I just finished Toni Morrison’s new novel, A Mercy. Which was amazing. Yet I now regret that, while I was reading it, I spent so much time trying to figure out the story. I believe that if I had just let myself succumb to the effect of the words, the story would have worked its way to me. Now [...]
Entries from November 2008
November 27, 2008
having eaten
Jane Hirshfield writes:
Having eaten the pears.
Having eaten
the black figs, the white figs. Eaten the apples.
Table be strewn.
Table be strewn with stems,
table with peelings of grapefruit and pleasure.
Table be strewn with pleasure,
what was here to be done having finished.
From “Spell to Be Said upon Departure”
The Lives of the Heart
November 26, 2008
concatenate
In Remembering the Bone House, Nancy Mairs writes,
“Here I develop that ability to concatenate events which characterizes human consciousness and makes ‘daily life’ possible.”
I had to look it up. To concatenate is to link together, as in a chain of events or things.
Here, in this space, we concatenate reading, writing, and life.
November 24, 2008
the yellow house
Remembering the Bone House is one of my all-time favorite books. Nancy Mairs wrote this memoir in 1989. It was out of print for a while, but then Beacon Press did a new printing in 1995, for which the author wrote a new preface. In it, she called this memoir ”the dearest of my books to me.”
Although here [...]
November 21, 2008
rough red brick
The Gathering, by Irish writer Anne Enright, won the 2007 Man Booker Prize. I read it in April. In this novel, the narrator describes her family of origin in terms of the labels we acquire, as families and as individuals in a family.
“The Hegartys didn’t start kissing until the late eighties and even then we stuck to Christmas.”
“There is [...]
November 19, 2008
folded
If I weren’t reading all of Rachel Cusk’s books to look at how her writing develops over time, I would not have finished her sixth book, In the Fold, published in 2005. As one reviewer wrote, “too little happened to too many people.” Or another, the book was “so lacking in anything to capture my interest that I couldn’t [...]
November 17, 2008
wonder
“I wonder what it would be like,” she said to me on one of those days that make you feel that you have chosen the right profession, “if I could once and for all get my mother out of my head.”
“Picture it,” I told her. “Tell me what it looks like.”
“It’s a big white room. [...]
November 15, 2008
companion
Just as Home, a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award in Fiction, has been called a companion to Gilead, this post is a companion to yesterday’s. Prompted by comments, I wanted to add that if you enjoyed Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson’s first novel, you might enjoy Home, her latest. In style of writing, Home more closely [...]
November 14, 2008
home
For anyone who enjoyed Gilead, Marilynne Robinson’s second novel, which won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, you will love her new novel, Home. For she has just crossed town, so to speak, and turned around to tell us the story from a different porch.
On page 29 of Gilead, narrated by John Ames, he tells us, “I [...]
November 11, 2008
who would you be
“That’s not what she means,” I said. “She means, like, we are what’s happened to us. So if you take away what’s happened to us, then, you know…Well, who would you be?”
“I’d be someone different.”
“Exactly.”
Dialogue from Nick Hornby’s A Long Way Down.
What is ironic about this bit of dialogue is that in the specific situation [...]
