A Literary Life

Don’t look at me! It was a book club selection. No, I don’t have anything against Jodi Picoult or her passionate fans. I’m just not one of them. Picoult is first and foremost a storyteller — all about plot, plot, plot — and I’m one for the artistry of the words, so I’ve let her words go one way while my eyes roam another direction for reading material. Until this round of book club, when I read The Tenth Circle.

I was tempted not to finish it. The first half is so utterly painful, the story of a 15-year-old girl who has been date raped and all the typical victim doubt, blame and shame that I utterly loathe in the newspapers and don’t want to see rehashed on the page. (With no twists from the newspapers’ usual stories either, which might have made the story less like the deplorable thing every other teen in America seems to go through.) At the halfway point, however, the story expanded beyond the incident and I was able to muck my way through.

Expanded beyond the incident? That’s an understatement. How about ballooned out of all reckoning into graphic novels, suicide, the plight of native Americans, dog mushing races and beyond.

No personal offence to Jodi or her fans, and not to say that her other books aren’t leaps and bounds better, but on top of the experience of this one novel I’ll have to say: Sorry, I’m just not that into you. And sorry for leaving this review on such a corny note, but that stupid phrase seems to sum up my feelings completely.

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars – Mediocre vacation reading

I didn’t know anything about the Siege of Sarajevo. I had heard vaguely of the Bosnian War and remember President Clinton getting America involved, some said too late. But I had no idea that for years — YEARS, from April of 1992 until February of 1996 — the army surrounded the city of Sarajevo and bombed the crap out of it. Bombed civilians. Intentionally. Snipers sat in the hills and picked off citizens, regular people going to work or to buy food, when food was available. I didn’t know anything about the Siege of Sarajevo until I read this beautiful, graceful, intelligent and touching book, which follows the experiences of three different citizens of the city at an undefined time during the siege.

The title character, the cellist, was a real person. He truly did witness a mortar attack on a group of people trying to buy bread, 22 of whom were killed. He really did set up his cello in the street and play Albinoni’s Adagio for 22 days in honor of the dead. Our three main characters — a female sniper, a father trekking across the city to find water and a baker on his way to work — spiral around the tale of this cellist, this crazy musician who makes himself a daily target, this man who somehow expresses what they all need to hear.

A small decision. Nothing to think about. You’re hungry, and come to this place where maybe they will have some bread to buy. Of all the places to go, you come here. Of all the days to come, a particular one chooses you. At four o’clock in the afternoon. It’s just something you do because life is a series of tiny, unavoidable decisions. And then some men on the hills send a bomb through the air to kill you. For them, it was probably just one more bomb in a day of many. Not notable at all.

She reaches down and picks up a small piece of glass. Glass is disappearing from the city. It’s either blown up or removed to prevent it from becoming a projectile when it inevitably is blown up. One pane at a time the windows through which people see the world are vanishing.

This is how she now believes life happens. One small thing at a time. A series of inconsequential junctions, any or none of which can lead to salvation or disaster. There are no grand moments where a person does or does not perform the act that defines their humanity. There are only moments that appear, briefly, to be this way.

It amazing how much humans can adapt, how much they can take and still survive, how quickly we can all revert to a primitve subsistence existence. And it’s amazing to me that this travesty happened. In the 1990s, not the 16th century. The image of people huddled against a brick wall, steeling themselves for a quick dash across an exposed intersection, where a dead man lays sprawled with a sniper bullet in his head: That picture is going to haunt me for the rest of my life, as will Galloway’s spare yet evocative writing style. He’s a writer that makes you feel as if his story was always true, was always there, floating invisibly in space. He simply plucked the words from the air and captured them between two covers.

Please, pick up this tiny novel and open your heart to it. It’s one of the best books I’ve read in years.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars – Buy the hardcover

I don’t know much about the country of Libya, and I had to look up the specifics of who the dictator Qaddafi was/is (“While he holds no formal office, it is generally understood that Gaddafi holds near-absolute control over the government. Basic civil liberties are virtually nonexistent, and opposition is not tolerated.”) But after reading this careful, precise yet insightful book, I felt like I knew what it was like to be a child in 1979 Libya. His father often absent and active in the hidden resistance movement, nine-year-old Suleiman spends the summer sealed in the family’s house with his mother, waiting for news, waiting for the other shoe to drop. And being an only child, the apple of his mother’s eye, Suleiman is in truth captured in the world of women, the world of those who cannot act but only watch, the world of the powerless and the scared.

In some ways, I’m truly amazed that a man wrote this story, so compelling is the way he speaks of his mother’s early life, the obsequious way she’s forced to deal with men, her fear, her impotence and especially the limits placed upon her. Chaperones, clothing, words. She turns to alcohol — which was (is?) illegal in the Muslim state — that she buys in secret from the local baker. How else is one supposed to cope with the stress of being under the sword, as Suleiman thinks of their situation, alluding to One Thousand and One Nights/Arabian Nights?

What would come out? Could he make music, could he sing? Scheherazade did, night after night, unable to look up into a sky or rest in the silence and solitude of her garden, hearing a wicker chair creak with the comfort of her own weight. She, I am certain now, was one of the bravest people that had ever lived. It’s one thing not to fear death, another to sing under the sword.

This novel is packed with meaning and careful prose, which makes it a slow read. But it also feels like you’re imprisoned in a small space just like Suleiman and his mother. The way the boy reacts to the stress is dead-spot-on kids’ behavior. He lashes out at his real friends, he becomes disobedient, he turns violent and tearful by turns, he feels crushing guilt.

Concern. I think that was what I craved. A warm and steady and unchangeable concern. In a time of cloud and tears, in a Libya full of bruise-checkered and urine-stained men, urgent with want and longing for relief, I was the ridiculous child craving concern. And although I didn’t think of it then in these terms, my self-pity had soured into self-loathing.

In the end, I think this novel reads more like autobiography than fiction. It seems like a novel should have a little more forward momentum. On the other hand, there is no doubt that the characters, the style and the plot are incredibly well done, by a very talented writer. I’ll definitely have to see if he’s written any novels since.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars – Book club selection

I don’t usually review the books I hear on tape, or rather on iPod, because listening to books is a very different experience than actually reading them, plus I tend to choose a different sort of book when it’s on tape: more plot-driven, also sometimes sillier or fluffier. But this book was a real book, a good book. It was no less physical because it was whispered in my ear, and it is certainly worth noting.

The story line is nothing too all-fired unique: one of those stories where several characters tell the intersecting stories of their lives, and it’s assumed that when they coalesce at the end, there will deep some *deep* or *important* meaning (a la the movie Crash). I know y’all know what I’m talking about. But the voices of the characters and the language used to tell their stories catapulted this novel above that perhaps-overused plot device. These are vivid and surprising women, each unique and interesting. And the language? I swooned. With a style very similar to my fave Toni Morrison, Naylor’s words are are sensuous and tactile; they fall like marbles, bounce, spin around, roll away, rhythmic and sonorous. Much credit has to go to the voice talent on the recording, certainly, but these words have life, have feet to get up and walk about the room. That part about swooning? Really, my heart beats faster and my knees weaken when I hear an author who can string a sentence like this: Morrison at the beginning of Jazz, Nabokov in Lolita (“Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.” You see what I mean? Knees. Weak.)

As suspected and hammered over the head with, the ending was *deep* and *important,* like you knew it would be. I prefer my “morals of the story” to be a little more organic and less predictable than that. But the journey to get there was a fun one and that made this book worth reading, on paper or on tape.

Note: I bought the book on Audible and have the file in my possesion, if anyone wants to take a listen.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars – Book club selection