Category: Life, Books, Letters

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.

Some stories are as much a part of Christmas as hanging a wreath on the door. I’ve been considering one that’s meant a great deal to me nearly all my life, and probably has meant as much to others, as well. Of course, it’s Charles Dickens’, A Christmas Carol.

When I was a little girl back in the days of vinyl records, someone gave my brother and me an RCA Victor album of A Christmas Carol. I spent many forty-minute sessions tucked up on the floor by the phonograph, wrapped in the story like a present under the tree. When I hold it in my hands now, I still hear the actors’ voices as they play Scrooge, Marley, and the spirits of Christmas Past, Present, and Future.

On the inside cover is a modest 1843 quote from the story’s author. “I have endeavored in this ghostly little book to raise the ghost of an idea which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. May it haunt their houses pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it.” In my life, Dickens’ wish has come true. As I’ve said, Scrooge and Tiny Tim’s story captivated me and became part of my Christmas growing up memories.

Later, I became a member of the Greater Grand Forks Friday Afternoon Lord Byron Reading Society, a group of friends who met Fridays for two hours of talk, wine, and taking turns reading aloud, all of which allowed us to decompress from busy weeks and start the weekends properly. One holiday season we tackled the unabridged original version of A Christmas Carol. It hadn’t lost any of its charming ability to conjure up the Christmas spirit.

Fast forward to my years of teaching Inupiaq Eskimo children in the remote village of Wales, Alaska. Like schools everywhere, ours turned the last day before vacation into a time for fun. An elder had given her granddaughter a recently made DVD of, you guessed it, A Christmas Carol.

We settled down and watched it, my students and I tumbling into the magic as inevitably as readers/listeners/watchers always have.

It doesn’t matter how A Christmas Carol is presented. No other story has ever captured the sense of good will the season can and should bring.

Happy Holidays. As Tiny Tim pipes up, “God bless us, every one.”

As most people know, the timing of our Judeo/Christian holidays is rooted in pagan celebration of the winter solstice. Whatever our spiritual observances, we also crave sensual comforts to carry us through the year’s darkest days.
Regardless of the time of year, certain authors have encouraged us to, as Kathleen Tessaro, author of The Perfume Collector puts it, “Come to our senses.” Probably the most original and prolific of these writers was Marcel Proust, who has a whole syndrome named after him, “The Proustian Effect.” According to ScentAir MENA, “It’s what happens in your brain when a smell unleashes a flood of memories, taking you back to a particular time and place.” Proust may have been the first to link smell to memory, but Tessaro adds to this in her book. She tells us that scent brings us back to the very emotion we felt on the occasion that led to the memory itself. We don’t just remember the experience. We relive the exact emotion.
The holidays for me include the scent of pine from a freshly cut Christmas tree, and of the hot wax from candles we held in our hands at Christmas Eve Church services. Then the rich aroma of wassail we used to make and serve hot on New Year’s Eve. It’s also the fresh flannel smell of the new Lanz nightgown Mom and Dad brought me every Christmas. These are the fragrant reminders of security and fun. They bring me back to family traditions. And to a time when
we didn’t have to wish for peace on earth.
It was in the air around us. All we had to do was breathe it in.

I came of age in the Vietnam Era, the time of Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll. Drugs were available, and many of my college friends used them, but then and later I tended to be skittish about using my brain and body as a sensation experiment center.

I’ve never seen a movie that portrayed drug users as anything but dimwitted, especially when they’re high. Watching someone else trip out just isn’t that interesting. It’s different, sometimes, with characters in novels. I’ve just read two novels that portray drug use from the inside out. That is, the reader can understand why the use occurs and vicariously feel some of what’s going on with the user.

Donna Tartt’s magnificent novel, The Goldfinch, portrays Theo Decker, a thirteen-year-old cut loose from all familiar moorings by a senseless act of violence that kills his mother. A beautiful woman, she was his only source of love and security. Theo is in love with Pippa, a fellow bombing victim, who is given what Theo calls “morphine lollipops,” the first reference to drugs as pain relievers. Theo’s pain is from loss, however, and left to the desultory care of adults who are indifferent to him, he drifts into drug use with his friend, Boris. Theo uses drugs for adventure and to dull the misery of his existence. It becomes a lifetime habit that he periodically escapes, but only at the price of hellish periods of withdrawal described in detail. He can function as an addict, but not as well as he’d like. Drugs and drug use figure into plot twists and character growth or conversely, a character’s inability to grow.

Theo experiences drug related suicidal thoughts as well. “…a cold, intelligent, self-immolating fury that had—more than once—driven me upstairs in a resolute fog to swallow indiscriminate combos of whatever booze and pills I happened to have on hand…” Theo belongs to a culture that doesn’t ignore drug use, or judge too harshly those who rely on it.

In The Quarry, Iain Baines, then dying himself, wrote about a group of friends gathering in a dilapidated house with a man dying of cancer. The narrator is his autistic son, Kit. The friends arrive for a weekend, mainly to search for a potentially embarrassing video made when they were in college. In the course of the weekend, everybody gets high with pretty insignificant results. For Kit, it’s no big deal. Certainly, he isn’t driven by the need to numb unbearable emotional pain as Theo is. Therefore, it’s casual and not too interesting.

What both novels do show is the general futility of drug use. Theo experiences the consequences of careless acts. Even in a book, where sensation can be almost completely transferred to the reader, there’s something about getting high, that just seems to be an interruption of life; i.e., the plot. Eventually, because they are the protagonists, both characters are capable of growth. If drugs are not altogether banished from their lives, both have more interesting points of focus.

For many years, when our extended family gathered for Thanksgiving dinner, I elicited groans, especially from the younger crowd, by insisting no one eat until I read a section of William Bradford’s account of the Pilgrims’ first winter in what he called, “the desert wilderness.” I did so because I felt, and still do, that we should acknowledge not just the Puritans’ capacity to give thanks, but their character and endurance.

William Bradford, who sailed on the Mayflower and became the second governor of Plymouth Plantation, began a journal in 1620. He did much more than merely document events; he showed the fiber of his companions. Here, in part, is his account of the misery of their first winter in America.

“So as there died sometimes two or three a day in the foresaid time, that of one hundred and odd persons, scarce fifty remained. And of these, in times of most distress, there was but six or seven sound persons who to their great commendations, be it spoken, spared no pains night nor day, but with abundance of toil and hazard to their own health, fetched them wood, made them fires, dressed them meat, made their beds, washed their loathsome clothes, clothed and unclothed them…all this willingly and cheerfully, without any grudging in the least, a rare example and worthy to be remembered. Two of these were Mister William Brewster…and Miles Standish, their captain and military commander… And what I have said of these I may say of many others who died in this general visitation, and others yet living, that whilst they had health, yea, or any strength continuing, they were not wanting to any that had need of them. And I doubt not but their recompense is with the Lord.”

Thank you, William Bradford.

What historical figure or figures are you thankful for?