicole Krauss (W.W. Norton & Co., 2010)

Nicole Krauss blows my mind. (I have mentioned this before.) A few years back, I gushed about The History of Love, and her latest novel employs a similar plot devise, being a sort of biography of a thing. In this case it's a desk, this monstrosity of a desk that is confiscated during Nazi occupation, and touches the lives of a surprising number of people. Strangely, I kept seeing the desk as almost like an organ - all the different drawers like pipes and .... I don't know.

Her stories are lyrical and haunting, and it's no surprise that many of the narrators are either authors or loved ones of writers. They speak in a high-flown language that doesn't really bear any relationship to how most of us talk, but carries the weight of intense sadness, loneliness, emptiness, and a struggle to know those we love.

I noted less than I would have liked, and this makes me sad. I'd probably direct you to the entire (long) chapter "Lies Told by Children." The first narrator, the author who owned the desk most recently, comments on how the things she loves she is reluctant to share with others, unlike those who want to share the music and literature that makes them who they are. She also has a lovely line about her youth: "I had been young and full, bursting with feeling, overflowing with desire; I lived closer to the surface of myself."

This is, perhaps, a book better meant to be reflected upon in conversation - or silence - than in a blog. It consists of interwoven parts, and leads to interwoven thoughts. I want to talk about it, and digress, and bring up other points, and wander down tangents. (That last might have been redundant.) So go read, and then come talk to me about it, okay?

Like reading a dream

The Vine of Desire - Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
New York: Anchor Books, 2002

When I was in college, I went through a phase where it almost felt like I could get enough literature by South Asian female writers. Really this was pretty much just Divakaruni and Arundhati Roy, but in my head it was much more. Anyway, I heard both authors give readings on campus, which was lovely. And what I really liked about Divakaurni was that she was based in the East Bay, so everything had an extra tinge of familiarity. And there was a lyrical quality to both writers, where things seemed lush and rich beyond themselves. (This is also a trait I have ascribed to Canadian writers, thanks to Michael Ondaatje and Joy Kogawa.)

I digress. Vine of Desire is a follow-up to Sister of My Heart, which I read in college and do not remember AT ALL. Fortunately, the novel stands alone just fine. The main characters are friends, sisters essentially. At the opening, one has lost the baby she was carrying and is adrift. The other has lost her husband, so that she could keep her baby, and is likely drifting. Anju, the former, insists on bring Sudha and the baby out to California. This despite knowing that her husband has nurtured a desire for Sudha. So now you have three injured souls (and an adorable baby) in a single apartment. And no one is capable of communicating in any truthful fashion. And obviously things go badly.

The plot isn't much of a surprise. But the writing is simply lovely. Chapters come in different forms, different styles, and we see the perspectives of not only Anju and Sudha, but also Anju's husband Sunil, Sudha's suitor (if that's the right word) Lalit, and even the baby Dayita. Divakaruni is extremely compassionate toward her characters, and you ache for each of them, over the pain they feel and the pain they cause.

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.