Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall by Kazuo Ishiguru

I am a well-documented fan of Kazuo Ishiguru. If you searched my sent emails, you would find pages and pages of extravagant, over-excited recommendations sent out to friends, looking something like this:

“You have to read Never Let Me Go! It is ambiguous without being withholding, and so heartfelt and haunting.”

“OMG–The Remains of the Day–the most subtle book ever. You have to recalibrate to enjoy it, but the narrator is one of the world’s great unreliable narrators…”

“A Pale View of Hills has the craziest narrative quirks in the world–how he gets away with it, I don’t know!”

Perhaps, readers, you have received one of said emails?

So, it won’t surprise anyone that I was thrilled to receive Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall for Christmas. It’s been on my wish list since it was released and, on top of being a new Ishiguru book, it’s a collection of semi-linked short stories–my preferred sub-sub-genre.

What will surprise you, and certainly surprised me, is that I was unimpressed, unmoved, totally unenthused about this book. Ugh, nightmare. I almost didn’t post about it because I want to pretend that it’s not true.

There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

I received There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill her Neighbor’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya for Christmas from Jamie, who said she was drawn to it right away and thought I would be, too. Correct! I’d read about it when it first came out and was completely intrigued.

The story collection is translated from Russian into English by Keith Gessen (n+1) and Anna Summers. Their introduction situates it within a global context–they recount a story in which, in 1973, Petrushevskaya, a young, long-suffering widow, hitchhiked on a pilgrimage to Thomas Mann’s home on the Baltic coast with the intention of also meeting with an editor who may not have known that her writing was banned in Russia (the meeting paid off). They describe how her bleak, dark fiction about the lives of Russian women was transgressive enough to be a threat to the government even though it was never explicitly political. When the USSR fell apart, Petrushevskaya’s work became available and she, in turn, became, as the introduction says, “Russia’s best-known living writer” (ix).  This translation makes her work available to readers of English.

So, I was excited to read the book, in part because of its brave, feminist author’s extraordinary career trajectory, but also because the idea of literary “scary fairy tales” was pretty fun.

A Cook’s Tour by Anthony Bourdain

My relationship with Anthony Bourdain is a conflicted one. I can’t say I love him and hate him in equal measures; love wins out. But he does irritate the shit out of me. But he’s kind of hot. But he’s so arrogant! But he shows me so many kinds of interesting food on the television. But he makes it all about him! But sometimes he’s really poetic. And he’s from New Jersey. And he went to Vassar! But he dropped out. You see what I mean.

I received his book A Cook’s Tour for my birthday.

The Boys of My Youth by Jo Ann Beard

The Boys of My Youth by Jo Ann Beard is the second book I’ve finished in 2010. What was the first? Who knows. It doesn’t matter. Anyone who has read this book knows that it tends to crowd out all else. It is the kind of book that one wants to injest, or tear up and wear close to the skin.

Ms. Beard’s collection, comprised of thirteen autobiographical stories (including the preface), contains tales of her childhood, her adulthood, the nebulous years in between, the time she and her cousin were in rowboat together, unborn in their mothers’ stomachs. She tries the boundaries of nonfiction, inhabiting her dying mother’s memory, recounting moments from her infancy, conversations for which she couldn’t have been present. But, showing us how her parents reacted (would have reacted?) to her as a screaming baby or a toddler bereft at the loss of a favorite doll, gives us their personalities, their relationships, the dynamics of the family in a way the reader can fully imagine. Rather than just presenting the outlines of what can be fact-checked, she renders her remembered reality. In stretching the genre, she writes truer stories.

A Friend of the Family by Lauren Grodstein

Lest you think I am unbiased (although I have no idea why you would think that…), I should say right away that Lauren Grodstein, author of the new novel A Friend of the Family, is one of my favorites. Favorite whats? Hmmm: Writers, Teachers, Motivators, Etc. She taught the Cooper Union writing workshop I took the year after I finished college when I was deciding that I actually wanted to go for it and be a writer, and then she taught the more informal (but infinitely more helpful) workshop that met around her dining room table. And then she moved on to head up the MFA program at Rutgers-Camden and passed me on to another great Brooklyn writer/teacher Julia Fierro of the Sackett Street Writer’s Workshop (a subject for another time). Before heading south to Jersey, though, Lauren dispensed this bit of terrifying wisdom, which I often repeat and rarely follow: “Sleep is nice, but getting published is better.”

Brutal, right? How do you argue with that? I think Lauren follows her own advice because A Friend of the Family is her third book–her first two are the short story collection The Best of Animals and the novel Reproduction is the Flaw of Love–and although I like to think that people who’ve accomplished this much are, like, at least twenty to a hundred years older than me, Lauren is certainly not. She’s young, driven, a new mommy and a fantastic writer.

But, is this post about Lauren or about the book?

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

As I’ve mentioned, there is an exhibition at the Morgan Library and Museum right now about Jane Austen, and it’s pretty terrific. (http://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/exhibitionList.asp?exhibition=Austen.) On view are many of her letters, the first twenty pages of her only surviving manuscript, Lady Susan, and assorted other documents relating to her life and work. Most of the letters are to Austen’s sister, Cassandra, but one particularly charming one is addressed to her young niece and its contents are written entirely backwards to make the correspondence into a game for the eight year old. Shown alongside the documents are the satirical drawings of James Gillray, a contemporary of Austen’s, who skewered many of the same social stereotypes as she did in her work, and as the exhibition shows, in her letters to Cassandra.

Austen made the most of her paper, filling ever bit of usable space and then some with news, gossip and conjectures–she cross-hatched her words across each other, wrote upside down between her lines, and at times was so catty that her words have been erased from posterity–excised by Cassandra. One can only imagine what she must have said in those missing fragments, because some of the gossip preserved by Cassandra is quite fantastically nasty. Austen made fun of people’s husbands’ pink necks, her suitors’ commands of the English language, the current fashion in ludicrous hats–she would probably have been the perfect person to gossip with in the corner of stuffy drawing room.

Because humor and cattiness are a theme in the show, I thought I would pull the same theme from Pride and Prejudice, which I finished this morning. As I said about Sense and Sensibility, I hardly presume to have something new to say about this book. So, I thought I would select a passage from early in the book that really shows how special it is.

From page 94: Mr. Bennet, the exasperated father of five girls, speaking to the second oldest, and his favorite, Elizabeth, about the man her eldest sister, Jane, had hoped to marry having skipped town. And, in case the sarcasm isn’t obvious when the excerpt is taken out of context, this is all sarcastic:

“So, Lizzy,” said he one day, “your sister is crossed in love I find. I congratulate her. Next to being married, a girl likes to be crossed in love a little now and then. It is something to think of, and gives her a sort of distinction among her companions. When is your turn to come? You will hardly bear to be long outdone by Jane. Now is your time. Here are officers enough at Meryton to disappoint all the young ladies in the country. Let Wickham be your man. He is a pleasant fellow, and would jilt you creditably.”

And Lizzy says: “Thank you, Sir, but a less agreeable man would satisfy me. We must not all expect Jane’s good fortune.”

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

November is Novel Writing Month. I have several friends participating, hell-bent on writing 150 pages before December strikes. They’re on strict word-count schedules and doing really admirable jobs sticking to them!

I, on the other hand, have been working on my collection of linked short stories since late 2007 and have barely cleared the 150 page mark. Hmmm. I could do the math, but I definitely do not want to know my words-per-day average.

Olive Kitteridge, a collection of linked short stories by Elizabeth Strout, was assigned to me by Sara, who saw structural similarities with my project and thought the collection could give me some technical help while I plugged away at mine. And–it worked! This is why Sara’s a super star writing professor.

Olive Kitteridge, the title character of the book, appears in each of the collection’s short stories, sometimes as the protagonist, sometimes as the antagonist, sometimes as a peripheral yet symbolically important character. She is a large, lumbering old woman with “the strong passions and prejudices of a peasant,” (264).  She is also the type of woman to characterize herself so. For the people of Crosby, Maine, as for the reader, Olive is a hard person to like. Opinionated, curmudgeonly, at times obnoxious, townspeople wonder how her saint of a husband, Henry, could stand her and think it’s no wonder her beloved son, Christopher, deserted her. Her seventh grade charges are terrified of her years after their tenure in her math class has ended.

A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore

One evening back in September, I waited in line with the wonderful writers Nicole M. and Ella B. for a brief audience with Lorrie Moore. We clutched our books (I’d narrowed my exhaustive library of her work down to only two: the new one, A Gate at the Stairs, and one of my copies of Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?.) and crept toward the front of the line at a pace that could be described only as painful. We, we were fine, chatting away, but there was Ms. Moore, on stage, signing book after book after book, her hand clearly aching, her energy, though not her graciousness, clearly waning. After approximately an hour, we got to the front of the line. Thanks to the business-like bookstore staff, our names were written on post-its, so Ms. Moore did not have to even look up or speak to us if she did not so choose. I didn’t want to delay the process–there were still more people waiting behind me–so I came up with one line to spit out once my turn came. Thrusting my copy of Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? forward, I said, “I used to have pages of this book photocopied and pasted to my bedroom wall.”

Ms. Moore froze. She looked up from my book, on which she had scrawled her name, and studied my face. She said, after a moment, “Really?”

Really.

But this post isn’t about Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?. It is about the book Ms. Moore was promoting that night: A Gate at the Stairs–a book on which she took the time to scrawl, after my modest confession, this:

Ok, that’s a terrible scan but I sort of like it. She wrote, “For Nicole– Here in NY. All best to you. Lorrie Moore Sept. 09″ Good enough for me!!!

A Gate at the Stairs is a novel oft-described as long-awaited. I can’t say I’ve been waiting this whole time, these last eleven years between her last publication and this one–I’ve just been re-reading her other books, uncovering new layers, new puns, new joys–I’ve had plenty of new Lorrie Moore to read. Which is not to say I didn’t pre-order A Gate at the Stairs and use it as self-bribery, my dangling carrot, to finish Anna Karenina. I stared at the cover a lot, imagining what lay inside. When I finally allowed myself to read it, I really went for it, barely pausing, finishing it in a weekend. My reading experience culminated last night–I stayed up late reading it, and then even later when finished, too upset to sleep.

It is a long baptism into the seas of humankind…

My friends, family, coworkers, readers and probably everyone I’ve encountered on the subway in the past six weeks will be happy to know that I finally finished Anna Karenina. I started it because of impassioned recommendations from Katherine (years ago) and from Lindsay (at the beach this summer), because I was haunted by my failed attempt to read it when I last assigned it to myself during grad school, and because I couldn’t stop imagining a future job interview in which I’d have to admit to not having read it.

The first two hundred pages were rough going, despite the introduction of the evocative phrase ‘Things will shape themselves,’ which I quickly became obsessed with repeating in my head (Tolstoy 5). I was a little bored, though, and quite confused by the fact that each character had at least sixty-seven different names. That aspect of Russian literature is one that my father used to make fun of throughout my childhood, instilling in me an early bias against Russian writing. When he heard I was nearly done with the book a couple of weeks ago, he offered that I should be awarded a medal if I managed to finish. (Dad? Do I get to collect on that?)

My reading experience with Anna Karenina, though, was that the book improved exponentially with each hundred pages. I read the last six hundred or so in the time it took me to make it through the first two hundred, even with the slow-down of dog-earring passages, pausing to cry, re-reading scenes for maximum effect, etc.

Thematically and character-wise, there is so much to say and that I want to say about this book, but I am going to really restrict myself and concentrate only on a passage I encountered on pages 603-604 and how it relates to the rest of the novel.

Classics Interlude

I have been, and will continue for a little while to be, on a short hiatus from reading blog-appropriate work. Due to an upcoming exhibit on Jane Austen, in which I will be teaching, at the wonderful Morgan Library and Museum, I’ve recently read the phenomenal Sense and Sensibility. (My previous Jane Austen reads skewed towards the more obscure: Northanger Abbey and Mansfield Park). Do I really have anything new to say about that work? Not so much. I’ll spare you. And now, I am trying Anna Karenina. Again. I know–it’s good. What’s my problem? I don’t know. Whatever it is, I hope I get over it and finish the book before the new Lorrie Moore arrives in the mail, because I won’t have the will power to do anything else once I get it in my hands.  Wish me luck.