Literary Cowardice

No matter how much I chastise myself or how often I remind myself of Nancy Pearl's Rule of 50, I find it virtually impossible to abandon a book once I start it. Sometimes I take a LONG break (Donna Tartt's The Little Friend still has my bookmark 158 pages in from a vacation two years ago, and I'm still interested in what happens. I've just been more interested in other things since then.), but rarely do I just give up entirely if I have any interest at all in how things turn out. If I'm 50 pages in and don't care two pins about what happens, that's another story....

So yesterday I started Karin Fossum's The Indian Bride. When we were on vacation, I noticed an interesting woman reading it, and judging both the person and the book by their covers, I thought it was worth a try. I actually started with her first book translated to English, Don't Look Back, and thought it was okay. I was a little disappointed, because she's Norwegian, the book's set in Norway, but really, there was absolutely no reason it couldn't have been set in a rural area of Iowa. (Just because I'm reading fiction doesn't mean I'm not expecting or at least hoping to learn!) And the translation is more than adequate, but a truly gifted translator is required if a book isn't going to come out with a slight woodchip quality to the writing - precise, bland, stiff. (I'm still not sure if Carlos Ruiz Zafón is a literary genius or if Lucia Graves is - go read The Shadow of the Wind right now, and develop an appreciation for why your college professors demanded a certain translation of Dante.) Still, it was okay, and when we stopped in the library over the weekend, The Indian Bride, her fourth book, was available so I snatched it up.

The story is that a confirmed Norwegian bachelor decides to get married, heads to India, finds a wife, and on the day she's to arrive, due to an accident, he's not able to meet her at the airport and she's later discovered beaten to death not far from his home. Small town, few but likely suspects, etc., etc.

I'm not giving anything away here - this all happens within the first thirty pages or so. I know because that's all I read. The bachelor is such a decent, kind man, so earnest and hopeful, and you spend most of the beginning of the book with him, viewing things from his point of view. He's just a nice guy, and knowing what was going to happen to him was enough for me. I felt so kindly toward the character that I just didn't want to see him devastated in detail. Imagining it was enough, so I skip to the end, figured out enough to determine who committed the murder, and put the book down.

I don't believe that's ever happened to me before, but I just couldn't bear it. It seemed sadistic (or masochistic) to stick around and watch him be devastated, watch what I had a vague sense of be writ painfully large, so I just bowed out, opted not to the take the journey. Of course, the character still has to, but somehow, not having a witness seemed better. You know how when you trip, the first thing you do is look around to make sure no one saw you and somehow that's a little bit of saving grace? It seemed to be a little bit like that: if I didn't witness it, then it didn't happen or it was less painful. Odd, but I don't know how else to explain it. Anyway, I'm a chicken or overly empathetic, but I know the end, and sometimes, knowing how things turn out has to be enough.

Sagas, Seeds and Strays

And 'sects. Insects, that is. Ants, the little interlopers, were after my candied ginger earlier, but I caught them in the act! Yesterday, they were investigating the cat food. The tastes of ants elude me....

Little bit of everything going on around here, as usual. I finished Kate Morton's The House at Riverton last week, and thought it was fabulous. It's drawn comparisons to Daphne du Maurier, and while it doesn't achieve du Maurier's eeriness, the plotting and the characters are worthy of the description. The story is told in a series of flashbacks by an old woman who started work in the local manor house as a very young girl. Early on, her life becomes intertwined with the youngsters of the family, and the story has all the great elements of a Gothic classic: death, secrets, unrequited love, deteriorating ancestral home.

The larger picture Morton offers is of England, and the world, really, dramatically changed by World War I. The war changed everything, and people still reeling from the devastation of war were dealt further blows by the rapid changes in society created by the Jazz Age, flappers, automobiles and other facets of the same new outlook. I actually preferred the original title, The Shifting Fog, a metaphor for the way in which we view history. We look back and make guesses based on glimpses revealed to us as the "fog" of time shifts, only to find out later that what we thought we knew wasn't exactly right. No matter how much we study and research, Morton seems to say, we never get a clear picture of the whole, just bits and pieces that we struggle to fit together. Anyway, Kate Morton has earned her place on my list of authors that I scan pre-pub alerts for!

Although it's a bit late, I planted some seeds yesterday. Nothing fancy, just a few beets and cucumbers, along with a few straggling carrot seeds left over from last year. And, just for kicks, I also planted a few zinnias, in the vain hope that I would actually be able to cut flowers and bring them in the house. Veterinarians will tell you that cats are unrelenting carnivores. If this is the case, then John Henry is not a cat, but some malnourished, splotchy groundhog. He is an herbivore, to his own detriment, but undeterred! He gnaws on zinnias, gums philodendron, and overgrazed my lemon verbena until it was reduced to a green stick instead of a plant. Of course, he doesn't digest any of this, but that's another issue....

The kitty that's been showing up outside probably wishes it were an herbivore. Poor little thing was SO hungry last night, and she got two cans of cat food, or most of them. I was able to get close enough to really see her face. Her eyes look clear enough, but her little face has been scratched up quite a bit at some point. She wouldn't allow me to open the door until recently, would just bolt off into the weeds, but last night she allowed me to come and go through the back door several times and even allowed me to wriggle up to her while she was eating. (I'm sure I was quite a picture, crawling on my elbows down the slope in the backyard, trying not to swat mosquitoes too vehemently, cooing quiet kitty talk the whole time.) But then, while I was finishing dinner, a raccoon swiped the last of her dinner and when I went out to scold him, he absconded into the brush with a little blue Fiesta bowl that I really like! Am going to have to go kick around in the weeds and see if it turns up. With my luck, once he decided on take-out, he probably hauled it down to the creek where he could wash and eat in peace! Raccoons are very cute until they aren't. Seems like so many things are like that: relationships, sugar, rollercoasters - really good right up to the moment that they're really awful. Why is that?

Home Again

Well, it's nice to be home again, even if all that has meant so far is a barrage of ants, yardwork, rain and a dead mouse. Vacation was good, though, and although I always approach family vacation with trepidation (I can't be well-behaved for that long!), it was fun. We ate well, despite Dad's constant commentary on how much we were eating and how little he normally eats, we slept well, we saw moose, the Maine Maritime Museum, a baby groundhog, and the Great North Woods. Personally, I'd go just about anywhere to see a baby groundhog small enough to fit in a shoe bobbling around with his little bottle-brush tail. And, on the last day, I managed to snag some white chocolate bread pudding from The Common Man in Merrimack. (Excellent restaurant, by the way - a small New Hampshire chain that is definitely worth a stop. Or two - they were our first stop and our last!) We spent our first two nights with Hilary and Derrek at the Admiral Peary House in Fryeburg up in the cozy North Pole room at the top of the house. We have to get back to Fryeburg for the fair in the fall sometime, in part because I believe it is the inspiration for the fair depicted by E.B. White in Charlotte's Web. I plan to visit for all the reasons Templeton visited....


After driving up Mt. Washington, only to be buffeted about by 60+ mph winds (pictures of the two of us staggering around like drunkards on the lookout deck at Mt. Washington in the winds will be here soon), and a moose tour in Gorham (where the moose were all confoundingly picturesque AND camera-shy), we meandered over to the coast and spent a night with Mike and De at the Five Gables Inn in East Boothbay. We visited the Breakwater lighthouse in Camden and the Owl's Head lighthouse south of Rockland, dawdled around the coast, gorged ourselves on one of Mike's breakfasts, and spent an afternoon at the Maine Maritime Museum, whose name belies their fabulous collection of marine and folk art.

Flights were uneventful and, even better, on time, and we straggled in on Sunday afternoon, grateful to be home again. Maybe that's the best reason for travel - no matter how nice the place, it doesn't compare to faded quilts, creaky floors and noisy cats. A few days away always renews my sense of appreciation for the peace and sanctity of my own home. With today's grey skies and endless damp, I plan to make a little time to curl up with a novel under a blanket on the couch and just be grateful for far-flung places and for home and for being able to find my way back again.

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

After finishing David Wroblewski's The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, I find myself feeling a great deal like I did at the end of Peter Jackson's King Kong. It was a beautiful experience, with plenty to fascinate and delight, but at the end, when the lights came up, all I remember thinking was, "I'd forgotten how much I hate the story!"

Wroblewski's book is well-crafted, and on more than one occasion, I found myself really enjoying his use of language and description. While he creates a lovely facade, the bones of his story are straight out of Shakespeare's Hamlet. I'm always amazed by the ability of Shakespeare's stories to transcend time and place: Romeo and Juliet against the backdrop of an L.A. gang war, King Lear on a modern-day Iowa farm, and I even once saw a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream on skateboards. I'm never sure whether his stories are universal or basic, perhaps the gift is that they're both, but either way, David Wroblewski relocates the tragedy of a Danish prince to a dog-breeding farm in Wisconsin.

I believe what I enjoyed most about the book was making the connections between the two works. For instance, Edgar Sawtelle, Wroblewski's Hamlet, is mute, a poetic recreation of the original Hamlet's loss of a voice due to his lack of power and disturbed mental state. Through the translation, I also found myself discovering new perspectives on Shakespeare's motivations for Hamlet, and I came away with a better understanding of the original work. In the end, though, although I knew Hamlet was the foundation, I wasn't prepared for the whole-scale tragedy that plays out. I suppose that also speaks to Wroblewski's success as an author: through his depiction of Edgar, the character becomes much more sympathetic and his tragic tale much more poignant. A true literary journey, but before you start, brace yourself for where you'll end up!

Vacation!

Woohoo! We're off for Maine in the morning, and I'm excited about getting away for a few days and eating food that I don't have to cook. A little nervous too, about going away with the family. We've not spent this much time together in years, and I've been worrying about whether or not we'll like each other still. Fortunately, family doesn't have to like you, they just have to love you.

Beautiful trip Sunday and Monday through southern Indiana, where it was green and still and hilly. And taking a bath in a tub you don't have to clean (especially when you have water as hard as ours) is almost as good as eating a meal you don't have to prepare. We passed the Jug Rock near Shoals, Indiana, which was really unusual. This picture, compliments of Wikipedia, is from a 1920s postcard of the area, I believe. Good pizza at Bobe's in Washington, Indiana, where they're also generous with their oatmeal raisin cookies, and then a long drive home.

Tomorrow we fly to Manchester, New Hampshire and then drive to Fryeburg, Maine for a couple nights at the Admiral Peary House. I'm looking forward to all the touristy things we plan to do - the Conway Scenic Railroad, the Mt. Washington Auto Road, and moose-watching in Gorham, NH. After that, we're going to spend a night on the coast at Five Gables Inn, where we'll hopefully just do some lounging by the fire, watching the bay, and drinking tea. It's possibly my favorite place in the world, and normally when we've been there, we've got so much going on that we don't get to just sit and enjoy it. (But we have plans to spend a few days there this fall, too, just lazing around and eating big breakfasts!)

It will be good to be home again, too: putting up my retractable clothesline, finishing mulching the back flowerbeds, working on getting through several work trips in June, but now it's time to dig the suitcase out of the closet, pat the kitties on the head and check my "things to do before leaving home" list!

It Happens

Our cool spring has been such a gentle one for the little green growy things. The clematis is climbing the mailbox in exactly the cliched fashion that I had hoped for, the new lilac is settling in nicely, and the petunias are happily oblivious to the scorching they'll be in for in a few months. That must be the nice thing about annuals - if they had personalities, they'd likely be optimists, because they just simply don't know any better. Hostas are gradually spreading out in the back beds, and they make me wish I were a mouse or even a spider (*shudder*), so that I could crawl under those seamless verdant leaves and look out at the world through green light. The simple sturdy nature of hostas suggests that as perennials, they take the long view of things. Time passes, rain falls, autumn comes, and so it goes.

Gardening is a gradual process here, and while it's a result of small bank accounts, I like to feel slightly superior about it. We only have so much to spend on improvements each year, and so we buy smaller versions of plants for less money. The big payoff is not this season or even next season for us, but maybe a couple years down the road yet. A person would think we were annuals, with this kind of optimism.

Progress is slow, especially this year with the peonies. I say "peonies," but in reality, there's really only one: a scrubby, weedy thing that most people would take out with a weedeater without a second thought. But, I continue to insist that there is potential. Maybe next year. Gardening seems to be good for me in this respect. I have to take the long view, to wait, to trust, to expect the positive as well as the negative. As with life, all of the factors aren't in my control, but the evenhandedness of nature lets me believe that I have better odds than most gamblers. Bad things (aphids, droughts, nibbly rabbits) will happen, but nature will also offer good things (sun, rain, compost). Maybe this is why there is an unopened bag of 7 dust in the barn - introducing chemicals into the situation seems unsportsmanlike, cheating, putting your thumb on the scales.

Gardening seems to promote a balanced view of the good and ill in the world, and either way, the situation is reduced to "It happens." Bugs happen. So does sunshine. Perhaps that perspective is only one of the things the move away from land has cost us. Gardening reduces the frustrations of life to a microcosm. We do our best, sometimes things fail; we do less than our best, sometimes there's no harm done. The world doesn't always pause to reward our best efforts, but our lack of effort doesn't exactly throw the globe off its axis either. The future is not predictable, and we can worry and plan and be anxious, but it will remain inscrutable.

You watch and worry over a garden, and you begin to gain a sense of your place in the pecking order of things. We only control so much, we do what we can or what we will, and then things happen: seedlings or crows, beans or blight. Either way, we'll have to deal with the outcome. Sometimes, we get what we want, sometimes we don't. It happens.

Poets and Rats

Mother's Day isn't a lot of fun if you're not a mother and you don't have a mother. It tends to be like Valentine's Day was when you were a boyfriendless teen - you really just want to wear black, stay home, eat comfort food and be left alone. You're not able to just forget, to just let it slip past like an old anniversary. Hallmark commercials, road signs, store sales, everything gears you up to be sentimental about something either long-lost or little-desired.

Maybe it's just me. My mother's been "gone" almost twenty years now, but she wasn't always easy when she was here. I wrestle with that enough without being reminded every May. I don't blame her, really; not that it does any good to have unresolved feelings toward resolved issues. Some people just don't come into the world with any emotional skin. It's not their fault, it's not always something that can be rectified: life just causes some people pain, even the beautiful parts. Poignant, maybe - everything is poignant when you have no skin. My mother always seemed like one of those people, and all of life seemed to either fall short of her expectations or overwhelm her. Even with almost two decades to try to make sense of this, it doesn't make her memory any easier to hold up to the light for examination. That's been one of the hard lessons of my life: understanding things doesn't make them prettier or lighter to carry.

I always think of her in terms of one of the Stage Manager's lines from Our Town. When Emily asks him, "Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?--every, every minute?", he responds, "No. Saints and poets, maybe--they do some." The awareness of life, realizing it, is so awe-inspiring as to be terrifying. It's too much to go through life so aware, and when you have no skin, you are that aware all the time. It's like looking at the sun.

I think of the rest of us in far less romantic terms, as rats in a Skinner box. Not terribly complimentary perhaps, but I once read about rats placed in Skinner boxes equipped with a button or a lever. Some rats pushed the button, and every time, they got a pellet of food, a reward. Apparently, it was too easy, and they lost interest pretty quickly. Others pushed the button, but nothing ever happened - no food, no response, and they also gave up what seemed like a pointless exercise. The rats that became the most engaged were the ones that got rewards randomly - sometimes they got pellets when they pushed, sometimes nothing. Sometimes they were rewarded after two pushes, sometimes a dozen later, there had been no payoff. I envision them like little gamblers in a rat casino, hunched over their buttons, oblivious of the passage of time, thinking that the next time, the next push, it would pay off, it would work, it would be the big one.

Making Mom happy was a little like that, and the randomness of it, the inconsistency of the response, turned me into a button-pushing junkie. The next thing I tried might make her happy, might relieve her discomfort. Or it might not. I was thirteen when she died, and looking back, I only remember feeling relieved. I felt relieved, in part, for me. I was transported out of the Skinner box, away from the lever that I tried by turns to win over and to ignore. It wasn't an option any longer, and with the lever gone, the responsibility to attend to it, to push it, was gone.

But, I felt relief for her, too. I knew that she wasn't hurting any longer, that she wasn't pushing whatever lever or button she had in her life, trying to get some response that she needed. Every Mother's Day, I miss her. Some years, I've been angry: at her, at the injustice, at God, but this year, I'm resigned. I may even be grateful. Even if she's not with me, she has what I would want her to have on Mother's Day - rest and peace and freedom from pushing a button, from waiting for a response.