Monthly Archives: October 2022

by

A Registry of My Passage upon the Earth, by Daniel Mason

a-registry-of-my-passage-upon-the-earth-daniel-mason-9781529038491-2881892114

Having found Mason’s novel The Winter Soldier a rich experience, I picked up this collection of short stories. I was surprised to find that I had already read one of them in The Atlantic and thought it brilliant.

“For the Union Dead” begins with the narrator being asked to sort through the belongings of his recently deceased uncle, a nan he didn’t know well. “He was a quiet figure, my father’s only brother, and overshadowed by my mother’s sprawling clan of six siblings.” The narrator does know that Teddy was peculiar: an unmarried man who wore suspenders, drank borscht every morning, and kept the tv tuned to pro wrestling. We learn more about Teddy’s background, his growing interest in Civil War reenactment, and the strange way he chose to participate in it. All add up to an unforgettable portrait of man and the weight of history.

The other stories are about equally peculiar people. Set in earlier ages, each delves into a person who is, well, different. From naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace collecting new species in the Malay Archipelago to a female aéronaute piloting a balloon into eternity, their voices invite us to share their experience as they launch themselves outside society’s straitjacket.

I particularly liked “The Line Agent Pascal” which begins “Every morning Hippolyte Pascal, agent of the Line at Urupá, woke to the sun and the sound of parrots, rose from his hammock, dressed, set a battered kettle on the fire, and crossed his tiny station to check the signal.”

Writers are often advised to leave out routine actions for fear of boring the reader. Yet this first sentence not only grounds the reader in time and place, but also conveys his solitude. It is a time when the telegraph was necessary to connect the town and the distant mines, when the technology was primitive enough to require signal boosters at intervals along the line. But it is his solitude that is the core of the story, the eternal balancing act between solitude and society.

The title story takes us into one of the farthest of society’s outliers: Arthur Bispo de Rosário who calls himself a sailor and “a collector of lives.” What today we would call an outsider artist, he speaks to us from the Brazilian psychiatric institution, his home for fifty years, where a doctor draws details of his life from him. Interspersed in the narrative are Arthur’s descriptions of his elaborate embroideries, part of his “divine mission.“ Mason draws on his own work as a psychiatrist to take us into the mind of this actual person, diagnosed with schizophrenia, whose name now adorns Rio de Janeiro’s Contemporary Art Museum.

The real question in these stories is: What does it feel like to be inside this person’s head? How do they perceive and interpret the world?

And this is the great gift of fiction: to be able to see the world through the eyes of another.

Yes, like many readers, I sometimes dive into a novel to escape from our humdrum or terrifying present into a pleasant dream of a world. Even in the most lightweight novels, though, we are asked to experience the events along with the protagonist. Every time we do that, we increase our capacity for empathy.

Some stories stay with us for years. What is one that has stayed with you?

by

Darling Girl, by Liz Michalski

darling

Subtitled A Novel of Peter Pan, this dark tale is not a retelling of the J. M. Barrie classic, but rather a story inspired by it. Holly Darling, granddaughter of Wendy, has come through great trauma to finally arrive at a good place. She lost her beloved husband and one of her twin sons in a terrible car accident, leaving her with a limp and her other son Jack with terrible wounds. Her daughter Eden, born after the accident, has been in a coma for years after a fall from a tree.

That’s a lot of tragedy for one woman. On the plus side, she has wealth through her mother Jane, and Holly herself has started a skincare business that has taken off. Jack has made a miraculous recovery, and Holly is able to use her lab at the business to continue researching a cure for Eden.

Then Eden disappears. Holly is convinced that the only one who could have taken her is Peter.

The family doesn’t talk about the whole Peter Pan thing. Wendy is a beloved memory; the emotionally distant Jane is fascinated by Peter, but also resents the fact that he never took her to Neverland. Yes, there is magic in this story, simply there, something that is part of the Darling family’s world. For Holly, “Maybe the line between the real world and the magical one isn’t quite as solid as she thinks.”

One of the things that brings this book into today’s world is its depiction of the terrible cost of celebrity. With the enduring popularity of Barrie’s book, the Darling family is hounded by stalkers and wannabes, while being fearful of ending up in the news for any reason. By lending her name to her company, Holly has taken a big risk, emotionally.

I took a risk as well, reading this book. Peter Pan is one of my favorite stories, ever since seeing Mary Martin fly across the stage of the Lyric Theatre. Was it really Mary Martin? I’m not sure, but that’s how I remember it. That experience launched me into wanting to become an actress.

It took 15 years for me to learn that acting wasn’t for me; childhood’s dreams don’t always work for adults. Meanwhile Peter’s story became a shifting metaphor for so many things in my life: the yearning for adventure, even dangerous adventures; the idea that wonderful things can come into your life, unexpected and unearned; the recognition that certain people never grow up and others are obsessed with crowing about themselves. I’m often reminded of Wendy’s line after she sews on his shadow: “Of course, I did nothing!”

Michalski’s story is so dark that at times I thought I must be crazy to risk this radically different interpretation of Peter, Tinkerbell, Hook, et al. But I have always been aware of the darkness in Barrie’s story: a charismatic leader who creates a cult-like following eager to agree with him; a father who is also a cruel pirate who flirts with Wendy; Wendy herself as the only one who is eager to grow up, pretending to be a mother to Peter and the lost boys, like women everywhere who take up the slack when men absent themselves.

The problems in Barrie’s tale have been brought home to me more recently in sharing the story with my grandchildren through Cathy Rigby’s film. It has prompted discussions of indigenous people and pirates, gender roles and personal space, lost children and parents, crocodiles and alarm clocks. We act out the parts we love: making Wendy houses, playing Hook and croc chase games, pretending to fly.

It’s as a parent that I appreciate the truth in the themes Michalski draws from the original story to explore here. Teenaged Jack is trying to pull away from Holly’s control, not understanding her reasons for putting limitations on him. Both Wendy and Jane have kept up the fiction that Peter Pan and Neverland are fun and innocent and lovely, leaving Holly vulnerable to Peter’s pixie dust. Not hearing the truth from her mother and grandmother, Holly is a “motherless daughter” as Adrienne Rich described in her essay “Jane Eyre: The Temptations of a Motherless Woman.”

The themes from Barrie’s original story around loss of innocence, aging, and leaving home/parents play out differently here. Our heroes aren’t always who we expect them to be. A couple of Michalski’s darker interpretations are ones that I’ve considered for years.

These days I think more about Wendy’s mother in the original story, losing her daughter to a charming man, a man without a shadow. I wonder about mother and daughter’s relationship after Wendy returns from Neverland, still charmed and eager to return to help with Peter’s spring cleaning. As a parent, I accept the lesson Holly struggles with: “I learned long ago that if you wish to keep your loved ones close, you need to let them leave.” At the same time, I would do anything—really, anything—for my children. Michalski’s story asks how much we will give of ourselves to protect those we love.

Poet Stevie Smith said, “we must put away the beautiful fairy stories / And learn to be good in a dull way without enchantment.” Michalski’s book is anything but dull; I couldn’t stop reading. It is a book for adults, for those of us who have learned to be wary of enchantment and to treasure the truth.

What modern interpretation of a fairy tale have you read?

by

And Sometimes I Wonder About You, by Walter Mosley

9780553551082-2153855327

Talk about spinning literary gold from genre fiction! Each Walter Mosley book I read is even better than the last. This 2015 novel is the fifth book in the series featuring Leonid McGill. This New York-based private eye has the strong, if peculiar, code of honor that I always like to see in a protagonist. A former thug who is still mistrusted by the police, he now works when he can to undo the damage his young self wrought.

Although he and his wife Katrina never recovered their marital life after she returned to his house, and they both seek lovers elsewhere, he does love her in his way and feels responsible for her. Of the three children they are raising, only one is his blood child. His son by another father, Twill, is the child he shamelessly loves best, perhaps because he sees a little himself in the independent young man. Leonid has a tight circle of friends and a wide, if often underground, network of contacts.

In this book, he has to juggle responsibilities for work and family. Katrina is still hospitalised from her attempted suicide in the last book. Twill, who has joined Leonid’s agency, takes on a highly dangerous case without telling his father. After Leonid turns down a case brought to him by a homeless man, the man is murdered. The private eye vows to find the killer and tries to ensure the man’s children are provided for. On top of all this, a simple train ride back from a business engagement in Philadelphia turns life-threatening when he helps a woman who is being stalked by a gangster, a woman who is more than a match for Leonid himself and threatens to disrupt his life.

The unexpected twists and overwhelming danger as Leonid tries to resolve each issue kept me glued to the book. The love and integrity and compassion are equally riveting. The brilliant cast of characters, many familiar from the previous books in the series, continue to evolve. Most of all, how the theme of family and the many forms it can take plays out is fascinating.

There are a lot of layers to this book, as there are for any of Mosley’s novels. You can simply go along for the ride or take a little time to consider these characters and what their lives and challenges have to say about our splintered society. Either way, you’ll find this book rewarding. Although you can enjoy it as a standalone, I do recommend reading the series in order to enjoy the subtle ways all the characters grow.

What Walter Mosley novels have you read? What do you think of them?

by

The Island of Sea Women, by Lisa See

the-island-of-sea-women-9781501154867_hr-2984931108

The island is Jeju, off the South Korean coast. The sea women are the Haenyos, women who don’t use breathing equipment but rather hold their breath to dive to the sea floor to harvest seafood.

The story opens with Young-sook, an elderly retired Haenyo who hates being treated as a tourist attraction. She is especially peeved by the persistence of an American woman and her daughter who claim to be descended from Young-sook’s best friend Mi-ja. They show Young-sook a photograph which she pretends not to recognise.

We are then transported back to 1938. As the daughter of the chief of a Haenyo collective, Young-sook trains from a young age, both to learn the breathing technique called “Sumbisori” and to be in top physical condition. Since the women are the ones who earn money, men on the island stay home to care for the children. Meanwhile, the island is suffering under Japanese rule.

We follow Young-sook as she meets and befriends Mi-ja, who is an outcast because her parents collaborated the Japanese. The girls eventually begin training to become Haenyos, starting out as “baby divers” and gradually becoming more proficient. They work as a team farming the wet fields (the sea) and the dry fields (the vegetable garden). Much as Young-sook loves being in the sea, she can never forget the danger involved, repeating the mantra “Every woman who enters the sea carries a coffin on her back. In this world, the undersea world, we tow the burdens of a hard life.”

The situation worsens during World War II, as the Japanese impress young men from the island into their army and send refugees to the island, where there is already too little food. The end of the war brings a new nightmare, as the Americans install a dictator in South Korea and help his forces further tyrannize the island. The carnages on top of the great poverty on the island makes for difficult reading at some points.

The two girls find themselves at odds as they enter arranged marriages. The progress and zig-zags of their friendship are one of the best things in the story, beautifully rendered. The story occasionally flashes forward to 2008, when the Americans continue to pester the elderly Young-sook, wanting to tell her about Mi-ja’s fate.

The details of the culture on the island, the history of the people there, and most of all the immersive experience of diving with the Haenyos are what make the story memorable. Meticulously researched, with additional information on the author’s website, we are privileged to learn about a way of life that has now almost disappeared.

Perhaps the hardest task for a novelist is inserting a trail of breadcrumbs such that the ending comes as a surprise, yet perfectly obvious looking back over the story. What makes it hard is the range of readers: I know from my book clubs that some people catch on right away, while others may still need an explanation even after finishing a book.

For me, with this book, I saw the answers to the story questions too early and wondered through much of the book why the characters were not able to see them as well. Still, though the story of the friendship sagged a little, for me at least, the story of the sea women and their island did not. I strongly recommend this book.

Have you ever heard of the Haenyos?

by

Parable of the Sower, by Octavia E. Butler

9781440761577-4142090490

This 1993 novel begins in the then-distant future of 2024, which startled me at first. Due to her mother’s drug abuse while pregnant, teenager Lauren Olamina actually feels all the sensations she witnesses in others. She calls it “sharing” and finds it a liability in her world.

She and her father, stepmother and young siblings live in a gated community ten miles outside Los Angeles. It is not just gated but fortified against the collapsing society outside, where dire poverty is rampant, services have mostly collapsed, and police and firefighters cannot be trusted. Gangs run amok, many high on a drug that makes them delight in setting fires and killing people.

Lauren comes to the conclusion that society will fail even further and their frail walls will not be able to keep out the mobs who want even the small affluence they have: vegetable gardens, acorns they’ve collected for flour, a sewing machine. She begins to train herself in how to survive, everything from recognising edible wild plants to firing a gun. But her “sharing” means that it is easy to incapacitate her, simply by hurting someone in front of her.

She creates her own belief system, which she calls Earthseed, based on the idea that the only reliable truth is that “God is Change.” Given that, then humanity can shape God. All of her preparations are needed when their fortifications are breached three years later, and she sets out to find a place to regroup and recreate a community.

At first I found this book almost impossible to read. Not because of anything wrong with the book, but because of my own despair. Such a future seems only too likely, maybe not in the next two years, but not that far off. Too many groups today are threatening civil war, and boasting that they are the ones with guns.

Then I remembered the early 1970s. Society seemed to be falling apart in the wake of assassinations, corruption, the Vietnam debacle. My partner pointed out the fragility of supply chains—something the pandemic has brought home to all of us fifty years later. Like many of those who jumped on the back-to-the-land movement at the time, he was motivated less by a desire to be closer to nature and more by wanting to be self-sufficient if—when—the social order imploded.

It didn’t. The country pulled through, damaged and deeply flawed, but holding.

This book felt so real to me, as though it were all happening right now. Just as I despaired in the beginning, I began to hope as Lauren built her community, one person at a time, one kindness at a time.

Have you read this book? What did you think of it?