Reading the World

When I discover an author whose work I like, I tend to go on binges and read everything she or he has written. For a while in my early 20s, I would go on binges of reading everything I could find from a certain country or continent. Remember, this was when much less world literature, especially from Nonwestern countries, was available in English in the U.S.; however, having access to a good university library, I was able to find quite a bit. Looking back on my reading list from those days, I find some of the following authors listed. I had a Middle Eastern mini-binge, reading Mahmoud Teymour, Naguib Mahfouz, Sonallah Ibrahim, Tayeb Salih, and Taufik Al Hakim. My Japanese binge took me through literature by Yasunari Kawabata, Yasushi Inoue, Yukio Mishima, Junichiro Tanizaki, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Hisako Matsubara, and Natsume Soseki. My South and Central American stage had me reading Pablo Neruda, Jorge Luis Borges, Ruben Dario, Rosario Castellanos, Pedro Prado, Jorge Icaya, Jorge Amado, Rachel de Quieroz, and Gabriela Mistral. Quite a few years later, I taught a class on "Contemporary Fiction by Nonwestern Women," and was able to discover many more writings by women from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East; that class' readings, and the research I did for it, will be a topic for another day. In any case, for a few years when I was a graduate student and had access to a large university library, I happily worked my way through various shelves from various parts of the world. My reading in those geographical areas was mainly untutored, unguided and unsystematic, but it was a wonderful experience and opened up many areas - geographical and otherwise - of understanding for me.

"Howl": The Movie

My daughter and I saw "Howl," the movie, last night. I don't usually write about movies here, but as this one was about a poet and a poem, it seems relevant to the blog. I had mixed feelings about the film, but overall enjoyed it very much and am glad that I saw it. The focus of the film is on Allen Ginsberg's famous reading of his long poem "Howl" and the ensuing trial in which Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whose City Lights Bookstore published the poem, is tried for obscenity. The film interweaves four types of scenes: first, from the reading in 1955 at the Six Gallery in San Francisco; second, from the trial; third, of Ginsberg being interviewed and speaking into a tape recorder; and fourth, animated scenes "illustrating" the spirit of the poem. The first three types of scenes were all engrossing and beautifully acted; the fourth type verged on the silly, with 60s/psychedelic/Fantasia-style/ecstatic whooshings and swoopings through a cityscape and the sky, animated attenuated creatures, and explosions of fireworks-type lights. However, I chose to give in to the spirit of those sequences and enjoy them. James Franco starred as Ginsberg and did a terrific job. His portrayal brought out the vulnerable and tender side of Ginsberg as well as the intellectual, poetic, free-spirit rebel side. The film is packed with wonderful actors, including David Straitharn, Jeff Daniels, Bob Balaban, Mary-Louise Parker, Treat Williams, and Jon Hamm. The focus of the film is on Ginsberg's pioneering work in a new, freer, jazz-influenced kind of writing, one that should not be fettered by narrow conservative views about what is appropriate and what is obscene language. In a touching last scene, we hear and then see a far older Ginsberg reading/chanting his poetry. As an aside: I was fortunate enough to see and hear Ginsberg read his poetry in his later years, in the 1980s, and am glad I could experience his unique poetry, wit, and spirit in person.

Great Biographies of Great Writers

Great biographies of great writers have a double whammy value: They are about wonderful writers that we care about; in addition, the best biographies are well written and sometimes become classics themselves. I was thinking about this the other day while talking with my friend B, a great admirer of Henry James. B spoke of what a masterpiece the Leon Edel five-volume biography of James was. I started thinking of other great bios of writers, and came up with the following as outstanding examples. One of the first such bios I was completely engrossed by was Michael Holroyd's "Lytton Strachey: A Biography." Of course that book was enhanced by its stories of the Bloomsbury group. And speaking of the Bloomsbury group, Quentin Bell's biography of his aunt, "Virginia Woolf: A Biography" is another classic. This book, like many of the classic bios, was found by later scholars to be somewhat biased and incomplete, but to me this doesn't subtract from the power of these great portrayals. Another and even older favorite of mine is Elizabeth Gaskell's "The Life of Charlotte Bronte." Gaskell and Bronte were contemporaries and knew each other, and as fellow female novelists, understood much about each other. Readers of that bio might want to read Winnifred Gerin's "Elizabeth Gaskell: A Biography." Claire Tomalin wrote the wonderful "Jane Austen: A Life," and R.W.B. Lewis wrote the terrific and slightly scandalous "Edith Wharton: A Biography." Although I don't believe one needs to know about a writer's life to appreciate her or his works, I -- like many readers -- am curious about the lives of my favorite authors, and have valued and enjoyed the great biographies listed above.

"Perfect Reader"? Not Really.

Readers of this blog will not be surprised that I picked up the novel, "Perfect Reader" (Pantheon, 2010), by Maggie Pouncey, at the library mainly on the basis of the alluring title, along with a quick perusal of the jacket verbiage. Perfect title, right? Perhaps my expectations were unreasonably high, but I was somewhat disappointed. Upon her famous critic and scholar father's death, the main character, Flora, finds she has been appointed his literary executor. Because of her parents' divorce and other problems, she has been somewhat distant from her father in recent years, but -- apparently on a whim and because she is not happy with her job anyway -- she goes "home" to Darwin, the small college town where she grew up, and where her father lived and taught. She camps out in his house -- now hers -- and dithers about what to do about a cache of poetry he wrote in his last year. When the poetry turns out to be about his new lover, one that Flora had not been aware of, her ambivalence about her father, about the poems, and about her role as his daughter and his literary executor increases. She seems to be paralyzed by indecision about whether to publish the poems, not to mention what she should do with the rest of her own life, and although she is perhaps meant to be a sympathetic character, I found her annoyingly passive and preoccupied with her own not very earthshaking dilemmas. The writing is fine, and the novel kept me reading, but I finished it with a "so what" shrug.

On Forgetting What We Read

On 2/24/10, I posted on the problem of forgetting the contents of many of the books we read. Several friends have told me they have this problem, and I often do as well. My newest rationalization of this phenomenon is that those of us who read a lot have too much to keep track of and therefore are more likely to forget what we read than people who only read a couple of books a year. Self-serving reasoning, no? I was pleased to see in last Sunday's (9/19/10) New York Times Book Review an essay by James Collins (author of the charming novel "Beginner's Greek," which I recommend) titled "The Plot Escapes Me." He ruefully reflects on the fact that he forgets much of what he reads, and then wryly asks the question, "Why read books if we can't remember what's in them?" He seeks professional expertise from Maryanne Wolf, a professor of child development and author of "Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain." She reassures Collins -- and by extension, us -- that "I totally believe that you are a different person for having read [his latest book read]," and continues by saying that reading creates pathways in the brain, strengthening different mental processes. She says that "we can't retrieve the specifics" of books we read, "but to adapt a phrase of William James's, there is a wraith of memory." I very much like the phrase "a wraith of memory" and find it resonates with my own experience. Wolf concludes by saying, again reassuringly, that "It's there [in our brains]. You are the sum of it all." Thank you, James Collins, for raising this question, and thank you, Maryanne Wolf, for your answers.

"A Gate at the Stairs"

Seeing that "A Gate at the Stairs," by Lorrie Moore, originally published in 2009,is now in paperback (from Vintage Contemporaries) gives me an opportunity to recommend this wonderful novel. Moore, best known as a short story writer, has written a thoroughly engaging coming-of-age story about a Midwestern college student, Tassie Keltjin, who is hired as a nanny for a mixed-race child even before the child is adopted. Tassie is naive, finding her way in life, being exposed to many new ideas and people at her liberal arts college; her experiences both at college and with the family she nannies for, as well as her expanding awareness of the larger world during the events of 9/11, contribute to her rapid maturing during this period. Tassie is often lonely, as is her employer Sarah, and there are some sad parts of the novel, as well as times of pleasure and enlightenment. Tassie is a very believable and likeable character, and the novel is both serious and often humorous, and very readable. Moore is -- as I am far from the first to note -- a terrific writer, and this novel is a gift to readers.

The Alices

As I was typing my post on 9/23/10, I started to type Alice McDermott's name but accidentally typed "Alice Hoffman" instead. I immediately realized my mistake and corrected it, but it reminded me of how many contemporary authors there are with the first name Alice. There's one of my very favorite writers, Canadian writer Alice Munro (whom I posted about on 7/22/10); Munro is considered by many to be the greatest short story writer alive, and a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature. There is the above-mentioned novelist Alice McDermott, who writes about Irish-American Catholic families in Long Island and Brooklyn. There's Alice Hoffman, also mentioned above, whose novels often include a touch of magic. There is the womanist/feminist, activist, African-American writer Alice Walker (whom I wrote about here on 5/26/10). There's Alice Sebold, author of the haunting novel "The Lovely Bones." And although she died a few years ago, I want to pay tribute to novelist and short story writer Alice Adams, who lived in and wrote about San Francisco; I felt I "knew" the neighborhoods and the women she wrote about. Consider this post an ode of gratitude to these fine writers, these Alices, whose fiction has given me such pleasure.