Karen Wills

When most of us think of bucket lists—that enumerated set of things to do before dying—we assume international trips, jumping out of airplanes, at the very least hot air balloon rides. There’s nothing wrong with such true adventures, but I have a parallel bucket list that emerged from my reading life.

It all started with Proust. A close friend and mentor bequeathed me his boxed three-volume set ofRemembrance of Things Past (or In Search of Lost Time to more modern translators). After I retired, I finally began to read it which proved a meaningful and insightful experience, not least because my dear friend had made notations in the margins. I read it in the early mornings, house still silent, sky slowly lightening. Tea and Proust became a ritual. And I value memory in a way I never could have without it.

When I finally finished, I wanted something else so beautiful and challenging that only a few pages at a time would do. I looked at my three-volume set of Dante’s Divine Comedy and took it up, one canto at a time, and only in the predawn hour. With the cat purring, the tea steaming, I traveled with Dante from the Inferno, through the Purgatorio, and on into the Paradiso. I appreciate how the world can be so vast and small all at once more than I ever could have without that journey.

Next, my husband gave me a four-volume set of the Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers for Christmas. Now my hour of solitude is spent near a stone house and tower at Big Sur. No day can go wrong that starts there. Jeffers wrote intimately of nature, of a wild landscape expressed by the people inhabiting it complete with their follies and mistakes, and of the peace of death. There are gifts on every page.

Perhaps, my reading list is written in invisible ink, each author or poet becomes visible only when the last has been read. I know that each is a treasure to be cherished, their works belonging to the ages.

I hope you set aside some part of your day for reading that uplifts and intrigues be it prose or poetry, fiction or nonfiction. Make it something you always thought you might like to read if you got around to it. What might be on your literary bucket list?

I was deep in the throes of coming of age when Francoise Sagan’s novel, A Certain Smile, hit the bestseller lists of 1956. According to a review in the San Francisco Examiner, “The reader is given the feeling of having opened a young girl’s diary by mistake. But whoever put such a diary down?” I couldn’t. With that younger woman/older man story, I began to see that, to the French, love is a game, a serious, high stakes, but survivable game. I minored in French in college, toured France at eighteen, and have been a sucker for French love stories ever since.

If you discount the existentialists, most French books are about the moves and feints in the game of love. Proust’s, In Search of Lost Time, is a study in unrequited love, suspicious love, duplicity in love. His love for Gilberte, later for Albertine, and the obsessions of the homosexual Charlus, are human, painful, silly, and never dull. His book reveals much of the era just before, during, and after WWI. Proust, a creature of his time, disguised his own homosexuality by making his two love interests women, but the romance remained gamesmanship to the max, displaying all the reversals, plotting, and focus of a chess match.

Modern French bestsellers include The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Muriel Barbary’s                         imagined love story is more gentle, mature, and less harried than Proust’s tumultuous upheavals. The dowdy concierge blossoms given the attention of a handsome, Japanese tenant. They begin the relationship by finishing each other’s quote from Tolstoy, “All happy families are alike. Every  unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The romantic hero and heroine “see” each other and begin a slow, beautiful courtship. He wins the game by drawing her out.

Alex Caput is Swiss, but his novel, Leon and Louise, is supposedly the story of the love of his grandfather’s life. He approaches the game of love playfully. Our hero and heroine spar verbally, are frank with each other, and struggle to do the right thing after a terrible explosion and another man’s jealousy interfere with their lives. Like all the intellectual French, the narrator can’t resist philosophizing, but does it poetically. Here is an excerpt in which Leon finds women difficult to understand.

…he knew… a woman’s psyche is connected in some mysterious way with

          peregrinations of the stars, the alternation of the tides and the cycles of the

          female body; possibly, too, with subterranean volcanic flows, the flight paths

         of migratory birds and the French state railway timetable—even, perhaps,

         with the output of the Baku oil oilfields, the heart-rate of the Amazonian

         hummingbirds and the songs of sperm whales beneath the Antarctic pack

        ice.

Now, that, brings a certain smile.

I entered young adulthood during the era of Ravi Shankar, Nehru shirts, and America’s discovery of Indian food and meditation gurus. India seemed exotic, but to most of us, a little overwhelming and unreachable. Now, we’re in the age of outsourcing and Bollywood. India is accessible in many ways. Not the least of these is via fiction.

My first real literary exposure came with E.M. Forster’s Passage to India. There we found the evils of British colonialism and sexual repression as they existed in 1924. The English schoolteacher, Adele Quested, becomes hysterical in the Caves of Malibar’s darkness and echoes. She accuses an innocent Indian doctor, who has accompanied her and an older woman there, of assaulting her. There is great ambiguity at the trial, finally resulting in Dr. Aziz being found innocent when Adele changes her testimony. What the book shows is racial tension and a look far ahead to the potential of a free India.

Years after reading Forster, I discovered India’s internal injustices as portrayed by Arandati Roy in her novel, The God of Small Things. Her writing leaves no doubt as to the evil of the country’s rigid caste system. The inherent cruelty of it continued my sense of being off put.

Fast forward to Salman Rushdie’s great work, Midnight’s Children. My book club read and discussed it. We thought it confusing, frustrating, charming, scary, and delightful. Rushdie portrayed an independent country almost, but not quite breaking apart in the throes of growing pains. Rushdie captured the zeitgeist of India for us better than any on-the-scene tour guide ever could have. I became more drawn to India. A character was telling me about it in the first person point of view, from his own wild experiences. He led me to a closer to understanding India.

The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri, and even more, her novel, The Lowland, tell not only of Indian political and cultural issues, but also the immigrant experience for young students coming to America from there. Lahiri covers more than just the serious problems of modern India. Her focus is on problems of individuals shaped by, but leaving India, moving through personal and cultural crises including the status of women, particularly widows, in contrast to how these are in the United States. The loneliness of even successful immigrants shows us the human value of family’s left behind. The newcomers carry India in their hearts, even as they adapt to modern America.

India seems a vast, varied, population of individuals to me now, not just images of brown, sari-wearing women and turbaned men. People there cope with daily worries involving aged parents, difficult marriages, children who don’t communicate, even what to cook for supper. They make jokes while their hearts break and mend, just as we all do.
Thanks to these books, I’m no longer wary of India and would love to go there. In the meantime, I’ll take my passage to India as an armchair traveler. Bring on the novels.

Once I hit college and began seriously studying Homer, Shakespeare, and other literary greats, I learned the mini-delights of discovering origins of beloved clichés. Embedded amidst joys found in the company of immortal characters peopling the epics, plays, and stories, were the expressions of their time. Some phrases we still use actually are very old.

For instance, I’d always thought “bit the dust” was an American western saying. It evoked images of Montana gunslingers and lawmen wearing silver stars. Not so. The ancient Greeks used the phrase to describe what happened to those slain in epics such as The Ilaid and The Odyssey, epics of the Trojan Wars.

Shakespeare, especially with Hamlet, gave us phrases that have become idiomatic to English speakers. Among them (Thank you, Wikipedia) are “the primrose path,” “the mind’s eye,” method in his madness (a paraphrase of the original), “What a piece of work is man!”, “…protest too much,” “The…dog will have his day,”

Then, there are characters themselves who have become so well known as to stand for human types in our culture. Goethe wrote a play featuring a man called Faust. Now, Faustian people are commonly known as those consumed by ambition or desire to the extent that they’ll sell their souls to the devil to achieve their ends. With Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe gave us the title character as a certain type of black man, and Simon Legree, a name now synonymous with slave drivers. Pollyanna remains the one who can always find something “to be thankful for,” even if a more normal reaction might be giving in to doom and gloom. As for that approach, Dickens gave us Scrooge and the words to use when the holidays become overwhelming to the point where the only proper reaction is the well worn, “Bah Humbug!”

In all beginnings lies a force for guarding us and teaching us to live. —Hermann Hesse

I read Hesse’s words when as a newly divorced single mother I entered law school at the age of twenty-nine. However Hesse would define that force within beginnings, the optimism in the quote meant so much to me that I wrote it in green magic marker on the round-shouldered refrigerator.

January is a good month to consider Hesse’s words as they apply to modern fiction. I’ve spent the last six weeks recuperating from shoulder surgery, so have been reading even more than usual. Many compelling plots involve the business of trying out, starting over, beginning, or beginning again. In novels, beginnings often involve journeys: mental, spiritual and/or physical.

For example, Elizabeth Gilbert’s, The Signature of All Things, is the story of American Alma Whittaker, born in 1800 to a life of studying botany in affluent surroundings. Eventually, love-starved Alma seeks adventure and understanding of the world via a dangerous, solitary journey to Tahiti. From there, she travels to Amsterdam to join other brilliant pioneers in evolutionary theory. Her passion for both knowledge and human connection is the force that guards her and teaches her how to live.

In Adam Johnson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Orphan Master’s Son, the title character Jun Do journeys through various strata of North Korean Society, often learning brutal lessons in how to live. He begins over and over until he grasps what freedom really is.

I begin a new journey with every novel I read, not to mention those I write.  I wish us all good, well-guarded journeys.