Category Archives: books

Enduring and Truthful Fictions

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Today is Book Lovers’ Day, my friend Myriah just informed me, and I’m so glad she did. It’s actually one of two days that are celebrated for and by people like us. To mark the day I am re-posting an old book review I wrote, from 2009. It’s a response to three books, so we could think of it as a triple treat for our readers’ party:

Three Truthful Fictions

In early summer I read three works of fiction in a short space of time:

Ah, But Your Land is Beautiful by Alan Paton
A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
The Folding Cliffs by W.S. Merwin

These were all pretty dramatic stories of historical fiction. Paton’s book follows closely the events in South Africa mid-20th century. Hosseini writes about Afghanistan in the last 30 years, and Merwin’s book is an epic poem about Hawaii, mostly in the 19th century.

I was sitting around after surgery with my foot up, and that was what had made it possible for me spend more time reading and thinking. Some things I thought about: How funny that the settings of these thr3 truthful fictions picee books were at three corners of the globe. Obviously they were not part of any theme. So were there some ways they were alike? What made them all worth reading to the end, when so many books I’ve tried lately were not?

Suffering was a large part of all the stories. The Afrikaners in Ah, But Your Land is Beautiful were treating all people of color unjustly and inhumanely. Whites who did otherwise suffered along with the oppressed, and often sacrificed their careers, homes, and reputations.

All the women suffer miserably in A Thousand Splendid Suns. War and famine, selfish and sinful men and women supported by bad cultural traditions, all combine to keep the women trapped in complicated and painful predicaments. Factions of Muslims hate one another.

The Folding Cliffs makes vivid the way conquering peoples oppress the vanquished, all the while thinking it is “for their own good.”

What benefit is there in dwelling on Man’s Inhumanity to Man? Don’t we already know how wretched we are? If that were all one gets from these stories, I don’t think they would be worth reading, but there is another bigger part to all of them, and that is Man’s Love. Just as Christ gave His life in love for us suffering humans, so He gives grace to men to rise above their suffering, show compassion to their fellow man, and do deeds of mercy.

“Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality,” said C.S. Lewis, and it is this courage that is shown by the young parents in Cliffs who flee to the hills and fight off government agents who are shooting at them, rather than have their family torn apart by the health officials who are shipping lepers off to Molokai like so many unclean animals. Their love is demonstrated in the test of courage.

In Land, the author and his companions find joy and fellowship in realizing the sacrificial, mercy-giving aspect of their humanity as they fight what seems to be a losing battle against political power. Perhaps they were living what Winston Churchill was talking about when he said, “We shall draw from the heart of suffering itself the means of inspiration and survival.”

Alan Paton in his autobiography Towards the Mountain writes of the experience:

“…the inhumanity of man to man could be made endurable for us only when we manifested in our lives the humanity of man to man….there is a wound in the creation and…the greatest use we could make of our lives was to ask to be made a healer of it.”

I haven’t lived with the kinds of suffering I read about, and that is partly why I think these writings are valuable, for as we read we take as our companions in mind and heart characters who are historically real or fictionally true, who can train us in Christian virtue.

Khaled Hosseini has given his countrymen and all of us a wonderful gift in the two books of his I am familiar with. In Kite Runner and in A Thousand Splendid Suns he paints a backdrop of horror, including much personal moral failure. Kite Runner exposed my own innate cowardice as I empathized with the protagonist, and as he was able to find healing and hope after repentance, I was also comforted.

In Suns the author gives a tender role model to women everywhere who are beaten down by life. The character of Miriam is the ultimate in misery, as she has no friends and no family who care about her, and she is barren, so her husband hates her. Then a young woman comes into her life, a woman who could easily slide into being another tormentor. But instead she shows kindness and becomes a true friend, and Miriam finds hope and courage, as well as other parts of her humanity and womanhood that had been obscured. She is transformed from a passive recipient of abuse into a woman who can return love, and she is happy, even in the face of continued abuse.

These stories have the potential to become part of the collective consciousness of a people, and help us to live more humanly, more humanely. I hope that Suns in particular can give vision to the women of Afghanistan, a vision of themselves as able to rise above their circumstances by means of love toward others.

We won’t eliminate the oppressors; our hope does not consist of that, as Father Alexander Schmemann has summarized:

“The fundamental Christian eschatology has been destroyed by either the optimism leading to the Utopia, or by the pessimism leading to the Escape. If there are two heretical words in the Christian vocabulary, they would be ‘optimism’ and ‘pessimism.’ These two things are utterly anti-biblical and anti-Christian…. It is for us, Christians, to reconstruct this unique faith, in which there are no illusions, no illusions at all, about the evil.”

Keeping with the theme of inspiring fiction, I’ll end with a quote by Whittaker Chambers from Witness (which book I love, but it is not fiction) about a novel that was formative for him. I haven’t read Les Miserables, but I noticed a few years ago that at least three important writers I knew of had mentioned they read it more than once as children. Sorry, I can’t remember who the others were. Chambers describes what can happen when a good writer connects with the reader:les miz pic

“I read and reread Les Miserables many times in its entirety. It taught me two seemingly irreconcilable things–Christianity and revolution. It taught me first of all that the basic virtue of life is humility, that before humility, ambition, arrogance, pride and power are seen for what they are, the stigmata of littleness, the betrayal by the mind of the soul, a betrayal which continually fails against a humility that is authentic and consistent. It taught me justice and compassion, not a justice of the law, or as we say, human justice, but a justice that transcends human justice whenever humanity transcends itself to reach that summit where justice and compassion are one….”

We find old book and doll friends.

books, family, ,

P1100825 dolls one box

When Kate was here last month she did a lot of plowing through her childhood stuff — Well, to be truthful, that doesn’t really describe what happened. She lovingly looked through boxes of books and toys she’d collected in her first 18 years, and household items like linen napkins and unP1100683used potholders that had been passed down to her from her grandmother. She had in mind the usual sorting categories of Keep, Give, and Toss.

With her wedding fast approaching, it blessed me that she took the time to enjoy the task. She hasn’t lived in our house for many years, but she was remembering what she said was a very rich childhood, surrounded with so many books which she always knew were part of the household because they had some value. This made the finding of a book worth reading much more likely than if she looked in a bookstore or library.

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Of course I find my children fascinating, and this peek into Kate’s memories interested me because it revealed that the development of her love for books and reading had an aspect I hadn’t even thought about. I was also pleased because it was a part of a success story. (I’m thankful that my kids don’t tell me about all the failings that I can’t change at this point.)P1100674

Kate used to collect dual-language dictionaries, even for languages she didn’t plan to study anytime soon, like this Japanese one above. And she had an assortment of dolls, most of which she has now bestowed on me to do with what I like.

I’ve been trying to figure out why grown women often like dolls and play with them, in adultish ways of course. Is it because we miss our children who have grown up? I find it hard to turn down a doll who needs a home, the way some people can’t say no to cats or dogs. I have a drawer full of dolls that I want to make new clothes for or mend in some way, and a suitcase full of really old broken dolls that belonged to our mothers and which I am even now gathering the will power and good sense to get rid of.

But I am quite thrilled to suddenly have so many new doll children who still have a lot of life in them. Before I decide how to distribute them, which ones to let the grandchildren play with, etc., I had to do something about the stink they had acquired by sitting in a plastic container for years.

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I set them out in the hot sun for a couple of days, and that did the trick. Maybe they didn’t even need the sunshine; perhaps the fresh air would have been enough therapy. But the ones with faces look happy enough to get the full outdoor experience.

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I used to love to read the Raggedy Ann and Andy stories to my children. Probably getting to know the personalities of the storybook dolls and following their secret adventures has contributed to my feelings about dolls generally. I can imagine that Kate’s dolls, over the years that they were ignored in that corner of the house, were sneaking out of their box and into the book boxes nearby to have fun improving their little minds. It sounds like something my children would do.

Savor the heady dry breath.

books, history, poetry, ,

I miss spending time in the public library, not that I have had a great deal of that experience. In my youth the city library was not a convenient place to study, being ten miles from our house, and my elementary school had no library.

When I stayed with my grandma she would actually drop my sisters and me off at the branch library in Berkeley while she ran errands and we could roam at liberty for an hour. I’m sure none of us knew what a lavish gift that was, but from this vantage point I can appreciate the sublimity, and the mental picture of the room where I spent the most time is still there.

Back home in the country we depended on the bookmobile that every two weeks provided plenty of the sensory excitement that is the subject of the poem below. The visits were brief and fairly businesslike, as we had to jostle a bit with the other young patrons in that cramped space and there certainly was nowhere to sit and ponder. Mom was waiting outside in the car.

I paid no conscious attention to anything but the book titles, being mainly interested in getting my stash to take home and savor in a more purely intellectual fashion. But now, so long removed, if I think on that county van for only a minute, I can remember the clunking sounds  of books being pulled off shelves and put back, and our tennis shoes scuffling around in the grit that we’d brought in from the gravelly parking lot. The librarian-driver would speak as few quiet words as possible as she stamped our cards. And the scent of the books — it’s still in me.

Library
by Valerie Worth

No need even
To take out
A book: only
Go inside
And savor
The heady
Dry breath of
Ink and paper,
Or stand and
Listen to the
Silent twitter
Of a billion
Tiny busy
Black words.

From All the Small Poems and Fourteen More

My $1 Summer Vacation

books, buildings, history

Of Cape Cod and summering there, one man generations ago said, “It is the dullest, flattest, stupidest, pleasantest, most restful place on the whole coast. Nothing to do and we do it all the time.”

Sometime back I succumbed to a book on a topic pretty far removed from my usual interests or experience: the life and history of a summer house on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. This book sat on the shelf for five years or so until for some reason I took it down and put it in my suitcase to read on a trip. How and why I ever came into possession of it, I couldn’t remember. Then inside the back cover I discovered a remainder sticker I had removed and put there, which showed that I had found it in the $1 bin at a local bookstore.the big house image

The author is George Howe Colt, who as I figured out after some chapters is married to Anne Fadiman, writer of essays I first read in her delightful book Ex Libris. As his story opens, he and Anne and their two children are opening up the eponymous Big House for the season, in what might be their last summer as its owners.

Colt writes richly about the history of Cape Cod and summer homes generally, and about his particular family’s particular house on the Cape. It hasn’t been that long, really, that people have lived this Cape-Cod-summer lifestyle that was already near to extinction when the author told his tale more than ten years ago. In the early 19th century Bostonians started building summer homes there where previously it was thought most unsuitable, as Thoreau wrote: “It is a wild, rank place, and there is no flattery in it.” In previous eras homes were built in more sheltered locations inland from the sea.

I learned that many of our forbears used to think of the ocean unkindly, as a symbol of spiritual barrenness, and they did not want to go into or live near it — and then over the course of a century they had changed, to the point where they thought that living close to the sea, swimming in it, and even drinking buckets of sea water the most healthful things they could do.

capecod
Aerial view of Cape Cod (from the www.)

I was interested in the architecture and construction of the Big House, so much larger than many summer houses that no way could it be called a cottage. Size is the only luxurious thing about it, though. Residents and guests must wash dishes by hand in a kitchen where crickets abound, sleep between old mismatched sheets, and prop open many of the sixty-seven windows with a wooden coat hanger or a copy of Greyfriars Bobby.

The whole phenomenon of Old Money and what Colt calls the Boston Brahmin is explained: “If one had old money, it followed that one had old things: the wealthier the Bostonian, it has been said, the more dents in his car and the more holes in his clothes.” I know this is common knowledge to many people but the concrete example of Cape Cod lifestyle brought it all home to me.

Of course, summer somehow relates to everyone’s childhood, too, and that keeps the traditions going: “We would never tolerate the Big House’s inconveniences in our winter homes, but this is different: we change in the winter, but during the summer — a season in which we regress to an innocent, Edenic state by replicating the experiences we had as children — change is heresy.”

For the author, the place was such a keystone of his youth that it seems reasonable to him to include in the book many stories and details about the family members who spent their summers there, information that seemed to me often inappropriate, and detracted from the book as a whole. When I read the subtitle, A Century in the Life of an American Summer Home, I did not anticipate hearing details about adolescent sexuality, Colt’s grandmother’s Alzheimer’s, and his uncle’s bunions. A little more focus would have been appreciated.

ColtGeorgeH_1l
the author

He obviously cares very much for his whole family and wants to remember every detail for posterity — or is it for the sake of his own sentimentality that he cannot edit out anything? Seemingly no indescretion committed or indignity suffered by any relative can be omitted, and I was very uncomfortable reading much of this material. This kind of authorial behavior kept inserting Colt and his personality front-and-center for me, and I mused that he was really writing not merely The Big House but George’s Big Loss.

I admit that if Colt had strained out more stories not directly related to the house, I would have missed hearing the wonderful tale of how his father during the war was hidden from the Germans by a French family, whose daughters later made their wedding dresses out of his white silk parachute. That was one little part I really loved and had to mention!

And I kept reading because Colt is a very good writer and I was imagining myself there in those halcyon summer days the family spent recreating, whether they were washing dishes or playing outdoors. Fishing, sailing, and tennis each have a chapter dedicated to them. And in a chapter titled “Rain” we get a tour of many of the books that were available and savored, and not only on rainy days. After a mention of board games, Colt writes,

“Best of all, there were books. Although it didn’t take rain to get us reading in the Big House (in fact, reading inside on a sunny day gave us a deliciously guilty feeling), on an overcast afternoon people would be curled up with a book in almost every bedroom, with three or four of us draped over the sofas in the living room, physically proximate yet in separate worlds.”

It’s been almost two years since I finished reading The Big House, but as I worked on wrapping up this review that I began back then I am tempted to start reading it through from the beginning again — well, maybe I could skim over those indecorous parts. Because it is just that kind of book, to be read in summertime as a delicious seaside vacation.