Rainy Day Travels

THE RAIN is raining all around,
It falls on field and tree,
It rains on the umbrellas here,
And on the ships at sea.
- Robert Louis Stevenson, “The Rain”

It was raining metaphorical cats and dogs this morning. Sarah had no interest in playing with them, so we had no big outdoor adventure with which to start our day.

Tuesday had its own frustrations, chief among them that of a technology challenge—specifically, knowing exactly what I wanted to do and attempting repeatedly and failing to achieve it. Do you ever want to scream, “Just give me paper, paste and scissors!”? That’s how I felt. This morning it was back to the drawing board--er, screen (damn!)--and success not nearly so elusive. Practice and experience do help....

Taking a break from frustration yesterday, I tossed away my semi-resolve to save the last chapter of the Jerry Dennis book for March and dived right into “The Scent of Spring.” Luckily for me, most of that chapter was still focused on winter, and I say “luckily” because the whole book has sharpened my anticipation for cold and snow, short days and long, dark nights, howling winds and drifts across the driveway. Crazy? It will all come, whether I anticipate or dread it, so why not welcome the season? The Windward Shore has blessed me in advance.

But I still wasn’t ready to return to the screen and the stubborn, demanding programs after one wonderful, last chapter of a beautiful book. Computer programs only speak their own language, you know. They make no attempt to understand mine. The HELP function can only help me if I know what the program calls what I want to do. It must be this way, I realize, and yet--.

What to do? I picked up another book. One of my customers had brought in a box of paperback books for trade credit and recommended Half of a Yellow Sun, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, a novel set in Nigeria in the 1960s. My first job in Michigan in 1967 was at the University of Nigeria Program office at Michigan State University. All those bills of lading to Nsukka! A slide show by one of the visiting Nigerian professors! All of us wanted to go, but Adiche’s novel tells of the turbulence and violence of that period. She has, moreover, the gift of being able to get inside all of a diverse cast of characters and show us the world through their eyes: an intelligent young boy come to the city from a country village, a wealthy and beautiful young woman in love with a Nigerian professor, and a shy Englishman trying to find his place in the world. Through these multiple perspectives the confusion is not dispelled, but we see that it was (as it always is) part of the cultural and political situation. And we yearn for the safety and happiness of the characters as the story unrolls. I have only reached the beginning of Part II, so that’s all I will tell you for now, but I’ll give you a tiny sample of the author’s beautiful writing:

There was something polished about her voice, about her; she was like the stone that lay right below a gushing spring, rubbed smooth by years and years of sparkling water, and looking at her was similar to finding that stone, knowing that there were so few like it.

That is the character Olanna, seen through the eyes of her lover’s houseboy, Ugwu.

Well, then, later, at home, after dinner and our evening movie, “Iron and Silk,” set in 1980s Hangzhou, China, I picked up A Bintel Brief: Sixty Years of Letters from the Lower East Side to the Jewish Daily Forward and reached the end of that book of letters to the newspaper editor. Again, confusion, uncertainty, heartache—as you would expect from letter-writers asking for advice. What grief human beings give themselves and each other! And yet, I also think, with what courage do they go on, day after day, year after year!

Books and movies let me travel the world and travel through time, as well. David and I enjoyed the trip we took together to Hangzhou, and I was thoroughly involved with my temporary “friends” in Nsukka and New York. I feel tenderness for the people I meet in them, fictional or real, living or dead. They help me understand myself and those around me. They remind me how simple and fortunate my life is, too.

New at Dog Ears Books today: Adam Gopnik’s latest book, The Table Comes First: Family, France, and the Meaning of Food; brand-new reprints of The Borrowers, The Borrowers Afield, The Borrowers Afloat, and The Borrowers Aloft; and, finally, an audio box set (12 CDs) of the new memoir by Roger Ebert, Life Itself, 14 hours of listening for your next long road trip.

What? You're going on a real trip? More real than my travels, do you think? Let's compare notes!

Assigned Reading: Bits and Pieces

Somehow I became responsible for two different reading group assignments that have discussions within a week of each other, so what with the groups and making preparations for the Jerry Dennis book launch and Fall Festival, it's a busy time. No pictures today. Sorry!

For the small group reading Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, I sent these questions:

I suggest we focus for this work on the poet's voice. What do you think of the way Whitman portrays America? How does the poet come across as a man? What did you like and/or dislike about Whitman based on this book? Do you feel that his poetry was sincere?

To another small group meeting to discuss Abraham Verghese’s Cutting for Stone, I suggested we begin with these:

(1) The twin theme opens and closes the story. What did you think of the way it was developed? What did it add to the novel? Did any aspects of the author's development of the twin theme delight/surprise/disappoint you? Why?

(2) Who was your favorite character and why?

(3) The cultures of Ethiopia, America and India take distant second place to the culture of medicine as presented in this novel. Do you think this is true for surgeons? What other groups might it also be true of? [Obviously I was too lazy to rewrite this sentence to avoid the preposition at the end!]

(4) Some people think this book would have been stronger or better if it had been shorter. What do you think? If you were the editor, would you have asked the novelist to make cuts--and, if so, where?

Years ago one of these groups chose to read read Wangeri Maathai’s memoir, Unbowed. Now I see that Nobel Peace Prize winner Maathai has died, age 71. One thing is certain: while alive, she did her work. What is your most important life's work? What is mine? Are we doing it?

Still Here, Still Reading

Time constraints and technical difficulties have conspired to keep my posting to a minimum lately. Now at least one of those problems has been resolved (hint: time is still full and fleeting!), so here I am again. Still reading Still reading Leaves of Grass, but other things, too. One is a fast-paced action novel from Botswana from Australian writer Tony Park, but unfortunately for the rest of you, Park’s books (the one I’m reading is the seventh, and he has a new one out since then) have not yet been published in this country.

We in the U.S. and here in Michigan do not want for exciting words on paper, however, as the new issue of Michigan Quarterly Review makes abundantly clear. You won’t want to miss this special issue entitled “The Great Lakes: Love Song and Lament,” its title taken from one of two essays by Jerry Dennis that make up part of this remarkable compendium of prose, poetry and photography that opens with two poems, in original Anishinaabemowin on one page and in English translation on the facing page, by Margaret Noori. There is so much in this beautiful, slim little volume, every page moving and every line quotable, that I must urge you to get out and find it for yourself. If you’re near Northport, naturally I hope you will stop in at Dog Ears Books....

The new MQR another reminder, too, that the Jerry Dennis essays inside are only a preview of his new book due out this fall, The Windward Shore, which will have its Leelanau launch party at Dog Ears on Friday, October 7, from 5-7 p.m. I’d say “I can’t wait,” except that before then we’ll be hosting Dee Blair, whose garden column many of you have enjoyed for years in the Record-Eagle. Dee will be signing the first of her books of collected columns (there will be one book for each gate in her lovely Sixth Street garden), The View From Sunnybank, at Dog Ears on on Friday, September 9, from 1-3 p.m.. Gardeners—from wannabe through negligent to expert—please take note and mark your calendars.

Between Blair and Dennis, David and Sarah and I will be squeezing in a little “summer” vacation time, making our usual September jaunt up to the U.P., so if you’re coming to Northport and want to make sure we’re open, you might want to call first. Bruce will probably cover the shop for part of the time that I’m gone.

Great Lakes. Michigan, September almost here. What more could anyone ask? Only time outdoors to enjoy it! Okay, so my time outdoors today starts off with stalking tomato hornworms. Sound like fun? "How do you kill them?" David asked. "I let Nature do it," I told him. I collect the little beasties and relocate them to the dusty driveway, far from the garden. There they can (1) dessicate, (2) starve, (3) eat something else, (4) be eaten by birds or (5) be run over by an orchard tractor. I don't care. Just so they're not eating my tomatoes. And meanwhile, on today's shopping list are apples, cider vinegar and golden raisins, so I can chop up green tomatoes to make green tomato "mincemeat" to can for fall pies. Yum!

Detour Through the Kalahari: “It may be that the day is just the dream of the night....”

Before the first of our rains finally arrived last week, the grass was parched and brown, and the vegetable garden needed watering every day, but the dry spell that made the cornfields suffer was good for cherry harvest and could hardly be called a drought--nothing like conditions on the opening page of Laurens van der Post’s The Heart of the Hunter (1961):

We were still deep in the Kalahari, moving slowly through a difficult tract of country into which the rains as yet had been unable to break. Since it was already late in the year, the plight of the desert was frightening. Almost all the grass was gone and only the broken –off stubble of another season left here and there, so thin, bleached, and translucent that its shadow was little more than a darker form of sunlight. The trees, most of them leafless, stood exposed against the penetrating light like bone in a X-ray plate. The little leaf there was looked burnt out and ready to crumble to ash on touch. Under such poor cover the deep sand was more conspicuous than ever, saffron at dawn and dusk, and sulphur in between. There was no shade anywhere solid enough to cool its burning surface. What there was, seemed scribbled on it by the pointed thorns like script on some Dead Sea scroll.

In quiet moments during the day and the dark hours when sleep flees, I have been living in the Kalahari and learning from Laurens van der Post. The excerpt above is only the second paragraph of the book, after a short introductory paragraph of two sentences, so you see how quickly the author plunges his reader into the atmosphere he wants to convey. Van der Post does not mistake the desert for empty land. The Kalahari, we learn as we read, is alive with clouds, stars, plants, trees, people and stories, and the traveler who guides us through it does so with a fine sensibility and love for everything and everyone he meets there.

I know that, ever since I can remember, I have been attracted by deserts in a way I do not properly understand. I have always loved above all others what I call Cinderella country. I know of nothing more exciting to my imagination than discovering in the waste land, which the established world rejects as ugly and sterile, a beauty and promise of rare increase not held out anywhere else in life.

Most of all, he appreciates the culture of the Bushmen. At its most superficial, then, The Heart of the Hunter (sequel to The Lost World of the Kalahari) tells a story of travel through the Kalahari and conclusions the author draws from his experiences, with the next level down his focus on the Bushman, but there is depth beyond a recounting of encounters and tales told. Van der Post’s third level is his search for nothing less than the meaning of life and his finding it in Africa and in the Bushman’s oral culture, from which he draws parallels to cultures and religions around the world. Finally, in all of these stories, as well as in the poetry of Blake and Goethe, he finds the reconciliation of opposites, the reunion of black and white, man and nature, intellect and emotion, life and death.

The Bushman before he came into conflict with European culture and law, with his spirit safely contained in his traditional stories, says van der Post, knew nothing of “that isolation which secretly eats away the courage and individuality of modern man.” Rather—

Armed only with his native wit and his bow and arrow, wherever he went he belonged, feeling kinship with everyone and everything he met on the way from birth to death. I myself would define his ‘participation mystique’ as a sense of being known; wherever he went he felt known, whatever he encountered, starlight, cloud, tree, or animal, knew him.

Those of my readers unfamiliar with van der Post’s writings will no doubt be thinking skeptically about now, Isn’t this just one more book romanticizing of the ‘primitive,’ of which we have known so many? Does the author conclude that we of the literate West are doomed to alienation because there is no way to return to our mythical ‘origins’? Happily—although not at all easily—this is not where Laurens van der Post would lead and leave us. The structure of this book echoes the much longer work of Marcel Proust. Part One of The Heart of the Hunter is “World Lost,” Part Two, “World Between,” and Part Three, “World Regained.” We can, the author believes (along with Proust), “regain” a feeling for the meaning of life and for belonging in the world. All it takes is that we do not let our commitment to words bar the contribution of images to our sense of belonging, that our appreciation for science not blind us to the grace to be found in imagination, mythic narrative and poetry.

Laurens van der post himself (1906-1996) was blessed with the soul of a poet and with a childhood that nurtured that soul. His attunement to the world around him was extraordinary. There is scarcely a sentence in this book unworthy of being quoted, but I will close today with a short excerpt from near the beginning, since in the beginning is the end and in the end the beginning:

The last red glow in the west died down behind the purple range of cloud, and it went utterly dark beyond our camp. Our own fires rose higher than ever, straining like a gothic spire towards the stars which were appearing in unusual numbers. Soon the stars were great and loud with light until the sky trembled like an electric bell, while every now and then from the horizon the lightning swept a long sort of lighthouse beam over us. At last the Bushmen stood up from their work with a deep sigh of satisfaction and wiped their hands on stubbles of grass. ... As always their fires were more circumspect than our own. Ours was a cathedral of flames, theirs little more than slender candles burning in a night devout under stars.

The sight stirred me deeply....

Parallelism, Random Examples of; Thoughts on

In a grocery checkout line in Cincinnati with a fellow graduate student, I noticed that the clerk’s curiosity was awakened when she heard my friend’s speech. To American ears, her English—one of two native languages she had grown up speaking—sounded accented.

“Where are you from?” came the inevitable question.

“Africa,” my friend answered laconically.

As we left the store, I asked her why she gave such a vague, general answer, why she didn’t say she was from Ethiopia.

“Most Americans? They don’t care. All they know is Africa.” She was also smiling, I should add. My friend was not a bitter or resentful person.

Over the years, again and again, I have noticed Americans referring to Africa as if it were a country rather than a continent. And yet they would never say of themselves that they are from “North America,” and if their question to a foreigner were answered with the name “Europe,” they would press for a specific country. Only when it comes to the continent of Africa does the parallelism break down, and when I hear examples, I am embarrassed for my fellow Americans.

Climbing and clambering. The ‘b’ is silent in the first, and pronouncing the second with a silent ‘b’ is perfectly acceptable, also. I prefer it that way for the parallelism. (Scrambling, on the other hand, needs its ‘b’ sound because of the ‘l’ that follows.) It wouldn’t surprise me to learn there are differences in the pronunciation of the word clamber from one part of the United States to another, and it may be one of those words (I’m not looking it up, but you are welcome to do so) about which the English apply a rule different from ours. The English so often have their own way of pronouncing words. Schedule, for example. Countries sharing a language, like siblings sharing a bedroom, are in frequent disagreement over what is allowable, sharing and dispute being two sides of one coin.

Foralongtimeinhumanhistorylanguagewaswrittenwithoutpunctuationandwithoutseparationbetweenwords. That we separate words now and punctuate sentences is a matter of convention. Some find the fluidity of language maddening, but one might as well be maddened by the evolution of plant and animal species.


Part of my garden this year is planted in the ground, part in straw bales, and a few items in wooden boxes. In the boxes are chard, spinach, kale and leaf lettuce, the lettuce only in double rows. Parallel rows. The boxes, as you can see, are placed end to end rather than parallel, for easier care, and as the greens have come in, the original seed rows have disappeared beneath the plants. Rabbits—amazingly, incredibly—have not bothered anything in the boxes. Yet!

Very young children are said to engage in “parallel play,” which means that they are playing in solitary fashion in one another’s vicinity—for example, two children in the same room, playing on the floor, each absorbed in his or her own make-believe. Around the yard in summer, David and I often engage in parallel work. When one of us finishes a job, we show off our accomplishment and invite the other’s appreciation.

Teachers of composition and speech are keen on parallelism. I like it, too. I feel in it an aspect of the more general idea of equality, something we feel before we conceptualize it at all.

I was surprised to finish reading Paul Auster's Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure so quickly. There were so many pages left, two-thirds of the physical book or so, but three appendices had swelled the volume. I didn't read the appendices. I did put the memoir on my "Books Read" list. This has nothing whatsoever to do with parallelism. So while we're off the subject, how do you feel about arugula?

Book Review: HOW TO READ THE AIR

“All angry men are depressingly the same, and my father was no different.”

The father in Dinaw Mengestu’s second novel, How to Read the Air (Riverhead, 2010), fled from Ethiopia to Sudan, stowed away on a cargo ship to Europe and eventually found his way to Peoria, Illinois. There he was eventually joined by the girl he had married in Addis Ababa but hadn’t seen for three years. Not surprisingly, the two were strangers to one another. The narrator is their son, Jonas Woldemariam, who tells his father and mother’s story along with his own.

The novel opens with Yosef and Mariam. The parents’ story is presented in small segments through the book as a slow-motion time capsule, the essence of their troubled marriage distilled by their son into a single day before he, Jonas, was born, before his father had yet been told of his wife’s pregnancy, a day on which Yosef and Mariam left their Peoria home on what was intended to be a vacation trip to Nashville.

Chapter II opens with a flash-forward:

Six months before I left my wife, Angela, and began retracing my parents’ route through the Midwest, my father passed away in the boardinghouse he had been living in for ten years.

In their respective childhoods, Angela’s father disappeared from her life without explanation, and Jonas sought to escape his father’s violence by making himself invisible, so it is not surprising that this young couple finds marriage difficult. On their first social occasion together, they discover a delight in playful invention and, over time, invent a shared history for themselves, but in the end it is the creative, invented stories Jonas tells her that erode Angela’s trust in him. By constantly retreating from her and from truth, he pushes her away.

Jonas’s most elaborate invention, however, is not one he creates for or with Angela but the one he tells his high school English students. Setting aside course work, he starts in one day and continues for several days, spinning out a fictional history for his father in the same way he had formerly elaborated on the asylum requests of clients in the immigration center where he and Angela met. In this way, the author lets the narrator give his father two pasts, one day of an unhappy and violent marriage, and months of fear and poverty as a displaced person.

Is the single day less invented than the saga? The way I read the book, the imagined detail Jonas gives to the slowly unrolling day in his parents’ life allows him to see his distant mother as an individual, with her own hopes and dreams, fears, disappointments and moments of happiness, while the twists and turns of the saga he invents for his angry father does the same for that parent. The truth is that Jonas received little in the way of concern or affection from either parent and had no siblings or friends to cushion his childhood loneliness. A lonely child, he naturally carries his defenses with him into adulthood.

...I had always suspected that at some point in my life, while still living with my parents and their daily battles, I had gone numb as a tactical strategy, perhaps at exactly that moment when we’re supposed to be waking up to the world and stepping into our own.

All that said, I do not call this (as one reviewer did) a tragic story. True, it lacks a “happy ending,” but the last page is anything but a tragedy, as I read it. The following passage is not the last in the book, nor part of the last chapter (I’ll not spoil the ending for you), but conveys how much Jonas has experienced and learned in his three-year marriage:

There were vast swaths of my life that I knew if I looked at closely I would come to regret, and I was certain that soon enough I was going to find the time to do that. I’d regret and wonder, and then do so again until all known ground was covered. This was certainly part of the cost that had to be paid.

One of the specific things he learned was the importance of seeing:

I had walked for a long time with my eyes half closed. ...[I]f one was really looking, which was what I felt I was finally doing—looking, with neither judgment nor fear at what was around me—then that was enough to say you had truly been there.

To wake up to life, to begin to see—surely these are enormous gains for the fictional narrator, as they would be for any human being.

Among the many new novels dealing with the immigrant experience (there are many good memoirs, too), How to Read the Air stands out for me as a unique fictional treatment of the social and emotional isolation felt by many immigrants and their American-born children. The subtlety of the writing allows the reader’s involvement in the story to build organically and almost imperceptibly until the last surprising page.

Book Review: THE POISONWOOD BIBLE

What did I think of Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible? Gerry from Torch Lake Views asked that question in a comment on my blog post from yesterday, and I thought I’d use it to begin a new post rather than simply posting a reply to the comment.

I avoided this book for over a decade. It came out in 1998, but despite all the people who told me how much they loved it, I was put off by what I thought was the book’s theme, but it turns out, I now realize, that the theme I’d projected onto the novel is only one strand of the story, and that strand by itself—impossible to separate it out except conceptually--is a complicated weaving of history, personal motivation, preconception, misunderstanding and love.

The wife and four daughters of a Christian missionary tell the story, in turns, from their different perspectives. The Price family from the American South, however, goes to the Congo without the full blessing of the Baptist hierarchy. For one thing, neither the preacher nor any of his family was prepared in advance to speak the language of their destination Congolese village. When it came to provisions for the year abroad, they “took all the wrong things,” as one of the daughters observes. Could anything have prepared them for the culture shock they would experience or the political realities that would turn their plans upside-down? Other missionaries they encountered fared differently, but the others had not only been differently prepared—they also brought to their task different expectations, greater resilience and adaptability.

Here’s the reason I took so long to read this book: Christian missionaries in Africa (or the South Seas or any of a number of places on the globe) are an easy target, easily written off as a group of narrow-minded, naive, meddling and unwitting supporters of Western money interests. The Reverend Price, from the outside, does match the stereotype. But just as Molly Bloom in James Joyce’s Ulysses is an individual woman, not stereotypical ‘Woman,’ and therefore must be understood in her unique selfhood rather than as a mere gender representative, so Reverend Price is more than a cardboard cutout Christian missionary, and from his wife’s and daughters’ narratives the reader is gradually given pieces of the past that explain why this particular man has become as he appears in the Congo.

Beautifully written, the story captivated me from the start, but for perhaps the first two-fifths of the book I was impatient with the family’s distance from their African habitat. Necessity impinged on them daily, but psychologically, they remained for a long time, and seemed determined to remain, in a cultural bubble from which they looked out uncomprehendingly and with distaste on their neighbors. Impatiently, I would pull back from the story and look at the number of pages left to read, then with a sigh plunge back in, kept reading by the beauty of the language. But then something shifted (I don’t have the book with me, so I can’t cite page number of incident), and I began to feel that I was finally in the Congo with at least two of the four daughters, the twins Leah and Adah.

Rachel, the oldest girl, selfish and self-absorbed, will never let anything touch or change her, and the last-born is too young to reflect deeply on life, but the twins, in their very different ways, do let themselves be changed. The story (I was going to say “the author,” but it does not seem at all contrived) also lets in the very specific politics of the Congo at that moment in history, and two of the Congolese characters, Anatole, the teacher, and a younger boy in the village sent by Anatole to work as the Price family’s houseboy, step forward into the main action. Everything begins to open up like a jungle blossom. Social, political and economic issues, on the one hand, and personal narratives on the other, for the rest of the book, form a seamless reality in which individual decisions and actions come up against the steamroller of larger events but personalities stubbornly persist and flower, each in his or her own fashion.

A literary critic could have a field day with the metaphor of twinhood. I am not that analytical in my reading but found the twins’ narratives the most sympathetic. Leah is the one first recognized as gifted, while her “crippled” sister, thought to be brain damaged at birth, is almost relegated to the ranks of the retarded. Leah carries a burden of guilt for Adah’s handicaps, and Adah’s cargo is her continual effort to keep up with rather than being left behind by her sister, but it is not even obvious to strangers that they are twins, so different are the two girls. In the culture of the African village where they come to live, twin births are considered unlucky. Have Adah and Leah been unlucky to each other? To those around them? The legendary “twin bond” of wordless understanding only appears very late in the story, after the sisters have taken very different and unforeseeable roads in life. It was Adah’s poetic language that kept me reading in the early chapters, just as, later on, I read largely for Leah’s adoption of and immersion into African life.

Rachel’s trajectory was for me a glimpse into the Other—not a gender or ethnic but a spiritual Other. The youngest girl’s viewpoint is the confused and frequently mistaken view of the Innocent, her mistakes not so different from those of the older characters but certainly more forgivable. Finally, it is the mother’s retrospective view on the lives of all of them, beginning from the first page, that binds together the narratives of her children and the history of their father to make the story of a family.

The book might have ended before it did. It might have stopped without the final, brief chapters and still have brought readers to the shivering brink of reading satisfaction. The last pages push one over the edge. The fall, however, is more than willing. Plummeting into the abyss, one blesses the author of this tale.


Gerry, does that answer your question?