Will I Ever Read Faulkner Again?

I was overwhelmed (in a good way!) by William Faulkner’s novels when I was in college and grad school. I read most of them – some for classes and some on my own: “The Sound and the Fury,” “As I Lay Dying,” “Sartoris,” “Sanctuary,” “Go Down Moses,” “Absalom, Absalom!” and more. I found them mesmerizing, maddening, inspiring, mysterious, enlightening. They made me feel I understood the American South in a new and intense way. Some years after college, I re-read a couple of the novels. But over the many years since then, whenever I have considered re-reading, or actually tried to re-read, one of his novels, I have been unable to do so. (I have posted here before about having the same problem with other books I valued and even loved when I was young.) It is not that I don’t still think the novels are monumental, classic, and groundbreaking. Of course I do. So the failing must be mine. I did enjoy reading, in the Spring 2013 issue of Threepenny Review, a symposium of seven writers’ thought-provoking and engaging short essays on their experiences with and responses to “Absalom, Absalom!” One quotation I was struck with was from an interview with Faulkner: “Interviewer: ‘Some people say they can’t understand your writing, even after they read it two or three times. What approach would you suggest for them?’ Faulkner: ‘Read it four times.’” So maybe I will try again.

I Love Commas!

I love commas! (See my earlier posts about punctuation on 10/16/10 and 3/11/12.) A review of Cynthia Zarin’s new book, “An Enlarged Heart” (reviewed 3/10/13 by Dawn Raffel – a writer I admire – in the San Francisco Chronicle) says about this former New Yorker writer that “The magazine’s influence is evident in the old-school beauty and precision of Zarin’s sentence making. She appears never to have encountered a comma she didn’t like, which has the effect of inviting the reader to pause, to breathe, to have another look around, even in a sentence as simple as, ‘The girls had had a wonderful time, swimming.’” Well, yes, exactly. I like the part about the “old-school beauty and precision” -- let’s not throw out this old-school style – and I like the part about commas. One of my coauthors and I, when working on our academic publications, used to have a half-joking, half-serious running conversation about commas; when we were reading and editing each other’s drafts, I would put commas in, and she would take them out. We always managed to find a compromise, but I was reminded of those days when I read this statement about Zarin’s book.

"Songs for the Missing," by Stewart O'Nan

I have so much enjoyed and admired Stewart O’Nan’s novels, once I discovered them these past two years (see my posts of 5/7/11 and 1/26/12), that I was pleased to come across one of his earlier books, “Songs for the Missing” (Penguin, 2008/2009), at my local library sale. I have to say I hesitated when I saw it was about the disappearance of a teenaged girl; I normally do not want to read about such a topic, even in fiction. (Strangely, I can read murder mysteries with enjoyment, but not literary fiction about similar topics; perhaps the mysteries are so stylized, so formulaic, that they seem more like puzzles than stories of real lives and deaths.) But because of the sensitivity and insights displayed in his other novels, I trusted O’Nan, and read this one. The focus is on the parents and sister of the missing girl, and although I don’t know if the portrayals are realistic, they certainly feel that way. Such a mixture of grief, desperation, pain, numbness and the need to do something, to keep going, to be strong. O’Nan, it seems to me, shows a deep understanding of human beings and their reactions to tragedy, as well as their reluctant resilience. Although the journey through the novel was painful, it was also compelling, and I stayed up late reading it when I should have been working on projects with deadlines.

Author Drawn to Words as a Child

Although I don’t know the relevant science (and the nature vs. nurture debate continues robustly), it does seem that some future writers (and readers!) very early on reveal an irresistible attraction to the written word. In “On Saramago” (Threepenny Review, Spring 2013), Margaret Jull Costa quotes the Nobel Prize winning Portuguese writer Jose Saramago on his childhood love of reading. Although he came from an extremely poor family, his father did bring home a newspaper, Diario de Noticias, every day. Saramago writes (in his memoir “Small Memories”) that “I was reading even before I could spell properly, even though I couldn’t necessarily understand what I was reading. Being able to identify a word I knew was like finding a signpost on the road telling me I was on the right path, heading in the right direction. And so it was, in this rather unusual way, Diario by Diario, month by month, pretending not to hear the jokey comments made by the adults in the house, who were amused by the way I would stare at the newspaper as if at a wall, that my moment to astonish them finally came, when, one day, nervous but triumphant, I read out loud, in one go, without hesitation, several consecutive lines of print.” I can imagine the little boy, earnestly and passionately focused on extracting meaning out of the little black symbols, intuitively knowing they were the key to something important and magical that would be his life’s blood, his destiny.

My Night at the San Francisco Ballet

Although this topic is not directly related to books and reading, and although I fully realize the feelings I express in this post are far from original, I can’t resist writing about the magnificent San Francisco Ballet (SFB) performance I attended a few nights ago, and the feelings it evoked in me about the larger world of art. My wonderful daughter took me to this performance as a gift, and we both felt it was one of the best ballet performances we had ever attended (and we both have gone often over the years to see various dance companies perform). Program Four at the SFB consisted of three pieces (both my daughter and I prefer these shorter pieces to the full-length “story” ballets, although of course those are often wonderful as well.) The first was “Scotch Symphony,” choreographed by George Balanchine; the third was “From Foreign Lands,” by Alexei Ratmansky (a world premier); both were excellent, beautiful, and beautifully danced. But the most riveting, the most sublime piece was the middle one: “Within the Golden Hour,” by Christopher Wheeldon. It was gorgeous, inventive, cohesive, fantastic; the movement was amazingly creative and intensely compelling; every minute of watching every interwoven permutation of dancers and dance was pure joy. So here are my unoriginal but heartfelt feelings and thoughts evoked by the performance: I left the Opera House feeling almost “high,” thinking about the transcendence that art -- whether it is literature, dance, music, theater, painting, or something else -- provides in our lives. It allows us to see and feel the best that the human mind and heart can offer; it allows us to transcend the everyday, the quotidian. Even when the art addresses and embodies the difficult parts of life, it takes us to another place, another perspective, and we feel how sharing the experience allows a note of hope, no matter what. And when it focuses on the pure joy of movement, music, and more, there is nothing better. I think of all the art I have been fortunate enough to experience over the years -- in books, in museums, in performance spaces, and elsewhere -- and I am deeply grateful to the writers, choreographers, dancers, composers, musicians, visual artists, actors, and all those who contribute to the art that opens up and gives us access to larger spaces, thoughts and feelings in us all.

Magical Thinking about Self-Help Books

I have a habit of occasionally buying advice or self-help books, usually about personal finance, health, or getting organized. The problem is that once I buy them, I tend not to actually read them. Why don’t I read them? Well, my intentions are good, but the books are generally not very scintillating reading. And the areas I think I need to work on are the exact areas I don’t necessarily really want to think about, as they are associated with anxiety and with forcing myself to do things I don’t feel like doing. So I procrastinate actually reading the books, and they often just sit on my bookshelves for weeks, months, or years. Strangely, though, I somehow manage to feel that just by having bought them, and having them sitting on my shelves, I have made concrete steps toward moving forward in the areas I mentioned. Magical thinking!

"Interventions," by Richard Russo

I am a big fan of Richard Russo’s fiction. His novels, such as “Empire Falls,” “Bridge of Sighs,” and “That Old Cape Magic,” are to me examples of the best that fiction has to offer: they are deeply engaged with humanity, families, the big questions of life; they are engaging; they are funny (especially "Straight Man," a hilarious academic novel); they make readers feel connected to the larger world; they are well written. I have always felt (perhaps irrationally) that Russo himself must be a good person, and his memoir “Elsewhere” (which I posted about here on 11/10/12) seemed to confirm that impression. I have just read a slightly odd assortment of Russo’s fiction and memoir, published in four little booklets gathered in one boxed set titled “Interventions: A Novella & Three Stories” (Down East Maine, 2012). I say “odd” because one of the four is a novella, two are short stories, and the fourth is a mini-memoir. One of the stories has been published before; the others have not. Each booklet’s cover is by the author’s daughter, the artist Kate Russo. The covers are beautiful and the whole boxed set is, as the back cover states, “handsome.” The stories themselves are, unsurprisingly to me, compelling and definitely worth reading.