What I’m reading: The Elegance of the Hedgehog. My book club–appropriately named the Ladies’ Book Club (and featuring wonderful ladies) is reading this, which I’ve meant to dive into for a long time. I’m only a bit into it, and enjoying it–not as a superb literary read, but as a souffle. Souffles–which I adore, but have never tried to make–are enjoyable reads that don’t resonant beyond their pages, but hold a place in the world that’s deeper than, say, chick lit or mysteries (both of which I very much like to read, but they’re more of a candy-bar pleasure). We’ll see if I change my mind by the end. Oof course, I love the title for obvious reasons. And that it’s published by Europa editions, which does excellent work and is among my favorite independent publishers.
So today I’m Shelf Awareness’s “Book Brahmin,” where I perhaps foolishly included this blog as something I do. It’s certainly something I *think* about doing, which philosophically should count in some way. But it’s about time it existed actually. If you’re here reading this, welcome, and know that from now on there will (truly, truly) be new rambling discussions about books and the publishing world. And for sure some posts about cookies (last night: chocolate-chip peanut butter cookies, with a dusting of roasted peanut bits).
Picked up these titles at St. Marks (stmarksbookshop.com) this past weekend, during vacation book-buying spree:
Naming Infinity: A True Story of Religious Mysticism and Mathematical Creativity by Loren Graham and Jean-Michel Kantor (Belkap-Harvard). Glancing through the book on the shelf didn’t prove particularly enlightening, nor does the writing seem afire with prose stye, but anybook that is about exiled monks and their mystical practice of Name Worshipping, combined with a mathematical exploration of the nature of infinity is a book for me to at least look at more closely. I like monks and I once thought about writing a short story based on a father’s explaining infinity to his 8-year-old son.
The Invisible Dragon: Essay on Beauty by Dave Hickey. I’ve always meant to read Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just, which really has nothing to do with why I bought this book. Malcolm Jones introduced me to Dave Hickey with his suggestion to read Air Guitar– which I haven’t yet, but it does occupy a prominent spot on my shelf. Maybe I’ll get to them both at the same time. I like an introduction that includes the line “he faced the real possibility of being shot by both sides in the culture war.”
And finally from McNally Jackson Booksellers (mcnallyjackson.com), where I also always find something interesting: Peter Kral’s Working Knowledge. I adore books like this, very short essays with no binding principles or particular forward motion. Instead, all around motion–your sight must dance along at the edges, careening from love to pigeons to suitcases and night and the wind. And this one on “Running for the Train”: “It is always humiliating to run for a train, we are fated to miss it: we will never again take it. When, on the other hand, we do manage to catch it, it is not a simple stroke of luck. With an innocent expression, we step into a compartment and place our suitcases on the luggage rack, attempting to conceal the lingering panic in our breathing from those present; and yet we know that winning the race straight away will bring us greater luck on our journey. Even compared to those worthy souls who took their seats on time.” I quite agree.
If I had pompoms, I’d give myself a cheer: I’m really, truly, cherry-on-top of a chocolate sundae, ready to begin blogging. I still haven’t figured out how to make paragraphs, but that’s a decent reason to either learn or to keep things short. Also: I have a hook. There are about 600 books in my office (I was tallying them up for an exact figure, but I’m too distractable to count that high), and I’m proposing to make my way through them on this blog: whether I read to the end, start and abandon, give them away before opening up the first page, or any and all other possiblities. Of course, there will be many a time-out and step away from the office as I delve into things from home, or things I must read for work, or from the library, or new purchases. Random musings may come up as well. Snappy responses, reading suggestions, general comments: welcome. Creative or constructive critism: welcome, if I have a glass of wine first. General nastiness: not welcome. Chocolate: always welcome, you know me. First title: Dancing at the Edge of the World, by Ursula K. Le Guin–whom I (blushingly, shamefully) haven’t read before. This was lent to me by a colleague, but since it was in my office this morning, it counts. Plus, I make all the rules. xok
Anne Enright’s The Gathering might have vanished into the publishing landscape like so many other thousands of literary novels destined for remainder stands and a few fervent reviews (or possibly not, in this time of the disappearing book review). Instead, thanks to that much maligned prize, the Man Booker, it was given an enormous wallop up the mountain and found its way to many a personal bookshelf, including mine.
Reading The Gathering is very much like making one’s way across a bog; an apt metaphor for an Irish novel mucking its way through the past and the thick, preserved layers of family. I found myself slogging through its brief but dense chapters, stopping from time to time to marvel at the precision and cut of Enright’s sentences: “I think you might call it a crime of the flesh, but the flesh is long fallen away, and I am not sure what hurt may linger in the bones.” The power of the novel builds inexorably, burrowing into and out of an inevitable darkness focused on family–the Hegartys, twelve children born living, three now dead and father also, mother vague and only approximately alive. It is sibling Veronica’s story, first-person and powerful, told beginning with the suicide of her brother, Liam, whose old tragedies haunt Veronica and cause her to write both that which is imagined and, finally, that which is known, the harder truth. Veronica’s voice envelops the reader as she reimagines the past–the way that her grandmother, Ada, met both her husband, Charlie, and the man who was to mark the Hegartys in ways always hidden, Lamb Nugent. Submerged in the possibilities of the past, Veronica pulls away from her husband and her two girls, going for long drives through the night, writing out the “clean, white bones” of her story, unable to sleep next to her husband (the night of Liam’s wake, they have sex and she feels “like a chicken when it is quartered”). There comes a time, though, when those imaginative acts about Ada, Charlie and Lamb’s past must fall away in the face of “real events” which have “real effects.” What the story has to say about forgiveness left me unsatisfied, and wanting more–the grandfather and father fade away, the grandmother stands to the side and is not made by Veronica to shoulder the blame, nor is anyone else in any definitive way besides the mother who could not save her children. This vagueness about forgiveness and blame says something both about the space between generations (easier to forgive the grandmother but not the mother) and about the diffuse nature of evil acts that are kept secret and deemed “of little account.” It also says a great deal about a time when such acts where ignored, and the consequences of that blindness (madness, endless childbearing, suicide). Universal in many ways, this is also a novel very much grounded in a particular place, Ireland, and a time–the 1920s of Ada’s marriage, the 1960s-70s of Veronica’s childhood. Ironically, this novel about the trap of family at the same time upholds the “we” of family, the power of its closeness intimately linked to the cruelties inflicted by sibling on sibling, parents on children. It is “we Hegartys” that Veronica always falls back upon, the similar ways they love and look, the roles they were assigned to play and what has followed them into middle age. As Veronica notes about large families, “There is always a drunk. There is always someone who has been interfered with, as a child. There is always a colossal success, with several houses in various countries to which no one is ever invited. There is a mysterious sister.” Yet along with the darkness and the fulfillment of roles comes the strength of brothers and sisters bonding, with and over each other (at the funeral, several remark on a sister, Ita, how she’s “had a job done on our nose”). Enright’s ear for dialogue is spot-on, and is often acutely humorous and moving, such as in this telephone call between Veronica and her daughter, Emily: “‘Mummy?”Yes, sweetie.”I give you a word,’ she says. ‘And that word is “love.””Yes,’ I say finally. ‘Yes. That’s a good word to give.”Bye bye!’ And to save me the bother, she slaps down the phone.” Combining this humor and descriptive power of the everyday with deeper and pointed sentences about family and its uses, Enright succeeds in creating a novel of remarkable lasting power, similar for me to McEwan’s Atonement, though each author has their own indelible voice: McEwan’s beautifully constructed sentences and narrative that builds to a devastatingly emotional peak; Enright’s blunter, heavier phrases that scrape at your heart. (If I read more of Enright, I suspect I would find that, like McEwan, I admire her work more than I love it–which is to say, I think it is amazingly good, but it wouldn’t make the cut for my desert island.) In the end, as is true for us all in some way, it is family that saves and destroys; and it is the promise of new generations (Liam’s son, Veronica’s daughters) that carries us forward to new kinds of stories. Buried in darkness and the questions of what can be remembered and how, The Gathering proves how essentially redemptive the power of storytelling can be, how it can help define our lives and make them survivable.
