Sick, sick, sick

Being sick really stinks. Especially on your very last week of freedom before going back to work and facing the mad crowds of students, colleagues who want to brag about their summer research and travel, and endless, pointless meetings.

Wasn't feeling too great on Sunday, but I simply attributed that to a bit of overindulgence the previous evening while out with some old friends visiting from out of town. Boy was I wrong! Monday morning greeted me with a stomach ache that made me double over, high fever and chills. August isn't flu season, is it? What did I do to derserve this?? Hubby has been a dear, though, and made me lots of jello and brought me ginger ale every time that I bellow for him to attend to me.

This is a bit of a setback both personally and professionally, as I was hoping to get a bit more research and writing accomplished before going back to work and to write up my long overdue reviews of the following books for the Summer Reading Challenge and Southern Reading Challenge: A Good Man is Hard to Find (Flannery O'Connor), The Heart of a Woman (Maya Angelou), Mademoiselle Victorine (Debra Finerman), The Shadow of the Wind (Carlos Ruiz Zafon). I have my work cut out for me! I have, however, felt justified in indulging myself in some good reading--reading, after all, is a more passive activity and requires less energy than writing.

My advisor attributes my current ill health to my last few tireless days of writing to finish another chapter of the thesis during which I ran down my resistance. Hmmm...is this is her way of appeasing me for having slashed the prior chapter?!

Regardless, I am simply thankful that we bought a new mattress last week and that I have a nice, long novel to read. If confined to bed, it helps one's morale (and keeps one's mind off the tummy ache) to be at least comfortable and entertained.

I spent the great majority of Monday (and most likely will do the same today, as well) reading The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. I found this novel in hardback a few weeks ago on the discount table of a bookstore for a mere $5.00. Based on the 300+ pages that I have read in my sickbed, I would have been quite pleased with my purchase had I shelled out the full price...and then some! I have heard people complain that this one gets off to a slow start and that it could have been edited down from its 500+ pages (yes, this one is a chunkster!), but I disagree. I like slowly moving narratives--if there is a reason for the pace and an eventual reward. In this case, it works for me. I look forward to finishing this and sharing my thoughts on it. For now, here's a brief description from Amazon:

If your pulse flutters at the thought of castle ruins and descents into crypts by moonlight, you will savor every creepy page of Elizabeth Kostova's long but beautifully structured thriller The Historian. The story opens in Amsterdam in 1972, when a teenage girl discovers a medieval book and a cache of yellowed letters in her diplomat father's library. The pages of the book are empty except for a woodcut of a dragon. The letters are addressed to: "My dear and unfortunate successor." When the girl confronts her father, he reluctantly confesses an unsettling story: his involvement, twenty years earlier, in a search for his graduate school mentor, who disappeared from his office only moments after confiding to Paul his certainty that Dracula--Vlad the Impaler, an inventively cruel ruler of Wallachia in the mid-15th century--was still alive. The story turns out to concern our narrator directly because Paul's collaborator in the search was a fellow student named Helen Rossi (the unacknowledged daughter of his mentor) and our narrator's long-dead mother, about whom she knows almost nothing. And then her father, leaving just a note, disappears also.

The Book Thief

The Book Thief is an amazing book. It is really and truly wonderful. It’s one of those books with which I so thoroughly identify and which I so enormously appreciated that I wish that I had written it. If you haven’t read it, go out and buy it or check it out of the library right now! Yes, I do genuinely mean this. And no, I am not engaging in gratuitous hyperbole by evoking all of these fluffy adjectives and trite expressions. I realize that it is a growing trend these days to qualify anything and everything as unbelievable, amazing or incredible to the –nth degree. In this case, however, a state of wonder and amazement is a quite appropriate description of my reaction to this book.

From the Oxford-English Dictionary:
Amazement, noun. 1. gen. Loss of one's wits or self-possession; mental stupefaction; bewilderment, perplexity; 2. spec. Overwhelming fear or apprehension; 3. spec. Overwhelming wonder, extreme astonishment.
Related words: admiration, awe, bewilderment, marvel, wonder, wonderment

Wonder, marvel and admiration are precisely what I felt while reading Marcus Zusak’s The Book Thief. This seems fitting, for the author is trying to remind us of the wonder and marvel that so often passes unseen in our daily lives.

The Book Thief is narrated by Death, but Markus Zusak depicts him not as a gloomy, frightening grim reaper-type character. Rather, Death is an acutely sensitive, meticulous observer of humans. He does not seek victims, but simply does his job, collecting souls once their bodies expire and recounting with tender wonderment the circumstances of the event, the opportunities missed, the genuine, unbridled emotions as those close to the deceased (which Death terms “leftover humans” and “the ones who are left behind”) react to their loss. The narrator punctuates the story with brief interventions, offering dictionary definitions in the style of mine above, descriptions of his observations or background information about the characters or the situation. Death seems to crave the experiences of the Living and their glorious vitality; he describes the world in wistful detail, with poignant analogies and vivid colors. Death depicts a scream as “dribbling down the air,” a leaf as “dry and hard, like toasted bread,” darkness “stride[s] forward,” words “fell like injuries from his mouth,” or are “stranded on the paper, beaten down for her to walk on,” sometimes even “like waves, breaking on her back.”


Words are, in fact, at the crux of this story. Words have power: power to harm, power to enchant, power to protect, to facilitate escape or to divert, to record and to affirm one’s thoughts, the very essence of our existence. Hitler, the Fürher (leader) as he is referred to in the book, controlled Nazi Germany with words, labeling its citizens and programming their conceptions of one another. Liesel Meminger, our young orphaned protagonist, has a fascination for words. Her mother, a suspected communist in Nazi Germany, delivers Liesel to a foster family (Hans and Rosa Hubermann) on Himmel Street in Molching, a small town in the outskirts of Munich, but her deep curiosity for books and their stories propels her through this and other tragic events. Death intervenes to describe her foster parents:


***SOME FACTS ABOUT***
HANS HUBERMANN
He loved to smoke.
The main thing he enjoyed about smoking
was the rolling.
He was a painter by trade and played the piano
accordion. This came in handy, especially in winter,
when he could make a little money playing in the pubs
of Molching, like the Knoller.
He had already cheated me in one world war but
would later be put into another (as a perverse
kind of reward), where he would somehow
manage to avoid me again.


***SOME FACTS ABOUT***
ROSA HUBERMANN
She was five feet, one inch tall and wore her
browny gray strands of elastic hair in a bun.
To supplement the Hubermann income, she did
the washing and ironing for five of the wealthier households in Molching.
Her cooking was atrocious.
She possessed the unique ability to aggravate almost anyone she ever met.
But she did love Liesel Meminger.
Her way of showing it just happened to be strange.
It involved bashing her with wooden spoon and words at various intervals.
Words, books and stories are Liesel’s sustenance; learning to read and then, to write, is as life-altering for Liesel as are the political changes in the world around her. Before even acquiring these skills, Liesel is enthralled simply by the material nature of books, a black cover with silver words embossed across the front: The Grave Digger’s Handbook. Liesel picks up the book left behind in the snow by a young boy who had dug her brother’s grave, concealing it from her mother and later hiding it under her mattress in her new foster home and earning her Death’s moniker for her, The Book Thief. It is her papa, Hans Hubermann, who gives her the gift of words by teaching her the alphabet and how its sounds combine to form meanings, sentences and stories. These lessons begin as a cure for Liesel’s nightmares about her brother’s death and develop into a healthy obsession that becomes a cure for the larger ills of her war torn world. Liesel reads to people in order to share this ephemeral joy—she reads to the Jew whom the Hubermann’s are hiding in their basement and who becomes her great friend, she reads to a neighbor who grieves for her dead son, she reads to her friends and their parents who seek shelter from air raids in a basement.

Liesel’s life essentially begins when she learns to read The Grave Digger’s Handbook, a narrative about death. Likewise, Death finds some semblance of life through his narrative about Liesel reading. The Book Thief is a story about Liesel, but it also is a primer of life’s simple joys and the importance of human kindness, a reminder from Death that in life one can find infinite treasures even in the smallest, most unlikely, unexpected or insignificant places, objects, events and people. The world is an open book, a cabinet of curiosities (like the one to the right) in which words allow us to share our wonder.

Someone whose advice I deeply respect told me recently that it is important to find moments to act childlike (though preferably, not childish), in order to rediscover the world through innocent, naïve eyes, as if seeing things for the first time. Liesel’s story can help us to recapture this sensation and to bear in mind that life’s journeys are just as rich and important as the end result. Life is beautiful. Even when bombs are falling, books are being burned and everything seems hopeless. Even then, there is beauty just waiting for someone to notice.

Specimen Days

Specimen Days by Michael Cunningham is a beautifully written work. He structures the book into three distinct short stories—“Into the Machine,” “The Children’s Crusade,” and “Like Beauty.” Although these stories may very well stand alone as distinct narratives, they coalesce in such a way that allows Cunningham to label his work a novel (the full title of the book is Specimen Days: A Novel). The stories merge in location (New York), character names and relationships (Catherine and Simon, who are romantically involved and a young deformed boy, Lucas) and the evocation of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.

Each story is set in New York in a distinct time period—“Machine” takes place in the early days of the Industrial Revolution; “Crusade” in present-day NY and “Beauty” 150 years in the future—yet the consistency of characters allows the stories to melt together. In these stories, Cunningham satisfies the reader by hypothesizing various answers to the question “what if?” What if this character had died instead of that one? What if this character could be saved from his own self-destruction? If circumstances were different, would this relationship have worked?

Plot summary from wikipedia:

-The first short story, 'In the Machine,' is a Ghost Story. 'In the Machine' takes place in New York City during the Industrial Revolution, as human beings confront the alienating realities of the new machine age.

The principal characters include Lucas (a disfigured young boy), Catherine (a young woman who was to marry Lucas' elder brother) and Simon (Lucas' recently deceased elder brother).

-The second short story, 'The Children's Crusade,' is a Noir Thriller. The story is set in early twenty-first century New York City. The story plays with the conventions of the noir thriller as it tracks the pursuit of a terrorist band that is detonating bombs, seemingly at random, around the city.

The principle characters include Cat (an African-American woman working in a New York City police department), Simon (Cat's businessman boyfriend) and Luke (a child terrorist).

-The third short story, 'Like Beauty,' is futuristic Science Fiction. The story is set in a New York 150 years in the future. In the story, New York City is overwhelmed with refugees from the first inhabited planet to be contacted by the people of Earth.

The principle characters include Simon (an adult male cyborg), Catareen (an adult female alien lizard living as a refugee on earth) and Luke (a homeless boy).

In a book review in New York Magazine, Caleb Cain observes: “This ghost story […] sets in motion themes, images, and characters that are reincarnated in the two compelling tales that follow.” Indeed, Cunningham slightly alters his characters’ names and social status in keeping with their respective societies, all the while exploring the same relationships, albeit it from slightly different angles. “Lucas lives in 1870’s New York, and he fears that the dawning machine age has made Whitman’s wishful thinking about death come horribly true” (NY Magazine review). Lucas, suspicious of the animated machines that are gradually replacing the roles humans once occupied, fears that his dead brother Simon’s soul has been captured by a machine. In the final story comes full circle with the novel’s beginning, for here, the cyborg Simon truly is a soul captured inside of a machine, becoming increasingly human in his affections and affectations.

Throughout the stories, the reader senses the haunting presence of Walt Whitman, in fact the title itself is a Whitman reference. The talismanic evocation of his poems, particularly Song of Myself, first by Lucas, then by Simon suggests that the individual dissolves into a common humanity and world experience. Each story, each life experience is but a specimen of a larger, universal truth. With the progression of the stories, the characters are closer and closer to approaching this truth, culminating in the tender relationship between a cyborg and an alien (strangely, this seems much less weird than it sounds). The following oft-quoted lines illustrate this idea particularly well:

-It is you talking just as much as myself…I act as the tongue of you.

-I am large…I contain multitudes.

-I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

- Nobody really dies. We go on in the grass. We go on in the trees.

-All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

Even after a bit of reflection, I can’t say that I completely understand this novel. I would have to reread it several times in order to fully appreciate its complexities. Cunningham is a gifted writer and although I may not have grasped all of Cunningham’s intentions, I truly savored his prose. I found myself thinking about the book often, longing for my evening reading time. The below passage from the first story is particularly beautiful and aptly illustrates the presence of Walt Whitman. Here, Lucas describes the pain of having injured himself in the machine:

After some time, a flower blossomed in Lucas’s mind. He felt it, and unfurling of petals, a transformation from bud to bloom. The pain was there still, but it was not in him anymore. The pain had left him as the spirit leaves the body of the deceased. It had made of itself a curtain, shimmering, as if curtains could be made of glass and the glass were veined with colors and tiny instances of light. The curtain hovered, fragile as glass, around Lucas and Catherine. It encircled them. Pain ran through it in capillaries of blue and green, of softest pink. Where it was most intense, pain produced watery quiverings of illumination, like light on a river. Pain surrounded them, and they were here, inside it.

Lucas didn’t think he slept. He didn’t think he dreamed. He was able, though, to see things he ordinarily saw in dreams. He saw that outside the pain curtain, outside the walls of the room, was the hospital, with its patiently damaged supplicants and its crying man. Outside the hospital was the city, with its houses and factories, its streets where Walt walked, marveling at everything, at smiths sweating over their forges and women strolling under feathered hats, at gulls circling in the sky like dreams the hats were having. Outside the city was the book, which invented what Walt saw and loved, because the book loved Walt and wanted to delight him. Outside the book…was there anything outside the book? Lucas couldn’t be sure. He thought he saw a distance, an immensity that was in the book and outside it. […] (85)

A Good Book and a Pot of Tea

Today being June 1st, I am beginning my two reading challenges: Southern Reading Challenge & Summer Reading Challenge Round 2. For SRC2, I am challenging myself to read half of the books in the list at left. That will make 10 total for me this summer, including my three for the southern challenge. I can do this!

What better way is there to kick off my summer reading properly than to treat myself to some new books and teas? There are few more delicious combinations.

The FedEx man made my day yesterday when he brought me a small brown package from Adagio Teas. I recently discovered this company and so far, I am impressed. The selection is great; prices aren’t bad and delivery is fast. This time, I ordered the rooibos vanilla and the apricot green tea—I’m drinking a pot of this one right now and it’s quite yummy; the apricot is very delicate. Would be arguably more pleasant paired with a good novel rather than required dissertation research, but will look forward to that treat this weekend as I hope to find the time to finish my current read, Daphne du Maurier’s The House on the Strand. Made a trip to our local bookshop last night and picked up my next two picks: Mansfield Park and The Jane Austen Book Club. These will be immediately followed by one of my southern picks, of course.