Review of A Woman in the Polar Night

I'm on Goodreads (Are you?) but I never blog my reviews. I don't know why not. But I love this book. Definitely one of the best and most surprising books I read last year. So I thought I'd splash it in this space, too. I wrote the review mid-read, but I still felt wonderful about it when I finished. In fact, I really really loved the ending. Quiet, deep close to a quiet, deep book. It never went out of print in Germany. I'm on a personal quest to revive stateside interest in it. Read it! Read it!

***

Why had I not heard of this book? I saw it in Tin House, in a feature on forgotten great books, and was skeptical, but got it from the library.

From sentence one, I've been hooked. It's nonfiction, written in the 1950s by an Austrian woman who followed her husband to the Arctic to stay with him in a hunting hut for a year. Her descriptions of travel and the scenery are stunning without being melodramatic. And she's causing me to have the deepest thoughts I've probably ever had on what it means to do housework, to be a housewife, a role she steps into with humor (cleaning bearded seal entrails from your doorstep, anyone?) and a stunning and almost unbelievable acceptance. Don't get me wrong: it's not a book that's ABOUT housewifery (yes, that's a word, says me), but that's what it's causing me to think of: the roles we step into, the roles we want or think we want to step into, and what it means when you strip away absolutely everything else and focus those roles and the attendant relationships down to a 10 X 10 hut in the middle of nowhere.

The writing is gorgeous. (Even my husband, who is the pickiest man alive when it comes to books, read the first few pages (I wouldn't let him have it for longer than that ...) and said it was clearly very good writing and made for good reading.) It feels like it's been awhile since I've had a book I longed for all through the day while I attended to less charming tasks, but this is a book like that. I want to stop people on the street and tell them to read it--it's that good, so far.

Shared Interests

I'm reading Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals. 

It would appear that Tadzio the cat is also reading Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals. 

(We both think it's dang good, thus far.)

On Reading Sad Books

I'm over on my friend's blog, Squeeze the Universe, talking about sad books and offering up a review of After Leaving Mr Mackensie.  Check it out?  Weigh in?  What's your sad book threshold?

Sort of, Yes, Obsessed with This Image

Alice in Wonderland, George Dunlop Leslie

Love Alice's chubby and serious little face, the couch, her resting doll, her mama's yellow dress, her black tights and shiny shoes, the way her pinafore is falling off one shoulder, and that she's being read to.  Alice is so vulnerable in Wonderland that I like to think of her here, although I guess the title implies that this is sort of a Wonderland, too.  Maybe the Wonderland, come from a book.

(Should say, saw it first here, at a blog I am certainly obsessed with as well.)

Something from D H Lawrence in My Brain

I can't even claim I know what this means, entirely. I don't even know that Lawrence did. And I sure don't know how to do it. But I like it. It feels true. And I'm thinking and thinking on it.

"The essential function of art is moral. Not aesthetic, not decorative, not pastime and recreation. But moral. The essential function of art is moral.

But a passionate, implicit morality, not didactic. A morality which changes the blood first. The mind will follow later, in the wake."

Read This.

Read this book yesterday. Bought it yesterday afternoon, went to read a bit before I went to bed, couldn't put it down. Finished it at 2 in the morning. The writing is beautiful, clear, astonishingly unsentimental and honest. It's a memoir about the last three weeks of her mother's fight with cancer. Amara, you won't like it. Kira, you will.

I've been looking so hard for something to read that didn't make me work too hard, but didn't turn my brain to mush either. This was it. I'm sad it's over. It's been a long time since I read a book that I mourned for after it was done.

Speaking of mourning, I don't recommend reading this when you're already sad. That part--the part where I wept and wailed at 3am for my mother and everyone I love, even though they're fine--that was not so good. Poor Sam.

I'm Won.

I once read an essay by Mark Halliday in The Georgia Review called "The Arrogance of Poetry." It's my favorite. The whole thing is good, and you must read it, but to sum up, he writes, of all poems, of any poem, of a poem:

"[The poem] says,‘Do you or do you not get it?’ It says, ‘Do you love me? You should. If you don’t, you’ve missed something. The problem is yours—some blindness, some crudeness, some insensitivity to nuance.’ Fortunately, persons don’t often have the gall to say, ‘If you don’t love me, the problem is yours.’ Poems say this every time."

He goes on to say, "Poems keep stroking their own hair."

It's true.

I hate poetry.

Am I a poet? Yeah, sure. But sometimes I hate it. In fact, lately, I hate all literature, all writing. I don't want to read it; I don't want to do it. I want to watch "American Idol" and eat marshmallows. It's been bad. I'm in a lit funk.

But today, teaching (bless teaching), my student gave a presentation on a poem by Carolyn Forche, and I was won over. This poem reminded me why I must try, why I must read. Forche wrote it when she was a civil rights worker in the 80s in El Salvador. It's brilliant. It's below.

(Dear Senstive Reader: this poem says the eff word and is ... slight gruesome. Just a heads up.)

(Dear Curious Reader: If you want to understand it better, here's a website with some stuff about the poem, including an interview with Forche.)



The Colonel


What you have heard is true. I was in his house.
His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar. His
daughter filed her nails, his son went out for the
night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol
on the cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on
its black cord over the house. On the television
was a cop show. It was in English. Broken bottles
were embedded in the walls around the house to
scoop the kneecaps from a man's legs or cut his
hands to lace. On the windows there were gratings
like those in liquor stores. We had dinner, rack of
lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for
calling the maid. The maid brought green mangoes,
salt, a type of bread. I was asked how I enjoyed
the country. There was a brief commercial in
Spanish. His wife took everything away. There was
some talk of how difficult it had become to govern.
The parrot said hello on the terrace. The colonel
told it to shut up, and pushed himself from the
table. My friend said to me with his eyes: say
nothing. The colonel returned with a sack used to
bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on
the table. They were like dried peach halves. There
is no other way to say this. He took one of them in
his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a
water glass. It came alive there. I am tired of
fooling around he said. As for the rights of anyone,
tell your people they can go fuck themselves. He
swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held
the last of his wine in the air. Something for your
poetry, no? he said. Some of the ears on the floor
caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on
the floor were pressed to the ground.

Awkward Anna

I've been trying to read Anna Karenina. Trying and trying and trying. I couldn't figure out why it was so hard to get into. It's good, right? It's worth reading, yes?

So maybe there were too many confusing/changing/Russian names. Maybe it was because I was on page 70 and there was still no sign of Anna. Maybe I'm lazy. Maybe I don't know how to read good.

Today, it hit me: the book itself, the physical object, is awkward. I have this edition:



It's not that it's too long and therefore fat. I've read and adored plenty of longer(fatter) books. It's that when I'm lying in my bed, trying to snuggle up with it, it's simply not snuggling back. There's just something about its shape. It feels like trying to cozy up to a brick, a floppy and awkward brick. Today was the first time that Kindle thing seemed like a good idea. It could cuddle a kindle. This, no.

Looks like the Kindle is still a grotesque 359 bucks. Maybe when they sell it at the dollar store, I'll get one.

For now, tell me. Is Anna really really worth sticking with? Will she change my life, if I only let her?

On How a Mormon Reads Lolita

I read Lolita over Christmas break, and found it to be one of the most heartbreaking, beautiful books I've ever read.

It makes me nervous to admit this, admit I read it. It's one of those books you hear whispers about before you ever read it, especially when you're a good little Mormon girl, as I am/was/will forever be. (As a sidenote, check out this article on a kid's bed misguidedly named, "Lolita Bed." So not cool.)

You see, Mormon folk are careful what they read/watch/see. When I was growing up, I wasn't allowed to watch PG-13 movies, and I remember trying to read a book by Joyce Carol Oates and feeling like God told me not to read it anymore. Which, I sort of think He did, because it was ugly and negative and boring. So I grew up thinking that there was such a think as "moral" literature, books we "should" read and books we should not. And I still suspect that's true, I just don't know what they are anymore. The line seems blurry.

Take Lolita: the main character is Humbert Humbert, a middle-aged man who is basically a pedophile, who seduces (or is seduced by, some critics say) a 12-year-old girl. Do I find the thought of this character disturbing/disgusting? Yes, yes I do. Take him out the walls of literature, and I hate him, I say lock him up; tell me he lives on my street and I'll move to another neighborhood to protect my kids. I think about my niece who is nearly twelve and I just shiver.

But the book tells this man's story, and makes you feels stuff about him, stuff for him. At the end I wept for him, this man. I find I'm sort of offended when I (or someone else) boils the plot down and calls him a pedophile. And so maybe the book, therefore, is "bad." Do we really need books that redeem pedophiles?

That's one way to see it. The other way takes me to something C.S. Lewis said:

"[I]n reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do."

There's more to it than that, but I can't find it. He says something about wishing the dung beetle could write books, because he'd want to read those too. And Humbert is a dung beetle; he basically says so himself.

Nabokov, in a essay at the back of my edition, talks about the seed for the book. He says he felt the first stirrings of it when he read in the paper about an ape they taught to draw, and how they painstakingly, over months and months, tried to teach it, and when they finally succeeded, what it drew were the bars of its cage. What's the implication here, the connection to Lolita? Humbert is writing the book from prison, so I assume the book is, in a way, the bars of his cage. And it feels like the bars of the cage. As I said, it's heartbreaking.

So maybe it's like something Yeats says, in a book of essays I can't remember the title of. He argues that literature is the purest Christlike act, because in a sense we do as Christ did, forgive, redeem. We take something dispicable and are made to understand it, to see the man as a man, not just a sinner who should be locked up. Which is how Christ sees us, right, with love no matter what we've done? I was talking about this with Sam, trying to figure it out, and I asked him if there was ever a limit what we should forgive, if there are people we simply should not read/write books about, and he said, "I don't know. Not according to Jesus." Point taken.

And there is a barrier between art and life, and of course this doesn't apply in the courtroom because laws against pedophila and murder are important and meant to keep us safe and maintain order. And Nabokov never says the bars of Humbert's cage shouldn't be there, he just shows you what they are.

And still, I'm nervous. Isn't there a limit, a line, a point we shouldn't cross? Or maybe all the lines are personal, none superior to the other?

Two sides, and I find myself straddling them. Do I want my nieces/nephews/future children reading Lolita? Maybe in a long long while. If I met my twelve or even twenty-year-old self, would I recommend the book to her? No, no I wouldn't. I wouldn't have been ready for it yet.

But now, I love it. At the end, when Humbert is driving down the wrong side of the road, and they put up a roadblock and pull his despairing, limp, apathetic body from his car, I wasn't sorry I read. Oh, I wasn't.

My Booky Bedside

I find I don't read or write much during the week. At least not anything interesting. So I have no pertinent readerly/writerly reports. But I did finish that story last week. I'm still waiting for Sam to read it and tell me if it works. I managed to include a weird scene that happened in the church restroom last Sunday, so that's exciting.

Anyway, I was thinking yesterday about how when people ask me what I read or what I like to read or what my favorite books are, I freeze. I don't like that question. But I was thinking I should just tell them which books are on my bedside table, spilling off onto the floor. That oughtta work. And then I thought I should post that list here:

The Modern Jewish Girl's Guide to Guilt. Editor, Ruth Andrew Ellenson.
Our Time. Collection of short stories by Hemingway.
Making Shapely Fiction. by Jerome Stern.
Quad of Scriptures. (I'm starting at the beginning of the Bible. It says, of Noah's dove, she "found no rest for the sole of her foot." I'm in love with that phrase.)
This Time. New and selected poems by Gerald Stern.
The Best Day, the Worst Day. Donald Hall. (If you want to read a very sad, beautiful, articulate account of someone's wife dying, I recommend the first chapter here.)
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Short stories by Raymond Carver.
The Know-it-All. by A. J. Jacobs, who also wrote The Year of Living Biblically, which I loved.
Anton Chekov's Short Stories.
Teachings of the Presidents of the Church: Joseph Smith.
The Best American Essays 2008. (Loved this one--beautiful essay on necklaces, on a man dying of aids, a gay woman planning her wedding, etc.)
33X3 Short Fiction by 33 Writers.
Lolita. Nabokov. (Am I not supposed to love this book? I've just started it, and the writing is superb. Don't read if you're easily disturbed.)
The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat. by neuroscientist, Oliver Sacks. (Tells stories of very strange brain disorders--fascinating stuff.)
Best American Science Writing 2007.

Does that seem like enough? Now if I could just find time to read them all. I've read snatches of all of these. But I want hours and hours with books and spoons full of peanut butter (my favorite book-reading treat.). Maybe after I read all these student papers, which aren't nearly as interesting as any of these.

Two Bits from Marilynne Robinson

I read an interview with Marilynne Robinson, author of Housekeeping and Gilead (which I've read) and the new novel Home (which I haven't read--anyone have thoughts on it?). It was in The Paris Review, fall 2008, and I recommend it for admirable insights on science/religion, solitude, writing life, etc. She also cleverly articulated a few things I've been thinking about:

Thing 1. When asked, "What led you to start writing essays?" she answered, "To change my own mind."

Although I didn't realize it, I think this is why I wrote an essay on polygamy, which is still looking for a home, but which I'm rather fond of. Completely changed my mind about the institution of plural marriage. Not so as I'm looking for a sister-wife, but so I have a clear empathy (pity?) for my ancestors who passed through it. Seems a good place to begin: start from a thing you want to have your mind changed about, plow ahead. Writing changes my mind anyway, might as well go in with that goal in mind.

Thing 2. This one, I hope, stands on its own: speaking of Freud who says it's best to have 'no sensation at all,' to remove ourselves from emotion, Robinson argues, "you are depriving yourself if you do not experience what humankind has experienced, including doubt and sorrow. We experience pain and difficulty as failure instead of saying, I will pass throught his, everyone I have ever admired has passed through this, music has come out of this, literature has come out of it. We should think of our humanity as a privilege" (58).

Makes me wonder: Why do we pull in, stay in bed, if this is a univeral experience, the thing that makes us part of humanity? Why, instead, does pain/depression/sorrow feel so isolating? Like we're the only ones on earth with heartache.

Reminds me of something Henry B Eyring said, which I always misquote, so I won't even try. He says if we treat everyone like their hearts are breaking, we'll be right most of the time. Sam loves that. When people say bad stuff about Mormons, he tells them that one of us said that. And if one of us said that, then we can't be as bad as they say.

But we're so forgetful. So disgracefully forgetful of the universality of our own pain, as well as that of others. We're human.