books

I read Ondaatje’s Divisadero while I was at Lake Champlain last month. I had the same experience I have with other Ondaatje works of falling headfirst into his glorious world of language and imagery, of consuming a book that is as much poetry as it is novel, as much musing on life itself as it is fiction. Ondaatje’s writing is clear, declarative, and simple, yet at the same time evocative and rich with imagery. How he accomplishes this shimmering lyricism with language that is not flowery or overwrought is nothing short of magic. Sentences of his line up in my mind, repeating themselves over and over almost every day (“the heart is an organ of fire,” “she was within him now,” “do you understand the sadness of geography?”).

The book is more a series of linked narratives than a traditional novel. It explores themes as central to the human experience as the definition of family and how early experiences in our lives can echo through the rest of our days. Divisadero just took hold of my imagination and did not let go. I finished it in an afternoon, and that night as I fell asleep I wondered why the book didn’t positively glow on the bureau, so luminous is the writing inside. What a genius this man is.

As I read I underlined passsages that I loved and last night I transferred them into a Word document. Which was four pages once I was finished. I will try to be careful in selecting only the very best to share here. After all, it is more compelling to let Ondaatje’s mastery speak for itself than to continue trying, in my ham-handed fashion, to describe it.

Everything is biography, Lucian Freud says. What we make, why it is made, how we draw a dog, who it is we are drawn to, why we cannot forget. Everything is a collage, even genetics. There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border we cross.

Going after lost things was as uncertain as prayer.

So there had always been and perhaps always would be a maze of unmarked roads between her and others.

… how to see that the present continually altered the past, just as the past was a strange inheritance that fell upside down into one’s life like an image through a camera obscura. All that was consistent was a principle … He did not know whether she was a lens to focus the past or a fog to obliterate it.

She’d lived one of her essential lives with Coop, and she could never dismantle herself from him.

In spite of her desire for a contained universe, her life felt scattered, full of many small moments, without great purpose. That is what she thought, though what is most untrustworthy about our natures and self-worth is how we differ in our own realities from the way we are seen by others.

And they saw that anything, everything, could be taken away, there was nothing that could be held on to except each other in this iron-like world that appeared to stretch out for the rest of their lives.

There was in the end an order, even to this.

His thoughts and emotions were loose in him, random, similar to the abrupt cuts of light in the sky.

For the raw truth of an episode never ends, just as the terrain of my sister’s life and the story of my time with Coop are endless to me.

My bedside table (a hand me down from my maternal grandparents) has two shelves. The top has a stack of magazines, a clock radio, a lamp, ear plugs and some ball point pens. The bottom shelf is where The Stack accrues.

The Stack is the pile of books I have queued up to read. I know it’s getting sort of out of control when there are four or five piles of books each four or five books high on the bottom shelf. That’s the situation now. I have so many books I want to read. And I feel so stressed about not having enough time that I’ve turned to powerful cbd capsules with curcumin to help me manage the daily anxiety. This has a downside, in that I get very goal-oriented about finishing books in order to plow through my stack, and I think reading with this kind of mindset sort of works against why I read in the first place. But, still.

I read a really wide range of stuff, a lot of junk. Mostly fiction, ranging from the current Target/Costco pulp titles to science fiction to books by friends to authors I adore (right now have two Ondaatje books in the queue) to, even, occasionally, poetry. I also read memoirs, often but not always of the parenting variety (but never, ever, ever, how-to parenting books). I went through an Allende period last year, for example, and loved Didion’s heartbreaking Year of Magical Thinking.

I read all the time. I carry a book with me as often as I remember, though the iphone has filled this gap nicely as well, allowing me to avail myself of my reader queue whenever I have three empty minutes waiting in line. I think of my friend Anna, who used to bring a newspaper for the ten floor ride down the elevator in her apartment building. Love that.

More broadly than the anxiety to get through my specific stack, I have a deep-seated, fearful awareness that I’ll never have time to read all the books I want. It is literally impossible that I will have time in my life to read everything I want to read. This, in the classic things-I-cannot-control category, makes me incredibly sad.

I better get back to my reading.

Just finished Michael Lewis’s memoir, Home Game. It is hilarious. Truly. Irreverent, honest, and just laugh-out-loud funny. It’s a quick read and I highly recommend it. Lewis’s dedication, to his children, sets the tone: “If you don’t want to see it in print, don’t do it.”

Any chapter that begins with “My main ambition when my wife went into labor was to be sober” instantly wins my heart. This man is my people. As the delivery of his second child nears, Lewis says “For the past two years and eleven months I have been on the wrong end of a story called ‘How My Husband Was Loaded When My Baby Was Born.’ I promised myself I’d do better this time. It was my last chance.” I am laughing hysterically by this point.

He lovingly teases his wife. In particular I liked this passage about her obstetrician: “When he is around, Tabitha feels, rightly, that she is in more capable hands than her own. This, for her, counts as an unusual experience.”

His stories are numerous, detailed, and frank. He admits that it took a while before he “felt about my child what I was expected to feel,” describing “tenderness and a bit of theoretical affection” that grew over time to full-blown love. He describes the sheer horror of an overnight at Fairyland (a “toddler Disneyland”) with his three year old. He mentions learning that the teachers at school laughed at the way he dressed his older child. He is confused by this, telling his wife, “She looks fine when I dress her.” Tabitha responds, “She looks like a street person.”

Lewis’s analogies are as wonderful as his stories. He likens being a father as being a slightly distant chairman of a company “allowed to sit at the head of the table but never actually listened to,” with the mother as the hands-on CEO. When the second baby is born, the CEO is “diverted by a difficult acquisition in a foreign country. The chairman is, however briefly, in charge. Everyone else is anxious.” He uses Mardi Gras as a teaching occasion for his girls, an opportunity to show them “how to compete in the more ferocious sectors of our nation’s economy.”

Oh, my, Michael Lewis can write. His language is direct, never flowery, but always elegant.

This book is a good one. Run don’t walk to buy it. I’m adding it to my short list of favorite books about parenting (all of which are, no accident, memoirs rather than how-to books).