“That First Fine Careless Rapture”

There’s a category of books that I’ve been thinking about a lot recently.  Every time I go to a used book store (usually Magus Books, here in Seattle), I see all these wonderful novels on the shelves that I am oh so tempted to purchase, even though a) I’ve already read them, and b) I already own them.  (Since I have my books shelved alphabetically by author, I can even easily find them — once a librarian, always a librarian.)  That palpable yearning to buy, again, books that I’ve already read and remember with enormous fondness and pleasure, made me realize that there are some books that I love but will never read again, because I don’t want to spoil “that first fine careless rapture” (as Robert Browning said in a totally different context in his poem “Home Thoughts, From Abroad”) that I had when I first read them. 

I have become aware that I have a fear that this rereading will leave me disappointed and wondering what I saw in the novel the first time.  This has happened to me before.  When I reread Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer for a class I was teaching, I was stunned at how much it had changed since the first time I read it, which was in the early 1960s, right after it won the National Book Award in 1962.  It meant so much to me then — I totally identified with the main female character and I was swept up in Percy’s fine writing.  But this recent rereading left me cold — I was impatient with the characters (although the writing was still magnificent) and just didn’t see now what I had seen in it then.  Why had I liked it — loved it, even — so much before?  What did that say about the person who was me those long years ago?  This train of thought threw me into a serious funk, because I didn’t want all those years to have changed Percy’s book into one that didn’t interest me now. 

So then I started thinking about the books that I felt I’d better not ever reread because I loved them so much the first time.  And here’s my list (so far), in no particular order:

Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook

Pat Conroy’s The Prince of Tides

Simone de Beauvoir’s The Mandarins

John Irving’s The World According to Garp

Paul Scott’s The Raj Quartet

Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children

J. G. Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur and The Singapore Grip

Gail Godwin’s The Odd Woman

Merle Miller’s A Gay and Melancholy Sound

Clancy Sigal’s Going Away

David James Duncan’s The Brothers K

Guy Gavriel Kay’s The Lions of Al-Rassan

Even as I write this, though, I find myself thinking about how terrific it would be to pick up Kay’s book again and be drawn into the world he created, and those fascinating characters, and wondering if I’d cry at the end of the book as I did the first time I read it; and how I’m sure that I would still adore The Odd Woman, even 35-plus years after I read it for the first time, and that family Duncan invented…. But I’m going to try to resist.  All the novels on my list were perfect for me the first time I read them.  Perhaps it’s too much to ask to have them remain the same book, when I’m no longer the same person who first read them, so many years ago. 

 I’d love to hear what books fall into this category for you.

The Cry of the Sloth

by Sam Savage

I never actually met a book that I would have described as being “tragicomic.”  Of course I knew what it meant — it’s pretty easy to guess the definition from the word itself, and I’ve certainly read novels or memoirs that have both funny and sad parts; but none of those have ever led me to describe it using that word.  (Many words, of course, are not so easy to figure out just by looking at and I have to resort to the dictionary.  For example, I always have trouble remembering what “sanguine” means; it sounds to me as though it should mean its exact opposite.  Hold on a moment, I need to go look it up again just to make sure that it means something like confident.) 

But I digress.  I just finished a terrific little novel that the word “tragicomic” fits to a tee (or should that be a “t”?).  Sam Savage’s second novel (after Firmin, which I also loved) is The Cry of the Sloth (Coffee House Press, 2009).  In it, we spend four months with middle-aged and failed novelist, failed publisher (of Soap: A Journal of the Arts), failed son, failed husband, failed landlord, and now financially bankrupt Midwesterner Andrew Whittaker.  The book we’re reading consists of the contents of everything that he’s written from July to October of a particularly bad year: letters to writers wanting their work published in Soap, including letters to his ex-wife, letters to his tenants, fragments of a novel he’s trying to write, letters to an old college friend, letters to the bank and telephone company, and shopping lists.  These are, on the surface, the comic part.  But even as we’re chuckling over the letters, we’re coming to realize that Andrew is — really, truly — falling apart, descending ever more swiftly into despair and desolation.  So we have to ask ourselves as we head toward the last pages of the book, what happens to someone when they realize that they are, in fact, an utter failure?  What are their options then?

Here are some of my favorite lines from the book that will give you a sense of Andrew’s voice.  The first is a letter to an old college friend whom he hasn’t seen in many years:

We make choices so early, and on the basis of practically no information, and then we end up with these different lives that we are really stuck with.  It’s all so depressing.

And later in the book Andrew writes to Jolie, his ex-wife, now living in New York:

Which decision was the wrong one? Or were there five wrong ones, or a thousand?  People like to say that each moment presents us with a fork on our life path; I sit at my desk instead of going to the window, where perhaps I would have been hit by a brick, or going for a walk in the park, where I would have met a beautiful woman, a mugger, a man selling insurance, or no one at all.   Walking to the store, I turn on this street rather than that street; and everything is different forever.  Have you ever wondered if the same thing might be true in the other direction? Going backwards, there are also choices to be made every step of the way, each item revived in memory only the first link of a new mnemonic chain, and every new chain recreating a different past, constructing a different album of photos, unpacking another box of forgotten treasures — a different past, which must of necessity be the past of a different present, a different future, a different person. 

It’s often hard to find small press books at big box retailers (which is why independent bookstores and libraries are so important), but in my experience it’s worth seeking them out.

Brooklyn

by Colm Tóibín

With good books, it really is better to read them late, long after everyone else you know already has, than to never have read them at all.  At least that’s how I felt when I finished Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn, which got (as I remember) wonderful reviews in 2009, and which my friend Anne Wyckoff just adored (and I always listen when she recommends something for me to read).  It’s a supremely quiet and strangely affecting novel, set in the 1950s. Toibin’s subjects are love, and family, and obligation (to yourself and those you love and how to decide which is the more important). It’s one of those books that you have to read slowly, in order to savor the strength and the powerful simplicity of the writing.  I had a weirdish experience while I was reading it, almost as though I had entered a large and empty gothic cathedral, where the atmosphere was hushed and all sounds were muted.  Yet I realized that almost everything of importance occurs within those four walls, just as so much of what’s important in Tóibín’s lyrical novel is never said at all: almost everything that matters is written, if you will, between the lines on the pages.

I have to tell you, though, that the plot doesn’t sound prepossessing (maybe that’s why I took so long to pick it up and read it).  At the suggestion of a priest coming home from his Brooklyn parish to Ireland for a visit, Eilis Lacey leaves her family and friends in her small Irish town and moves to Brooklyn, where she lives in a boarding house with other young women (all Irish), all watched over (and disapproved of) by “Ma” Kehoe, works days in a department store, and attends night school to get a degree in accounting.  Along the way, she meets a young Italian man and falls in love with him.

But it’s Tóibín’s economy of language and his uncanny ability to bring to life both Eilis’s home in Ireland and her adopted city that make this novel so very special.

Getting Stoned with Savages

by J. Marten Troost

J. Marten Troost’s Getting Stoned with Savages: A Trip Through the Islands of Fiji and Vanuatu is an anecdotal (and frequently hilarious) account of the year he spent with his wife Sylvia living on the South Pacific islands of his book’s title.  This is the first of his books that I’ve read, and I found Troost to be delightful company.  He’s eminently curious, open to new experiences without being foolhardy (most of the time, anyway), and entirely without pretension.  Whenever I read the sort of armchair travel book in which first-world authors spend time in third-world locales, I am always on the lookout for any signs of looking down on, or making fun of, the native populations. Troost is entirely respectful (even when he’s describing how corrupt the government is), saving his harshest criticisms for his own fears, inadequacies, and dumb decisions — all of which just made him seem more human to me.  Whether it’s traversing (or trying to) the mud-slick, unpaved roads of the islands; landslides; encountering active volcanoes; giant centipedes seemingly bent on household domination; musing on the pros and cons of cannibalism (while visiting a village in which the last incidence of this practice took place within living memory); surviving Cyclone Paula; or trying out kava, Vanuatu’s intoxicating drink of choice, Troost’s writing is lively and entertaining.  When Sylvia gets pregnant, the couple moves to Suva, on the advice of the obstetrician on Vanuatu, so that they could have access to more up-to-date medical care.  Troost calls the bustling metropolis of Suva, the capital of Fiji, “the Midtown of the South Pacific,” a description that somewhat unaccountably brought the city alive for me.  When I finished this book, I was sorely tempted to spend my next vacation in Vanuatu and Fiji, but reason belatedly kicked in, and I realized that I would probably need to bring Troost along as well, in order to guarantee myself a good time.

Two Great Books for Older Teens

by Justine Larbalestier

I am generally not fond of books with unreliable narrators — they simply seem to add to my already abnormally high level of anxiety. Call me naïve, but I usually want a narrator that I can believe. Which makes it all the more interesting that I am recommending Justine Larbalestier’s Liar (Boomsbury, 2009), in which the main character admits right away that she seldom tells the truth, can’t be trusted, and may (or may not) be guilty of a horrendous crime. And that’s all that I can tell you about the plot of the book without giving away too much. I want everyone to experience it just as I did, one page at a time. I will say that it’s a spectacularly imaginative and gripping story, and the narrator is a young woman whom I won’t soon forget. If your adult book group is interested in trying a teen novel, this will make for a great discussion.

by Libba Bray

Another novel that I suspect teens will enjoy a lot is Libba Bray’s Going Bovine (Delacorte, 2009). I don’t love the cover (although we all know you can’t judge a book etc. etc. etc., but it’s hard not to), but the plot hooked me right away. Told in the voice of a 16-year-old boy, the story begins when Cameron Smith is diagnosed with Mad Cow disease. As his doctors search desperately for a cure, Cameron spends his time trying to save the world (and himself) by trying desperately to locate a mysterious Dr. X. Aided on his journey by his classmate Gonzo, a Mexican-American hypochondriac dwarf, a punk rock angel named Dulcie, and a lawn ornament who was once (perhaps) the famed Norse god, Balder, Cameron sets off on a complicated quest. Based loosely on Don Quixote (a comparison I didn’t get until near the end of the book) and both comedic and tragic, this is another novel that will leave readers talking about what really happened: how much of Cameron’s trip is simply a delusion caused by his disease and how much really happened. I know which of the two I’m hoping for.

Nomad’s Hotel: Travels in Time and Space

by Cees Nooteboom

There are some armchair travel books I would put into a category simply labeled “Something Special,” and Cees Nooteboom’s Nomad’s Hotel: Travels in Time and Space (Mariner Books, 2009) is one of them.  This collection ranges over a number of years, and includes essays originally written between the 1970s and the present decade. The two earliest pieces are from 1975: one, a prescient account called “An Evening in Isfahan,” and the other a charming tale of an unexpected trip Nooteboom took to The Gambia, in Africa. (It was unexpected because he had actually intended to journey to the Spanish Sahara but ran into visa difficulties.)  What sets Nooteboom’s travel articles apart from many others is that he is both a real reader and a real writer.  By that, I mean that he frequently refers to the experiences of other writers (but in a way that doesn’t make you feel inadequate because you haven’t read them) and is also able to capture the essence of a place in a paragraph or even a single sentence, which meant that I felt I had experienced the soul of, say, Venice, without ever having set foot on a vaporetto.  Much has been written about Venice, but this is how Nooteboom does it: 

In Venice anachronism lies at the very heart of things: in a thirteenth-century church you look at a fifteenth-century grave and an eighteenth-century altar; what your eyes see is what the no longer existent eyes of millions of others have seen.  Here, on the contrary, that is not tragic, for while you are looking they go on talking, you are constantly accompanied by the living and the dead, you are involved in an age-old conversation.  Proust, Ruskin, Rilke, Byron, Pound, Goethe, McCarthy, Morand, Brodsky, Montaigne Casanova, Goldoni, Da Ponte, James Montale, their words flow around you like the water in the canals, and just as the sunlight causes the waves behind the gondolas to fragment into myriad tiny sparkles, so that one word, Venice, echoes and sparkles in all those conversations, letters, sketches, and poems, always the same, always different.  Not without reason did Paul Morand call his book about this city Venices, and actually even that is not enough.  There ought to be a superlative degree of the plural just for this island.

In the article on his trip to The Gambia that I mentioned earlier, Nooteboom describes a young woman who is headed off for a two-year Peace Corps stint as someone who ”resembles the beginning of a novel that is destined to have an unhappy ending.” 

For me, the most moving chapter dealt with a trip Nooteboom made to Canberra, Australia, to the war memorial and museum dedicated to the men who fought and died in the Battle of Gallipoli in the First World War.

Chasing Kangaroos

by Tim Flannery

Just looking at the cover of Tim Flannery’s Chasing Kangaroos: A Continent, a Scientist, and a Search for the World’s Most Extraordinary Creature, you get a good sense of the book. It turns out that kangaroos are even stranger and more wondrous than I had ever imagined them to be.  But this is more than just the story of kangaroo life styles and life cycles, their mating habits, and their child-rearing techniques.  It’s also the story of the country the author loves best, Australia, and how its history and development are intertwined with that of its most iconic animal inhabitants.  Part geology, part travelogue, part ecology, part ethology, part anthropology, part history, part paleontology, part natural history, and all of it always interesting, Flannery’s book is a first-rate example of popular science writing.  The first line of the introduction will give you a good sense of Flannery’s style: “When I was young I met a man whose arse bore the bite-mark of a Tasmanian tiger.” Who could resist that?

The Good Soldiers

by David Finkel

It was difficult to read David Finkel’s The Good Soldiers for more than a chapter at a time, because I found myself weeping at an alarming rate.   But of all the books I (and we) have read about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — all the excellent and not so great  “we were there” and “embedded reporters” accounts — Finkel’s book stands head and shoulders above the rest.  This is war as it is experienced by the soldiers on the ground.  We are with the 2-16, an Army Rangers battalion, who were sent to Baghdad at the beginning of “the surge” in 2007.  Finkel has a terrific journalistic eye (he won the Pulitzer Prize as a reporter for the Washington Post), and we share the soldiers’ experiences  as they attempt to bring a kind of peace to Baghdad.  The trauma of being away from friends and family, the daily boredom of patrolling a city that is all too frequently punctuated by the terror that comes with an attack or a suicide bomb, the lack of trust of the civilians — all this comes through in writing that is both vivid and visceral.  And Finkel is fully aware of the irony that this group of young men fighting what appears to be a rearguard (and losing) battle are led by Lt. Col. Ralph Kauzlarich, whose lifetime motto has always been “it’s all good.”  After reading about the reality of life lived under the constant threat of death and bodily injury, it’s not hard to come to the conclusion (and I have to believe that Finkel did) that a better motto would have been, “none of this is good.”   After reading Finkel’s fine book, I had a deeper understanding of both the physical and mental risks we are subjecting our soldiers to.  When we read about returning soldiers committing suicide or murder, or even the recent  incident at Ft. Hood, it’s not hard to see why these sorts of things occur.

When Wanderers Cease to Roam. . .

by Vivian Swift

I cannot adequately convey how much I ABSOLUTELY loved Vivian Swift’s When Wanderers Cease to Roam: A Traveler’s Journal of Staying Put (Bloomsbury, 2008).  For over two decades, Swift traveled the world, for work and fun, and then settled down with five cats in a house in a small village on the Long Island Sound. This is a diary (highly illustrated with her watercolor drawings) of those years, as well as the events of the past.  It’s charming, delightful, and captivating.  I loved the pictures of the single mittens that she’s found over the years, but I could have equally chosen any of hundreds of other examples of what made this book so much fun to read.  Here are others: it’s through this book that I learned about the mid-18^th century French soldier, Xavier de Maistre, who was confined to prison for 42 years (for dueling), and decided to write about each of the items in his room as though it were an important tourist attraction.  Swift says that he “invented a new mode of travel.”  And Alexander von Humbolt, who was an explorer and naturalist, and almost an exact contemporary of de Maistre (although they probably never met).  He spent five years exploring Latin America and then, according to Swift, lived in Paris for 20 years and wrote 30 books about his Latin American adventures.  This is a perfect gift for travelers, those with artistic souls, those with a sense of wonder, those who are hug-the-hearths — in short, nearly everyone on your gift list.

The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet

by Reif Larsen

“Clever” novels frequently put me off.  You know the sort I mean: those that make use of different fonts, footnotes, and other similar affectations.  I often wonder if the purpose of all these bells and whistles is simply to disguise the fact that the author really has nothing much to say to the reader.  And I find that so often novels about child geniuses all follow the same story arc: kid burns out and comes to no good end.  So you can imagine my relief and delight when I discovered that Reif Larsen overcame both of my ingrained prejudices in his splendid and emotionally satisfying first novel, The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet (Penguin Press, 2009).  Twelve-year-old cartography genius Tecumseh Sparrow Spivet lives at the Coppertop Ranch (just north of Divide, Montana) with his über-laconic rancher father, his scientist mother (who is obsessed with finding a certain type of beetle that nobody else believes exists), his older sister, Gracie, and the memory of his younger brother, Layton, whose death has left an unhealed scar on the family’s psyche.  T.S. spends his days mapping the world around him.  We’re shown examples of his maps: there’s one describing the behavior of the female Australian dung beetle during copulation, while another is a three-dimensional time-map of 26 of the Spivet family toasters, including “highlights of its career and the date and nature of its demise.”  Two other notable maps are of the family’s dinner table conversation and the correlation between the time and distance of the self-inflicted gunshot that killed Layton.  Then one day T.S. gets a call from the Smithsonian Institution, announcing that he has won the prestigious Baird award.  He’s invited to come address a select audience and receive the recognition due him for his outstanding scientific contributions.  (T.S. realizes that the man on the phone has no idea that he’s only 12, but he’s too shy to tell him.)  Almost on a whim, T.S. decides to hop an eastbound train and hope that he makes it to Washington in time to accept the award.  As T.S. travels toward the Smithsonian, we are along for the ride, experiencing the world through the eyes of this brilliant, funny, and emotionally wounded kid.  It’s a trip well worth taking.