Margaret Atwood's Surfacing, Reading for Virago Week

To me, nobody writes of the pain that can be found in childhood like Margaret Atwood. Just as I felt when I read her novel Cat's Eye, I find myself seared by the words I'm reading in Surfacing. I'm only halfway through this novel, but I have to post these thoughts now.

At first I ran away, but after that my mother said I had to go, I had to learn to be polite; "civilized" she called it. So I watched from behind the door. When I finally joined in a game of Musical Chairs, I was welcomed with triumph like a religious convert or a political defector.

Some were disappointed, they found my hermit-crab habits amusing, they found me amusing in general. Each year it was a different school, in October or November when the first snow hit the lake, and I was the one who didn't know the local customs, like a person from another culture: on me they could try out the tricks and minor tortures they'd already used up on each other. When the boys chased and captured the girls after school and tied them up with their own skipping ropes, I was the one they would forget on purpose to untie. I spent many afternoons looped to fences and gates and convenient trees, waiting for a benevolent adult to pass and free me...

"If you don't do it right we won't play with you," they said. Being socially retarded is like being mentally retarded, it arouses in others disgust and pity and the desire to torment and reform.

It was harder for my brother; our mother had taught him that fighting was wrong so he came home every day beaten to a pulp. Finally she had to back down: he could fight, but only if they hit first.

It must be something Canadian mothers tell their children. My brother and I were also taught not to fight by our Canadian mother. So unlike the American mothers in my experience, who said, "Someone hit you? Who hit you? Well, make sure you beat the crap out of them next time."

I wasn't teased or left out because I was ugly. Or, stupid. Or, anything wrong. I was teased because I wasn't mean. I didn't fight, and neither did my brother. We didn't know how to handle teasing because the words spoken in our home weren't unkind. We were vulnerable in the face of neighborhood bullying, schoolyard taunting, the cruelty of children everywhere.

This is part of why Margaret Atwood's writing is so very poignant to me today.

Major Pettigrew's Last Stand

Abdul Wahid looked confused, which was an improvement over the frown.

"You are very strange," he said. "Are you saying it is wrong, stupid, to try to live a life of faith?"

"No, I think it is admirable," said the Major. "But I think a life of faith must start with remembering that humility is the first virtue before God."

"Major Pettigrew's Last Stand against what?" I kept asking myself as I read this novel. "His last stand against an incredibly arrogant son? His materialistic sister-in-law, Marjorie, and niece, Jemima? His longing for the pair of Churchill guns, which his father was given by the Maharajah? Or, his stand against the ignorance displayed in a small British town toward another culture?"

Quite possibly, it could be his stand against loneliness. Being alone. Or, settling for a convenient love with Grace, when he could strive to have it all with his heart's desire, Jasmina Ali.

Ultimately, I believe it to be his stand against pride. And this, perhaps, requires the greatest strength of all. When we ask for forgiveness, when we recognize our own faults, when we stand for what is good and right and true, this is our most important stand.

I loved Major Pettigrew. I loved his quiet observations on life. I loved the lessons that he learned, and the way he taught me as he went, reminding me that the importance of self isn't so important after all.

"I longed for the day when I could look important to a lot of people who I felt were more important than I," said the Major. "I was arrogant. It must be genetic."

(Find more information here.)

Periodically

"Even I read things other than books from time to time … like, magazines! What magazines/journals do you read?"

Ah, magazines. Yes, those things that pile up on coffee tables, baskets and end tables. The ones you feel you should collect or save for that certain recipe. Then you can never find it again.

I used to read magazines. I subscribed to Seventeen when it was still huge (does anyone else remember that size? The blond girls with straight hair parted down the middle so unlike my own?). There was one with Princess Caroline of Monaco on the cover, in high heels and blue jeans, and my mother said, "Why don't you wear your jeans like that?"

I didn't. Caroline has a certain je ne sais quoi.

I used to subscribe to Real Simple. Until I realized that it was anything but Simple. The sheer amount of magazines cluttering my family room was not simple, nor was the amount of effort required for one of their beautiful 'little' projects. They do, however, have fabulous recipes. Even better than the recipes in Bon Appetit.

Everything I've made in Bon Appetit has been a singular point of failure. The coconut frosted cake, for example, surely had sawdust in it instead of all the fresh coconut I cramped my fingers grating.

I would read professional magazines like ones from the NEA (National Education Association). But, they're full of their own agenda, doom and gloom. Our pensions are in danger, our jobs are in danger, our whole profession is up for grabs by the current politics and economy.

So, no, I don't really reach for magazines. Only very periodically. How about you?


Find other thoughts here.

Russian Winter by Daphne Kalotay

Winter 1951. Moonlight stretches the warped shadows of buildings, enormous and looming, over the square. Nina feels their presence like a weight above her as she crosses, shivering, toward the Bolshoi. Already the building is swarming with security guards. The ones at the entrance hold bayoneted rifles across their chests and, though Nina has become a recognizable face, make her show a special pass with her photograph on it, which they scrutinize coldly before allowing her in. For the rest of the night she will be made to show this pass, again and again, to enter her dressing room, the makeup room, the bathroom.....even before stepping onstage (when she will have to tuck the stiff little card somewhere under costume and pray it doesn't slip out.)

I have long been inexplicably entranced by Russia. I have collected the little black boxes painted with a single haired brush, taken more Russian literature courses in college than English, read Anna Karenina more times than I can count.

Last night my friend and I went out for coffee, and I told her how much I loved this book. "It's not one of those like that Pasternak guy," she said, "who was it that wrote Crime and Punishment?"

"Dr. Zhivago," I said, "He wrote Dr. Zhivago, and this is nothing like it."

"Oh, good," she replied, "I had to give that up after the first four pages with all those crazy names..."

No, this novel is not filled with 'crazy names'. But, it is filled with the way that people had to live under Stalin's leadership. Interspersed with that time period and today is the story of Nina Revskaya, a prima ballerina, who refuses to talk about the past let alone the amber jewelry which she has offered for auction. The other characters who enter in are Grigori Solodin and Drew Brooks who help unravel the mystery behind Nina's dreadful, and heart-wrenching, secret.

When I taught in Germany, in the mid 1980's, the wall was still up between the East and the West. We were required to visit The Wall and found it to be multi-layered. The fence was laced with hidden mines, the road behind it was patrolled by soldiers in jeeps, the towers over all had searchlights and armed men. "It's to protect you from the West Germans getting in," the people on the East side were told.

Only, no one was ever caught trying to enter the East side of Germany. They were only shot trying to get out.

That experience, and the way I now feel America could become a country under leadership which is meant to protect us but only takes our freedom, echoed throughout my mind as I read this most fascinating novel.

Sunday Salon: Two Weeks from Today, The JLC4 Ends

It's a funny thing when you're teaching, or hosting a challenge, that you probably end up being the one who learns the most. When I began the first Japanese Literature Challenge in 2006 it was to better understand a culture which fascinated me, but also because I'd read not one work of Japanese literature. I knew that by creating a challenge I would find many novels in the genre to read, and I'd hoped to find many book lovers who'd share the journey with me. It was such a fulfilling endeavor that I have hosted the challenge for five years.

This year, I did not give away prizes as I have in previous years. I wanted the joy of reading the works themselves to be their own prize. Plus, the teacher in me finds it very hard to single out a select few for prizes when the list of participants has been many. Apparently, this is copacetic because neither the list of participants, nor the amount of reviews, has dwindled.

I read more Japanese novels this year than I have in any of the previous Japanese Literature Challenges. They are still not enough to quench my appetite. As with eating anything extraordinarily delicious, when I'm reading a fascinating genre I only want more. Fortunately, we have Tanabata's Murakami Challenge to give us regular doses of Haruki's work. We also have a JLC4 review site to which we can turn for enticing novels as yet unread.

There are two weeks before the Japanese Literature Challenge 4 officially draws to a close. That gives you time to quickly read one book, thereby fulfilling the challenge requirements, or to pull your thoughts together for any wrap up post you may wish to write. I'd love to know which authors, and titles, were your favorite. I'd love any suggestions for next year.

The Hunger Games

I finally succumbed. Not one to run with the pack, nor read what the average teenager would, I had to read this novel. Literally. Because one of my book clubs chose to read it for January, and what would I have to discuss should I attend unprepared?

In many ways it was inevitable fare for a YA novel: conveniently arranged romance, drama, and taut suspense. Only, you knew the heroine was going to survive because how could the series continue without her?

That said, the imagery in this novel was remarkable. Picturing Katniss, dressed in black with her hair in flames as she entered the arena for the opening ceremonies, will be one of the images that I remember most. Followed by the black dress studded with precious stones which glittered as though they were afire themselves. Red lips, wild hair, love it:

They erase my face with a layer of pale makeup and draw my features back out. Huge dark eyes, full red lips, lashes that throw off bits of light when I blink. Finally, they cover my entire body in a powder that makes me shimmer in gold dust...The creature standing before me in the full-length mirror has come from another world. Where skin shimmers and eyes flash and apparently they make their clothes from jewels. Because my dress, oh, my dress is entirely covered in reflective precious gems, red and yellow and white with bits of blue that accent the tips of the flame design. The slightest movement gives the impression I am engulfed in tongues of fire.

What she's engulfed in is actually worse, a cat and mouse game of children who must kill each other to survive. Not for the children I teach, and in fact, more resembling a video game than a novel, I still found this novel to be somewhat arresting.

If not chilling, for what humans can do to each other. No matter how young they are.

The Metropolis Case and Give-Away

"We're born with a gift," Anna continued, "and for a while it seems magical and gives us great pleasure, but there comes a time when it no longer satisfies us, except unlike a toy or a dress it's not something we can just outgrow, because it's part of us, and when you first begin to understand this, it can feel like a curse, so that you regret having been given the gift in the first place. So even if your voice feels different to you now because of what happened to your parents, that's the natural order of things, it's part of the growing up; and though you can never go back, you have the option of really learning how to use it in a way that will still bring you-and countless others-a lot of joy. Because-trust me-most people don't have it, but it's through us that they find at least a little piece of it in themselves."

Juilliard and practice rooms. Opera and Wagner. Tristan and Isolde. Martin and Maria, Leo and Anna, the way that the four of them are inexorably intertwined with each other, and with their music, is what comprises this story.

It is everything I know musicians to be: creative, emotional, unique, insecure and gifted all at the same time.

It is everything I know parenthood to be: divine, despairing, filled with self and filled with sacrifice.

On top of this exists an extraordinary element of surprise; while in some ways I found The Metropolis Case contrived, in others I'm intrigued by the author's imagination. Surely he understands our human hearts as well as he knows musicians'.

Read an excerpt from The New York Times here. Win a free copy of your own by simply leaving a comment. Name to be pulled on January 27th.

Now Is The Winter of My Discontent

It seems a simple thing, really, to pick something you like and stick with it. A red lipstick, for example, shouldn't be that hard. Go to the store, pick one up, wear it, done.

If you looked in my bathroom's dresser drawer you'd see Chanel's Red #5 (now discontinued), Clinique's Rubellite, Aveda's Poppy, Guerlain's Le Rouge, Revlon's Fire and Ice, Cherries in The Snow and Certainly Red. And those are just the ones I can remember while I'm typing downstairs at the dining room table.

How about perfume? Easy again, in theory. But, if you looked on the shelf of my linen closet you'd see Chanel #5, Chanel's Allure Sensuelle, Estee Lauder's Pleasures, Clinique's Aromatics, Guerlain's Parure, Shalimar, Vol de Nuit, Mitsouko and my latest Christmas acquisition: L'Heure Bleu. Among so many others I dare not list them all for you here.

So, what about blog templates? I started out with Blogger's Minima in 2006. Changed the background color and header 9,000 times then skipped on over to WordPress. Tried WordPress' template of Mystica. PressRow. DayDream. Hemingway. Went back over to Blogger. Lucky for me, by then Blogger had a established a Design Your Own Template button. Sigh...

I'm back to Blogger's Minima, five years later.

None of these things are the crux of the matter. Not lipstick, not perfume, not the frickin' blog template. What matters is the source of discontent. Why this searching? Why the continual change on my part? (I don't even like change. Really! I've lived in the same town for most of life, except for the years of living away in college and a few in Europe. I've had the same career for 26 years, for Heaven's sake.)

I think its source is in a search for perfection. If I keep trying everything, I'll find what's Best. If I keep trying everything I won't have to accept what doesn't please me. I won't have to look at the imperfections which come naturally in this world; I won't have to see the imperfections within me.

I think if I can accept that perfection is impossible, the ability to stay with one thing, flawed though it may be, will be possible.

(How interesting that Shoreacres has been thinking about perfection as well. Read her excellent post here.)

Virago Reading Week

Edith Wharton. Elizabeth Von Armin. Margaret Atwood. Booksnob and Carolyn are bringing them together, with others, for the Virago Reading Week to be held Monday, January 24 through Sunday, January 30.

The list from which to choose is here, and here is the Virago Press website.

As Margaret Atwood is the featured author of the month, I may go with one of her books. Even thinking about rereading The Robber Bride or Cat's Eye, two of my favorite Atwood novels. I'm also considering a novel by Edith Wharton. Or, Jane Austen. So many possibilities...

What will you choose?

A Rule Against Murder

"What killed people wasn't a bullet, a blade, a fist to the face. What killed people was a feeling. Left too long. Sometimes in the cold, frozen. Sometimes buried and fetid. And sometimes on the shores of a lake, isolated. Left to grow old, and odd."

When I went looking for Louise Penny's lastest thriller, Bury Your Dead, after reading so much praise about it on so many blogs, the only work I could find from her at our prize winning library was A Rule Against Murder. But, I'm not disappointed.

For one thing, how lovely it is to relax into a novel. Not struggle for every nuance. Not analyze every symbol. Not decipher every tangled sentence the author wrote to impress the reader with his skill. It is exactly what I've needed right after Christmas, right after returning to the zoo we call school.

For another, what a lovely genre Mystery is. I'd forgotten how much I love a good whodunit. Maybe not the highest of intellectual endeavors, I will still fall back on a good mystery any day of the week. Especially one with the gentle and wise Chief Inspector Armand Gamache.

The Night Bookmobile

I sat with my son at Barnes and Noble this afternoon; it's one of our favorite things to do together. We've drunk coffee, written in leather journals, and sat reading silently across the table from each other for almost twenty years.

As I perused the fiction aisles, with only gift cards to Borders in my pocket, I saw Audrey Niffenegger's visual book, The Night Bookmobile. As eerie as you would suspect from someone who wears mahogany lipstick without mascara, calls Chicago home, and can credit The Time Traveler's Wife to her imagination, this story is about a girl who encounters the bookmobile at four o'clock one morning while wandering from Irving Park to Ravenswood.

Inside, is every book she's ever read.

But, she's not allowed to be a librarian there because it's only for the living...

In the After Words, I found this passage:

When I began writing The Night Bookmobile, it was a story about a woman's secret life as a reader. As I worked it also became a story about the claims that books place on their readers, the imbalance between our inner and outer lives, a cautionary tale of the seductions of the written world. It became a vision of the afterlife as a library, of heaven as a funky old camper filled with everything you've ever read. What is this heaven? What is it we desire from the hours, weeks, lifetimes we devote to books? What would you sacrifice to sit in that comfy chair with perfect light for an afternoon in eternity, reading the perfect book, forever? ~Audrey Niffenegger

The Enchanted April

The cover of the film enchanted me to begin with. But before I view it with my friends later in January I wanted to read the novel, being of the firm conviction that one should always Read The Book First.

And when a novel contains this ad within its first few pages, how can one not continue to be enchanted?

To Those Who Appreciate Wistaria and Sunshine: Small mediaeval Italian Castle on the shores of the Mediterranean to be Let furnished for the month of April. Necessary servants remain. Z. Box 1000, The Times.

It wouldn't take much more than that to convince me to answer, just as it did Mrs. Lotty Wilkins when she encountered it while reading the newspaper at her ladies' club. She convinces her acquaintance, Rose Arbuthnot, to join her, and together they find another pair of women, Mrs. Fisher and Lady Caroline, to go to Italy for a month. Each longs to escape the life she leads, if only for four weeks.

What follows is a truly enchanting story as each woman's hopes and dreams are revealed, each woman's inner heart is healed, during their stay in San Salvatore. I would expect nothing less from 'my' Italy.

Sunday Salon: Fresh Beginnings

The house is clean. No more starlit trees sparkling in dark corners at night. No more Wise Men to inch ever more closely toward the manger. No more cookies, dark chocolate truffles, cups of cocoa with a peppermint stick to drink whenever anyone wants. Christmas is definitely over Chez Bellezza.

But, with the end of 2010 comes the promise of 2011, and the promise of new books to be read, discussed and discovered. That's such an exciting prospect! When I started my blog, it wasn't even a book blog. Sure, I'd post on the occasional novel I'd been reading, but mostly I wrote posts chronicling my thoughts. My life. Yawn. Much better to talk about a common theme with those who love it as deeply as I do.

Then, when I'd nicely established myself on Blogger, I got bored and hopped over to WordPress. For my year long stay there I met wonderful bloggers I hadn't known, but I felt like I lost touch with many of my blogging friends from Blogger. I got frustrated with stats In My Face every time I opened my dashboard; I decided to hop back over to Blogger where I'm staying.

In the process, I've gone from reviewing books that only I chose, to books that I chose specifically for a challenge, to books that an author or publisher had requested I review. I'm swinging back the pendulum now, rather like teaching, to return to where I started: reading mostly what I want when I want to read it. Hmmm, sounds a bit selfish, but it is, afterall, my blog. It is my not unlimited reading time.

I want to read all the rest of my Murakami novels. Own them all, have read only about a third. I want to read the books my main book club selected: Lucy, Astrid and Veronika, Out Stealing Horses, Confederates in The Attic. I want to read short story collections, something I never do; after reading Tony's praise for the Oxford Book of Japanese Short Stories, and Haruki Murakami's praise for Raymond Carver, I purchased both collections. Love them so much so far. I have a few books I've committed to review that seem awesome: Major Pettigrew's Last Stand. Frank Delaney's new book to be released in March: The Matchmaker of Kenmare.

And, don't forget that Claire promised us a Persephone Reading Weekend for February 25th through the 27th, so mark your calendars accordingly.

Now with Christmas put away, the books come out to play. And I, for one, love this playground!

The Century's Top 100 Novels

Behold the list of  the century's top 100 novels as requested by the Modern Library editoral board.

 1. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald

 2. The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger

 3. The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck

 4. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee

 5. The Color Purple, by Alice Walker

6. Ulysses, by James Joyce

 7. Beloved, by Toni Morrison

 8. The Lord of the Flies, by William Golding

 9. 1984, by George Orwell

10. The Sound and The Fury by William Faulkner

 11. Lolita, by Vladmir Nabokov

 12. Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck

 13. Charlotte's Web by E. B. White

 14. A Portrait of The Artist As a Young Man by James Joyce

 15. Catch-22, by Joseph Heller

 16. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley

 17. Animal Farm, by George Orwell

 18. The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway

 19. As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner

 20. A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway

 21. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

 22. Winnie The Pooh by A. A. Milne

 23. Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston

 24. Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison

 25. Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison

 26. Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell

 27. Native Son, by Richard Wright

 28. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, by Ken Kesey

 29. Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut

 30. For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemingway

 31. On The Road by Jack Kerouac

 32. The Old Man and The Sea by Ernest Hemingway

33. The Call of the Wild, by Jack London

 34. To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

 35. Portrait of A Lady by Henry James

 36. Go Tell it on the Mountain, by James Baldwin

 37. The World According To Garp by John Irving

 38. All the King's Men, by Robert Penn Warren

 39. A Room With A View by E. M. Forster

 40. The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien

 41. Schindler's List by Thomas Keneally

 42. Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

 43. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

 44. Finnegan's Wake by James Joyce

 45. The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair

 46. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

 47. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum

 48. Lady Chatterley's Lover, by D.H. Lawrence

 49. A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess

 50. The Awakening, by Kate Chopin

 51. My Antonia by Willa Cather

 52. Howard's End by E. M. Forster

53. In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote

 54. Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger

 55. The Satanic Verses, by Salman Rushdie

 56. Jazz by Toni Morrison

 57. Sophie's Choice, by William Styron

 58. Absalom! Absalom! by William Faulkner

 59. A Passage to India by E. M. Forster

 60. Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

 61. A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor

 62. Tender is The Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald

 63. Orlando by Virginia Woolf

 64. Sons and Lovers, by D.H. Lawrence

 65. Bonfire of The Vanities by Tom Wolfe

 66. Cat's Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut

 67. A Separate Peace, by John Knowles

 68. Light in August by William Faulkner

 69. The Wings of The Dove by Henry James

 70. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

 71. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

 72. A Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy by Douglas Adams

 73. Naked Lunch, by William S. Burroughs

 74. Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh

 75. Women in Love, by D.H. Lawrence

 76. Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe

 77. In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway

 78. The Autobiography of Alice B. Tokias by Gertrude Stein

 79. The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

 80. The Naked and the Dead, by Norman Mailer

 81. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

 82. White Noise by Don DeLillo

 83. O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

 84. Tropic of Cancer, by Henry Miller

 85. The War of The Worlds by H. G. Wells

86.  Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad

 87. The Bostonians by Henry James

 88. An American Tragedy, by Theodore Dreiser

 89. Death Comes for The Archbishop by Willa Cather

 90. The Wind In The Willows by Kenneth Grahane

 91. This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald

 92. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

 93. The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles

 94. Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis

 95. Kim by Rudyard Kipling

 96. The Beautiful and The Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald

 97. Rabbit, Run by John Updike

 98. Where Angels Fear to Tread by E. M. Forster

 99. Main Street by Sinclair Lewis

 100. Midnight's Children by Salmon Rushdie

  

Read: I've struck through the titles I've read.
Own: I've italicized the titles I own.
Want to read: I've boldened the titles I want to read.