Orhan Pamuk's Snow

This is my last post for a while, as the Hobgoblin and I are heading out to my parents' place in western New York state tomorrow. As they have very slow dial-up, I think I'll have to do without blogs for a few days. It'll be hard, but I'm going to try my best not to let it get to me. I'll be back by the middle or end of next week.

I finished Orhan Pamuk's Snow last night and was very impressed. It's a beautiful book and one that taught me a lot about Turkey and Turkish culture. I don't mean to make it sound didactic, but I do think that reading novels is a good way to get a sense of another country and culture. Snow dealt a lot with the conflict between Eastern and Western Europe -- the main character Ka has been in exile in Germany for many years and in the novel returns to the Turkish city of Kars, and throughout, he is faced with questions about what it means to have become westernized but not to be fully western. Connected with this cultural conflict is the religious one -- shortly after Ka arrives, the city of Kars undergoes a military coup, meant to keep religious conservatives from winning the upcoming election, and throughout the novel religious differences turn violent. Ka takes part in many philosophical and theological discussions about what it means to have given up his faith and about whether or not he has become an atheist.

Ka wanders the city and gets himself involved in adventures; he isn't all that interested in all the conflict going on around him -- he'd really rather write poems and talk to Ipek, the woman who is the real reason he has journeyed to Kars (the ostensible reason is to investigate a rash of suicides committed by young religiously conservative women who want to keep wearing their head scarves). All this is a way for Pamuk to write about religious and political conflict, but it's also a way for him to consider the relationship of the artist to the political world. It seems like nearly everybody in the novel has aspirations to be a writer; so many people Ka talked with had poems stashed away somewhere or used Ka to try to find a publisher for their work. The novel's closing section centers around a play, an incredibly loose adaptation of Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, which brings together all the novel's themes and works through the conflict the city is experiencing.

One thing I found particularly interesting is the way the narrator becomes a character himself, gradually talking about himself more and more as the story proceeds. The narrator's name is Orhan, making him a stand-in for the author himself, or perhaps another version of the author. At first I found this narratorial intrusion awkward; I wasn't sure who the narrator was supposed to be and what his relationship to Ka was. All this cleared up gradually, however, and by the end we know quite a lot about him and his presence in the novel adds a layer of complexity to it. His relationship with Ka reminds me of Richard Holmes's book Footsteps, which I'm currently in the middle of, and also a little bit of The Places in Between by Rory Stewart; in all these examples, one person is following in the footsteps of another, trying to puzzle together what that person's life is like and to see what that person saw. And then each person writes a book about it. In the case of Snow, the narrator is doing research on a novel about Ka, walking where Ka walked and talking to the people he knew. He follows the exact route Ka took on a book tour, staying in the places he stayed and asking audiences what they remember about Ka.

All this brings me back to travel metaphors, the subject of an earlier post, because part of the narrator's writing process is traveling (which is true for Holmes and Stewart as well), but writing about travel is itself also a kind of travel (one could say all writing is a kind of travel), as the writer follows the map of the journey, this time in words. And it's true for the reader too. Following in someone's footsteps can be done by crossing a landscape but it can also happen as a book gets written and as it gets read. So the narrator tries to relive Ka's life twice -- once by following his path through western Europe and Turkey and another by writing about the experience.

There's another sense in which the novel is about writing itself. Pamuk talks about what a novel can and can't do; in one scene, the novel's narrator talks with another character, Fazil, who is troubled that the narrator plans to write a novel about him and the other residents of Kars. This is what Fazil says to the narrator:

"But I can tell from your face that you want to tell the people who read your novels how poor we are and how different we are from them. I don't want you to put me into a novel like that."

"Why not?"

"Because you don't even know me, that's why! Even if you got to know me and described me as I am, your Western readers would be so caught up in pitying me for being poor that they wouldn't have a chance to see my life. For example, if you said I was writing an Islamist science-fiction novel, they'd just laugh. I don't want to be described as someone people smile at out of pity and compassion."

In another scene, the narrator asks Fazil what he would like him to put in his novel, and this is Fazil's answer:

"If you write a book set in Kars and put me in it, I'd like to tell your readers not to believe anything you say about me, anything you say about any of us. No one could understand us from so far away."

"But no one believes in that way what he reads in a novel," I said.

"Oh, yes, they do," he cried. "If only to see themselves as wise and superior and humanistic, they need to think of us as sweet and funny, and convince themselves that they sympathize with the way we are and even love us. But if you would put in what I've just said, at least your readers will keep a little room for doubt in their minds."

So we come up against the problem of whether a novelist can capture the truth of somebody's experience so that a reader can really understand it, so that the reader can get beyond expectations and stereotypes and keep from pitying the poor people of Kars, and so that the novel won't just be another way of reinforcing the separation between east and west. I opened this post talking about what I learned from the novel, so I guess I do believe that reading novels can tell us something true about other people's experiences and can help people bridge cultures, but I appreciate this warning about what a complicated process it can be.

Barbara Noble's Doreen

I finished Barbara Noble's 1946 novel Doreen this weekend and found it quite interesting; I'm grateful to my new book club for getting me to read it, as I'd never heard of it before. I can't say I thought it was a brilliant novel, but it was a fun read and it gave insight into an interesting time period.

It's set in World War II and is about what happens to children evacuated from London; Doreen is a 9 year old whose mother has decided she has taken her chances keeping Doreen in the city for too long, and when the opportunity arises to place her in a good home in the country, she takes it. Of course, this is difficult for mother and daughter both, but Doreen settles into her new home fairly quickly.

Here is the problem, however, since Doreen's new family -- the childless Geoffrey and Francie Osbourne -- quickly fall in love with her, and Doreen's mother, when she finds out about it, becomes jealous. Doreen is caught between her love of her mother and her affection for the Osbournes and enjoyment of her new life. The novel centers around this conflict; most of the adults are well-meaning, but they find themselves at odds with one another and the unwilling Doreen must try to keep peace.

The novel is interesting because of its depiction of London and the countryside during the war; Noble gives descriptions of bomb shelters and air raids in the city, and the quieter but still unsettled life of the country. Even more so, it's interesting because of the class dynamics among the characters. Doreen's mother is working class; she cleans offices and struggles to keep up a respectable life while living in a decaying house turned into apartments on a seedy street. Doreen's mother and father are separated, which makes things even more complicated. The Osbournes, on the other hand, are comfortably middle class. They live on a hill above a town, a situation meant to indicate their status relative to the town's working class residents.

So Doreen experiences new comforts with the Osbournes -- her own room, a garden, occasional presents -- and it becomes harder and harder to imagine her going back to her cramped London life. Her mother is torn between wanting to keep her daughter safe and fearing that she will lose her loyalty and affection. The book showed me a little of the attitudes toward class distinctions at the time -- surprisingly strict, I thought -- and it probed the psychological effects of the disruptions of war and evacuation very effectively.

It's a slow-moving novel; I wondered for a long time when something exciting was going to happen. It did, eventually, but this book is more meditative than action-packed. It isn't a stunning novel, but in its quiet way, it's quite good.

Books I've finished

I finished listening to the audio version of Jacqueline Winspear's Pardonable Lies: A Maisie Dobbs Novel, and I thought it was a lot of fun -- I like Maisie a lot and the story was good. I thought perhaps the ending dragged on a bit long; I could feel things wrapping up for a good two of the nine CDs I was listening to, but that was the only flaw.

One of the things that intriqued me about the novel was its touch --just a touch really -- of eastern thought. The implication seems to be that Maisie's particular insightfulness comes from a mix of her "western" rationality and her "eastern" spirituality and insight. She meditates, she's gotten training from someone of eastern origin -- I have to be vague because I listened to the book and so can't go back and check my source -- she's acutely aware of other people's states of mind and how these are reflected in their bodies. She's not a hard-nosed detective type but finds success through intuition as much as logic. There's something just a little bit mysterious and mystical about her.

I'm now realizing how gendered this is. Of course she's not a hard-nosed detective! She combines "masculine" strength and resolve and logic with "feminine" compassion and intuition and that's what makes her so good at what she does.

I liked this book enough to want to seek out other Maisie Dobbs novels, perhaps also in audio. I must see what my library has.

I've also finished Proust's In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower. I find myself with little to say about it, although I continue to enjoy reading the novel a lot. It's so rich I should have much to say about it; I think, though, that I have been letting it wash over me and haven't tried to back away to get some critical distance in order to write something. Perhaps this is a sign of defeat -- maybe I should try to get some critical distance on it -- but I don't really have the energy, and, more importantly, I'm enjoying the experience plenty as it is.

I've begun Barbara Noble's novel Doreen for a book club meeting next week, at which I'll meet Emily. This will be fun!

How do I read Cortazar's Hopscotch?

I just got a copy of Julio Cortazar's novel Hopscotch through Bookmooch, and although the truth of the matter is that I won't read it for quite a while (not because I don't want to, but because of all my other reading obligations and desires), I was intrigued by its form -- and also set a bit on edge by it.

The novel comes with a "Table of Instructions" (which will make more sense if you know the novel has 155 chapters):

In its own way, this book consists of many books, but two books above all.

The first can be read in a normal fashion and it ends with Chapter 56, at the close of which there are three garish little stars which stand for the words The End. Consequently, the reader may ignore what follows with a clean conscience.

The second should be read by beginning with Chapter 73 and then following the sequence indicated at the end of each chapter. In case of confusion or forgetfulness, one need only consult the following list:

73-1-2-116-3-84-4-71-5 [I won't give you all the numbers, but they continue on for 10 lines or so of text].

Each chapter has its number at the top of every right-hand page to facilitate the search.

I'm not sure what to make of this, and I don't know how I'll read the book when I do get to it. The notion of reading the first 56 out of 155 chapters and then quitting with "a clean conscience" seems highly unrealistic, given my intense desire to finish books -- finish them all the way to the end. There's no way I'd quit after 56 out of 155 chapters with a clean conscience.

But following the jumbled-up sequence of chapters doesn't seem quite the thing to do either. It upsets my notions of how to read a book.

The other option, of course, is to disregard the Table of Instructions and read the thing from cover to cover in the normal way. But ... would that work? Would it make any sense at all?

I'm curious about what the different ways of reading would be like. I suppose there's another option, which is to read the novel in the two ways the author describes: once through the end of chapter 56, and then once following the jumbled sequence of chapters. That way I'd know what the two experiences are like, and I'd be following instructions like the obedient reader I tend to be. But that would take a lot of time and would require re-reading large chunks of the novel. Maybe even I am not prepared to be that obedient.

I realize that my uneasy feelings must be part of Cortazar's point; he's making me aware of my conventionality in reading, my obedience, my feeling that I must complete books, my need to have the experience I think the author wants me to have. He's making me question the traditional arc of a story, the convention of reading from cover to cover, and my assumptions of what must be included to make a story complete (at least I think he's doing these things -- can't really say until I read the thing I suppose).

Has anybody read this novel before, and, if so, how did you do it? If not, which reading method would you choose?

Marguerite Duras' The Lover

I finished The Lover over the weekend. It's a very short novel, more like a novella, really, at 115 pages, and a fascinating read. If you're interested in the novel, you should check out Litlove's post on Duras. There she discusses The Lover plus Duras' life and reputation.

It's a story about a girl of fifteen who lives in Indochina with a difficult, poor family -- her mother and two brothers -- and who has an affair with older Chinese man. But the novel doesn't stay focused solely on the affair; it skips around in time, telling stories of the narrator's later life in France and of what happens to her family members. We watch her as she realizes she wants to be a writer, and as she struggles with her love/hate relationship with her mother, and we see all this from different perspectives in time. At the beginning of the novel Duras describes the beginning of the affair, and at the novel's end she describes the lovers' fate, but in between, Duras takes us to many different years, often abruptly with rapid switches.

The narrator's voice is simple and spare; the sentences seem empty of feeling, although emotion lurks under the surface, unexpressed but present. Here is a sample (from early in the book -- I'm not giving anything away):

My younger brother died in three days, of bronchial pneumonia. His heart gave out. It was then that I left my mother. It was during the Japanese occupation. Everything came to an end that day. I never asked her any more questions about our childhood, about herself. She died, for me, of my younger brother's death. So did my elder brother. I never got over the horror they inspired in me then. They don't mean anything to me any more. I don't know any more about them since that day.

The voice is halting and obviously pained but also detached, as though she's trying to make sense of her experience but only can repeat sentences about the meaninglessness of it all.

The narrator is isolated; she feels loyalty to her family and yet the family fails her in many ways, she attends school but has few friends, and she quickly gets a bad reputation because of her sexual experience. She travels to and from school in an odd outfit that marks her as the outsider she feels herself to be.

The love affair is described in a similarly matter-of-fact manner; it is all-consuming -- the narrator spends all her time with her lover and sneaks home late at night -- but it seems emotionless. We learn very little about the lover, except that his father refuses to let him marry the narrator.

This is largely the story: the novel tells how the lovers meet, gives us some stories about the difficult family dynamics, describes the narrator's desire to be a writer, and moves forward in time now and then to give glimpses of the narrator's future life. What The Lover excels at is creating a mood; through its shifts in time and its short, simple sentences, it creates a feeling of a writer haunted by her past, exploring it but grazing across the surface of it rather than digging in deep.

Set in Indochina in the 1930s, the novel also gives a sense of what it was like to be a French family far away from their home country. It describes race and class tensions, as well as familial ones.

Although the story is a dark one, I enjoyed the experience of reading it; there's something compelling in the voice of the narrator, haunted by the past as she is. I don't usually like prose styles one might call "lyrical," as one can call the prose in this book, but the blunt honesty and courage of the narrator saves it for me.

The novel is largely aubiographical; I'm curious to find out more about Duras and her life. She seems like a fascinating figure.

This book is part of my "From the Stacks" challenge -- one down, four to go. Next up will be Alice Munro's Runaway.

Audio books: experiment update

Last week I wrote about experimenting with listening to audio books while riding on the trainer. My update is that I haven't actually conducted the experiment yet; fortunately for me, the weather has been good enough that I could ride outside -- yesterday, for example, I rode outside for two hours and although my toes were a bit cold when I returned, I did fine.

I have been listening to my chosen audio book, however, Jacqueline Winspear's Pardonable Lies: A Maisie Dobbs Novel; I've just been doing it in the car. I've got a half hour commute to work, and while I usually listen to NPR to keep up with the news, I was so excited about the novel that I decided to listen to it right away.

I used to listen to audio books all the time, back when I had a really horrendous commute of 1 1/2 hours. They were what kept me going; I could only listen to NPR for so long before the stories started to repeat and I started to go crazy. Listening to Winspear's book now, I'm reminded of how much I like listening to audio books, and how I missed listening to them after we moved and I didn't have as much time for them anymore (although I definitely did not miss that long commute). For most of the books I listened to, I liked the reader -- which is crucial in an audio book -- and I felt like the reader became a character him or herself, one that I could get to know a bit. I found myself responding much more emotionally to an audio book than to a regular book. Sometimes I'd be crying as I drove down the highway. I wonder if anybody ever noticed. I'm not sure what this means, exactly. Is my reading with a regular book detached and more cerebral somehow? There's something about a real voice telling a story that makes it seem intimate and very real.

The reader for the Maisie Dobbs novel is great; I love her voice and it's fun listening to her do different British accents. For all I know she may be butchering some of them, but it all sounds good to these American ears.

And I'm enjoying the novel too. I don't read mysteries all that often, and now I'm wondering why. Luckily, all I have to do is check out Danielle's post over here to find a whole bunch of them that look good. I'll write in more detail about the novel when I've finished it, but so far, I like the main character a lot, and I'm interested in the time period -- it's set in 1930 and it deals with the aftermath of World War I. One of Maisie's assignments is to investigate the deaths of two British soldiers in France in the war. And it's got an element of eastern mysticism and philosophy that's intriguing. More on that later.