I Have a Problem: Volume VII

"What Lips My Lips Have Kissed and Where and Why" is one of the first poems that I read over and over again. St. Vincent Millay led a fierce and complex life and she really shook things up for her time. But for a woman who could look into a camera and seduce you across the ages, her vulnerabilities and strength come across in equal measure in her poetry. She reminds you that people are often infinitely more complex than the bare expression of their actions. 

My boyfriend's brother recommended this and I hear there's a cat in it. That's only partly a joke. This book has something of a cult following and everyone that I've spoken to who has read it absolutely loves it.

I read The Innocents Abroad when I was in India and fell in love with Mark Twain in a way that I never had when reading Huck Finn in high school. Twain pulls no punches and, as someone who has grown up in the age of the politically correct, it is refreshing to read someone who is not apologizing every other sentence.

This book is my latest addition to my collection of good ol' fashioned ghost stories. I have a fascination with Nantucket, because whales.

I love books about places and also things that go. This means that I am attracted to board books designed for children who cannot yet read and books like this.

167, 168, 169, 170, 171

The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins (20 of 166)

One Sentence Summary: The Moonstone, a mysterious gem of India, supposed cursed, brings mayhem, theft, and death to the lives of those who possess it.

Excerpt: 

“We had our breakfasts--whatever happens in a house, robbery or murder, it doesn't matter, you must have your breakfast.”

This is the first Wilkie Collins book that I have read and as I was able to get through it and have never been able to get through a Dickens tome (with the exception of A Christmas Carol, which is decidedly un-tome-like) , it looks as if Collins has already pulled ahead in my affections for authors of their time. Collins seems underappreciated to me and I have to wonder if it is because he was operating in the shadow of his friend and contemporary, Dickens. Granted, my impressions of him have been swayed by a reading of Dan Simmons' fictional Drood. What is true from that thoroughly unimpressive book is Collins' opium dependence, which comes across in an alarmingly close and telling manner in The Moonstone. At one point, a character with a dark history and an issue with the nefarious drug, gives an extensive account of the effects. They are so intimate and accurate, you can't help but feel a little uncomfortable, considering the author's history.

The Moonstone is a classic detective story- a whodunnit of the old tradition. Agatha Christie probably cut her reading teeth on it. Daphne DuMaurier must have curled up in a bay window, rain pelting against the outside, and devoured this tale of robbery, blackmail, and mayhem. The mark of a great mystery, in my mind, is when it pushes the reader to feverishly try and solve it before the characters get around to the task. I had a running list of ten possibilities, each shifting up or down the list and morphing as the pages turned. There were at least two shock-worthy moments where the story took completely unexpected turns. I can't imagine how this must have driven readers mad when this was first published in serialized form. So many miniature cliff-hangers! How did they bear the wait between editions? 

Collins's use of unreliable first-person narrators throughout kept you guessing what was truth, what impression, and what was outright untruth. While I have great praise for nearly all of them, I am especially obsessed with Miss Clack. She was absolutely hilarious. Why is she forgotten when we list the great comic moments of canonized literature? I was sad when her part of the narrative ended, but its briefness gave a great roundness to an otherwise very straightforward plot.

On the negative side, but keeping in mind the time when it was written, there is the classic Oriental fetish of the Victorians at play here. I mean, a cursed Indian stone- undercover Brahmin traveling jugglers- mystical Hindu ceremonies? Yeah, okay. I get it. The colonies are the heart of darkness. The Temple of Doom is now. But still, that was the stuff of romps in the day. It is telling and intriguing to look at the culture through the prism of its popular media. 

I am going to be passing this along to my mother and grandmother, fans of Jane Eyre and crime stories, respectively. Bordering on gothic and thoroughly intriguing and delightful with its touch of the tragic and mystical, it's a great read. If you can't get through Dickens, maybe you should hang out with one of his best friends. If the popularity isn't there, the technique and imagination certainly meet, if not surpass those of the famous champion of the poor.

Shelf Status: Passing along
If you liked The Moonstone, you may like: Rebecca, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Turning of the Screw

The Secret of Scent by Luca Turin (19 of 166)

One Sentence Summary: A persuasive argument for biochemist Luca Turin's theories regarding the mysterious scent molecule.

Excerpt:

"The voice of Nombre Noir was that of a child older than its years, at once fresh, husky, modulated and faintly capricious. There was a knowing naivety about it which made me think of Colette's writing style in her Claudine books. It brought to mind a purple ink to write love letters with, and that wonderful French word farouche, which can mean either shy or fierce or a bit of both. I immediately bought a very expensive half-ounce in a little square black bottle." 

I am thoroughly intimidated by anything more than cursory approaches to the sciences. For the most part a decent student in high school, I hung on by the skin of teeth in science classes year after depressing year. It is not that I do not appreciate science; don't get me wrong. I actually love it. I experience the same strange pull to it that I do to all fields with any mystery left to them. It is just that curriculum everywhere manage to squeeze all of the goodness out of a thing and replace it with the knee-knocking fear of senseless equation running. Equations are beautiful things, but not when they have stripped down to their use on standardized testing. You catch my drift. I think that it must be nearly impossible to separate a love of this world from a love of science. High school achieved it. Remarkable.

Something that I do have a decent understanding of is perfume. It may a seem a superfluous sort of interest, a bourgeoisie fascination, but I would argue that belief to come from a root of ignorance. Scent is integral to our relationships, to each other, to ourselves, and to our environment. It is the sense most strongly linked with memory and association. And yet, when it comes to finding the sensory calling card that you will leave most subtly and inexorably on those you meet, we deem the pursuit vanity. Why am I into perfume? Because it is complicated and romantic and different for every person out there, because it is full of beautiful language both technical (fougere, aldehydic, chypre) and descriptive (blousy, biting, sensual, woody), and because the legacy of scent is so strong.

Taking into consideration the above two paragraphs, one begins to understand how I managed to finish a book that, by its very nature, gave me test-taking anxiety. Luca Turin writes on his topic with so much passion and excitement that you cannot help but feel that scent molecules are the most important thing to happen to science since the microscope. Even as I labored through pages of complicated (for me) formulas, it always became worth it for me upon reaching another milestone where the shop talk turned back to perfume. Turin managed to make his book about more than his theory (which is fascinating, by the way)- he managed to make it a scientist's love letter to an arcane and under-appreciated art form. Better than that, he wrote with all of the sass of a self-assured Frenchman. Like a complete bad ass, he shrugs off his nay-sayers by casually reminding that he has used his theory of scent to generate synthetic molecules for Flexitrol for several years now. Excuse me, but:

I only wish I had a better grasp on the technical aspect of this little treatise on scent.

I would like to take a Chemistry 101 class and then return to this text to see what else I can take away from it. But Luca Turin sounds like someone I want to take up over the perfume counter in some back-alley Parisian boutique and talk Coty, Chanel, and everything in between, up, down, and diagonal. 

Shelf Status: Keeping for now. Perfume books are few and far between.

The Color Purple by Alice Walker (18 of 166)

One Sentence Summary: Celie, an impoverished black woman living an agonizing cycle of abuse and oppression, comes to find her inner light enabled and bolstered through the course of her life by the people and events that come through it.

Excerpt: 

“I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it. People think pleasing God is all God cares about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.” 

I actually can't believe it took me this long to read this book. It's another major school reading list champion and I guess I always avoided those- I was going to be forced to read them eventually, so why go out of my way? That was probably the thinking. Foolish, of course. Most of the books on those reading lists are on there for a reason.

From a writing perspective, Alice Walker is unreal. Her ability to write dialect and ignorance and perspective is so inspiring, it makes me want to write my butt off. I love how, with this particular craft, simply reading is perhaps the best way to learn from the masters. I feel as if my life is overflowing with the power of the two incredible women I have only just now been exposed to- Toni Morrison and Ms. Walker. They are separate entities, with strong individual identities, but their joy for life is so completely unbridled and seeping through the cracks of their work, that I will think of them together always. I cannot relate to many things in their books, particularly the American black experience, not directly, anyway, but I am learning learning learning. Even struggling to comprehend that element, I feel as if I am leaning on their formidable shoulders. 

When it comes The Color Purple specifically, I am just in awe of Celie. The characters are so believable and vivid- but all come to being beneath Celie's forgiving and increasingly wise gaze. Growing with her is a privilege. You find yourself wanting to weep tears of joy as she comes into her own and grasps life and takes a hold of her future and discovers the unquenchable thirst of her spirit. At first I thought that I was meant to love Shug for bringing the wrecking ball into Celie's constructs of self-defense mechanisms, but then I realized it was Celie gently teaching everyone, even as she learned. There is so much pain in this book; the first few chapters are even a little exhausting in the scope of their abuse and hardship, but it sets the stage for a story about hope that must be among the greatest ever written.

 Life is hard, chickens, but the light is just a few steps further, always.  You can take that away, no matter what your race or history, because everyone has felt pain, been betrayed, and stood alone in the darkness sometime. Their tales remind me of how our lives do not run parallel to those of others- how instead, we wind and weave through the narratives of friends, families, and enemies alike. In that way, the tapestry becomes strong- wind and weave, wind and weave.

Shelf Status: Moving Along and someday buying a copy with the binding attached
If You Liked The Color Purple you may like: Beloved , The Invisible Man, All Over but the Shoutin', The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson (17 of 166)

One Sentence Summary: The suspicious death of a local fisherman becomes a murder trial informed by the prejudices and agendas of residents of a post-war island community off the coast of Puget Sound. 

Excerpt: 

“To deny that there was this dark side of life would be like pretending that the cold of winter was somehow only a temporary illusion, a way station on the way to the higher "reality" of long, warm, pleasant summers. But summer, it turned out, was no more real than the snow that melted in wintertime.”

My love and I went to see a reading of David Mamet's play Race not too long ago and were blown away by the narratives of inherent racism and prejudice. We sat in the dark as the actors sparred for the salvation of our culture's very soul, it seemed. It frankly addressed the things that we skirt around when the conversation of prejudice comes up in real life: "I know it's a problem, but not mine." , guilt and shame, and the necessity of acknowledging that being a non-racist, for lack of a better word, is learned behavior- a painstaking process of unlearning. 

I was brought back there when reading Snow Falling on Cedars. As a reader, it is clear enough to see where old prejudices and anxieties come into play, even when the characters do not. The white population of the island comes across as long-suffering. They resent the presence of their Japanese neighbors even now, fifteen years after the conclusion of the war. For some, it is the echoes of their assailants from the Pacific theater, for some it is the deeply rooted sense of prevailing "otherness" that pervades their perspective on other races, and for some it is guilt- that they stood aside and did nothing as people they knew to be good and honest were torn from their homes and transported to internment camps. As the court case unfolds, it becomes increasingly clear that what the Japanese defendant projects as dignity, is perceived as defiance and with every psychological stroke against Kabuo and his family, your heart breaks with the injustice of it. Sadly, there may be more modernity to the commentary than one wishes to believe.

I was not loving Snow Falling on Cedars when I started it. I read Guterson's A Country Ahead of Us, A Country Behind last year and didn't really love it. There were a couple of stand-out moments in the short story anthology, but overall, it missed the mark for me. His moments of sparsity came across as pushing through to a part he would rather be writing, sometimes those moments were he chose to dwell on description, went on a couple of beats too long. Where there was balance, it was beautiful- but you shouldn't have to seek those moments out as a reader. I'm always wary of books with intersecting storylines where I favor one arc to the exclusion of the others. We've all been there, flipping ahead to see where the chapter ends so that we can sink back into the part of the story that matters, dammit. Snow Falling on Cedars fell into that trap, with one additional faux pas- the details meant to lend it a sense of the crime-novel procedural, instead served to bog it down. Usually those details are there to heighten your awareness. Any little piece could matter! Not so with this book- if something is going to matter, Guterson will let you know, so you can let your guard slip for all of those finnicky stacking paragraphs of info-dump.

Still, it's not fair to judge Snow Falling on Cedars as a glowing example of a mystery- I don't believe it's really written to be one. The crimes in this book run deeper than the murder of Carl Heine. The tragic incident is merely a backdrop for Guterson's more sweeping statements regarding the lingering mental state of the island-folk. He does a beautiful job bringing out the humanity of the majority of the characters and utilizes tropes to enhance his story, without letting his awareness slip and surrendering to the siren call of writing stereotypes for their simplicity, not their irony.  His real skill lies in developing characters as ultimately unknowable as real human kind and in bringing you to island of San Piedro. It unfolds, a deeply beautiful and treacherous landscape of sea, rock, lofty cedars, and tumbling strawberry fields, with a personality and a purpose. By the end of the book, you've walked the pathways and streets into familiarity. Guterson's passion for the locale is so clear and convincing that you cannot help but feel the melancholy of missing homeland during reading. For a moment in time, you belong to San Piedro and it is all too far away.  I understand why this book is considered a contemporary classic- why it's on so many high-school reading lists. The message is clear and unwavering, the themes are timeless. Where Guterson's momentum failed him, his conviction kept the story alive. It is certainly worth reading, if only to feel that you have traveled and seen a person for who they really are. After all, how often can we know a person's heart so intimately outside of the realm of literature?

Shelf Status: Moving Along
If You Liked Snow Falling on Cedars, you may enjoy: Cold Mountain, Amsterdam, Mystic River

Beloved by Toni Morrison (16 of 166)

One Sentence Summary: The dark presence that pursues an ex-slave woman and her family creates a maelstrom of heartache and memory in its vengeful wake.

Excerpt:

“There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up, holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship's, smooths and contains the rocker. It's an inside kind--wrapped tight like skin. Then there is the loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive. On its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one's own feet going seem to come from a far-off place.” 

This is a long overdue read. I paid it little mind when it appeared on reading lists in high school as an option- I was far more concerned with reading fat classics with intimidating reputations than this slender volume and its unapproachable subject. A copy found its way into my hands, and that copy into a dark corner of my closet, and there it sat and waited and waited, as so many books have done all of these years. Well, today I finally sat down with it and I read... and read... and read. I read for hours. My heart is sore. My eyes are tired. I feel a little shaky and out of sorts, because I have spent so much time, a small lifetime, on this couch, having this book move through my insides and take up roost in my heart and soul. I could not turn away from the agony and memory of these characters, now so much a part of my life, and the real world seems foggy in that special unreality that comes only from surfacing from the deep waters of a text with no bottom.

Toni Morrison writes about heartache and evil and simple goodness and pain and jealousy and need and want in ways that I have never encountered. She speaks straight to the heart of all that is fragile and secret in the heart of a person, but particularly of a woman. The reader feels keenly the shame of Sethe's life, of living in a world that can do such things, strike such fear of living, into a human being. The story comes out, a long red thread, ducking and weaving through the non-linear telling, and it is a dark flower blooming slowly. Morrison's work is switchblade poetry, deceptively beautiful and raw. Lulled by the language, you are all of a sudden locked in the simmering microcosm of 124 with its unfortunate denizens- flawed, desperate Denver, regal and shattered Sethe, blessed Paul D, Baby Suggs, holy, and Beloved- the gentle to heavy pressure of Beloved, always, haunting the house. Once again, I am reminded that the great ghost of the sins of this world bears the face of a child. 

Learning about slavery in school, there is and always will be a certain amount of separation. A detailing of the atrocities may make you pause for a day, but this book is the photograph that takes up residence behind your eyes. I once saw a black and white picture of a box of wedding rings removed from the hands of Holocaust victims. That box was so deep and wide and full and it is part of the catalog of my finite experience that informs my world view. Here we see straight into the aftershocks of humans treated as animals, denied themselves, and it is so painful and so necessary because this work of fiction, like most, walks the well-beaten paths of reality. Beloved demonstrates the power of literature simply by being- this is what a book can be: a sword and a trigger.

I will never forget these characters and what they represent. Beloved comes into your house and unless you will yourself to forget her, she never really leaves.

Shelf Status: Keeping
You May Enjoy Beloved if you enjoy: The Invisible Man, East of Eden, Night

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga (15 of 166)

One Sentence Summary: Balram Halwai, hailing from one of many (any) villages in the great swath of neglected rural India, becomes the first driver to the son of a coal magnate and, desperate for real opportunity, murders him.

Excerpt:

“Go to Old Delhi,and look at the way they keep chickens there in the market. Hundred of pale hens and brightly colored roosters, stuffed tightly into wire-mesh cages. They see the organs of their brothers lying around them.They know they are next, yet they cannot rebel. They do not try to get out of the coop. The very same thing is done with humans in this country.” 

I spent six months in India last year and am still processing the experience. The White Tiger is disturbing, but even more disturbing when you know how frank and completely possible it is. Spending time in the head of Balram Halwai, you could be in the head of any number of individuals whose lives are placed in the careful boxes of caste and class. The more you think about it, the less solid any ground becomes. While this book is most definitely a tale that seeks to pull back the veil from modern India specifically, it also makes simple, human observations that extend to the infrastructure of any nation where class designation makes us see each other as less or "more than".  Being in Balram's head made me a bit queasy because, while he is certainly corrupt and ultimately wicked, you can see how he became that way and it is very hard to blame him completely. You sympathize with him and you don't want to, but you must.

Adiga's narrative is sharp and quick and I would have been disappointed had it not been, as it did bring home the Man Booker Prize in 2008. Because of this fluid and accessible writing style, the whole book gives off the feeling of a car crash that you are watching take place, complete with the little building scream at the back of your head. The author's choice to let us in on Halwai's trespass right at the beginning of the story sets up the entire story for a feeling of momentum so intense that you almost want to jump and roll off the train. He pulls no punches in confronting the reader with a harsh underworld that is chaotic and of a darkness that feels well-like, but seems to avoid blatant exaggeration. That being said, I read one review that said that The White Tiger was not a work of literature, but a collection of facts. That puts words to what I was trying to articulate throughout reading. While I do not completely agree with the claim that it is not literature, I also sometimes spotted the profusion of information, it betrayed itself by becoming significant to the point of being noticeable- still, I think it a small price to pay for the level of immersion that Adiga creates. You get all the way to say, the seventh circle of Delhi. Certainly, sometimes this book can come across a bit of a crash course- but I stick to my guns when I say that it ultimately avoids the dreaded feeling of "information dump".

This is one that I would like to abstain from "rating", per se. How would I go about rating it? Did I enjoy it. No, not really. I was glad to finish it, but also glad for having read it. Did I think it was significant and important and worth reading? Oh yes, definitely. On a more personal level, I may never completely understand the unrest that still comes upon my soul when I think of India, but reading brings me closer and I think that this book tapped into that need for me. Still, it is heavy and if you are seeking a happy-go-lucky guru road trip tale, this is not going to be it.

I am now off to go read more heavy literature because I said so in my last post. I think that after Beloved, The Color Purple, and Snow Falling on Cedars, I will be ready for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix- really, really ready.

Thanks, Hannah South, for the recommendation!

Shelf Status: Off to a book tarp in Connaught Place
You May Enjoy The White Tiger if you enjoy: The Invisible Man (Ellison, not Wells), Interpreter of Maladies