Jane Gardam: The Queen of the Tambourine

Fate is so peculiar.  Last year a friend was unloading a pile of his books before leaving the country, and I of course accepted them all sight unseen.  I am occasionally guilty of literary tunnel vision, seeing only fiction, poetry, and drama by long dead authors as worthy of my time.  The bag I received from this friend was, by contrast, filled with modern writing, both fiction and non; decidedly outside of my usual wheelhouse.

So were it not for Fate, I would never have read this book--at least not until long after the author had died and it had proven itself worthy.  What a loss that would have been.  At first slightly unimpressed by the epistolary framework, I gradually succumbed to its charm, and by the end admitted that there was no other way it could have been written.  A good book until the last chapters, at which point it revealed itself to have been secretly great all along.  Every seemingly out of place or jarring addition earlier in the book gradually unfolded into a lovely and perfectly intentional flower by the end.  One scarcely noticed the seeds until they had bloomed, and that is, by my definition, literature.  Perhaps an author doesn't have to die to earn the label after all.

Hirotaka Kisaragi: BrotherXBrother

Just another breezy graphic novel, written in Japanese, read in Korean, and written about in English.  Nothing literary or groundbreaking.  And yet . . .

One does wonder about the theme.  Love between (albeit half-) brothers taken to the extreme is appropriate in a Japanese graphic novel.  Certainly not my fetish.  But there is something about the brotherly aspect of male romantic relationships that is undeniably attractive.  It is this dynamic that sets us apart from our straight counterparts, in my opinion, and I have for some years been campaigning to get us our own word, proposing "Theban" as a counterpart to "Lesbian" (to no success).

There are really only two things I want, after all: someone to watch over, and someone to watch over me.  A younger brother, and an older brother.  The three of us against the world,

김원일: 마당 깊은 집

우리 독서 동아리 회원들 모두 다 대구에서 사니까 이 책을 같이 읽기로 했다.  옛날의 대구 모습을 알게 되면서, 그 시대의 시민들이 어떻게 살았는지 배운 후 대구에 있는 "마당 깊은 집 박물권"을 방문해서 직접 이 책에 나오는 장소를 볼 수 있는 게 우리 다 좋은 기회라고 생각했다.  책을 읽고 난 후 우리의 의견이 완전 달라졌다.

친구 한 명은, "그냥 일반 대구 아저씨의 얘기인데" 라고 하며 다른 한 명은, "남성성의 오만"이라고 답했다.  더구나 그 "마당 깊은 집 박물권"으로 가서 자서전도 아니고 그냥 그 시절의 기억을 바탕으로 만든 허구인지 알게 됐다.  더 이상하게 자서전 아니면서 그 박물권 직원들이 굳이 자서전인 척 했고 독촉해야만 그 집, 그 사건들 존재하지 않았다고 인정했다. 

대표적인 한남 김원일.  감정, 철학 없으면서 "내가 하고 싶은 말을 모두 다 들어야한다"고 고집한다.  그 시대의 모습 정말로 알고 싶다면 마당 깊은 집을 무시하고 박원서의 그 많던 싱아는 누가 다 먹었을까"란 정당한 자서전을 읽는 게 좋다.

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra: Don Quixote

What Pottermore house are you?  Are you team Edward or Jacob?  What color is your lightsaber? Do you admit that the most pure lady Dulcinea is the most beautiful of all ladies on this Earth, or do you prefer to die by my hand this very instant?  Have you accepted the Lord Jesus Christ into your heart? I challenge you to find the difference between these questions.

In chronicling the adventures of The Knight of the Sad Countenance and his squire, Cervantes seems almost to be describing our modern version of fandom, so little has the human phenomenon changed in 400+ years.  The parallels are striking.  Surely there are in your circle those who obsessively devour all media related to their chosen fantasy world: the fans. And likely you also know those who have allowed their fandom to seep even further into their identities, learn Klingon, dress as Sailor Moon, and get tattoos of the Bat Signal: the cosplayers.

But what Cervantes is most interested in here are the most obsessive of fans, those who actually go out into the world in the guise of a their fantasy persona, The Society for Creative Anachronism, Vampire: the Masquerade, the LARPers.  Cervantes does not mock these characters; his affection for his main character is palpable, and those who view the book as a documentary of madness and futility miss the point entirely.  Don Quixote's break with reality is entirely voluntary, as he is early to point out: "'I know who I am,' replied Don Quixote, 'and I know, too, that I am capable of being not only the characters I have named, but all the Twelve Peers of France and all the Nine Worthies as well, for my exploits are far greater than all the deed they have done, all together and each by himself."(54).  Quixote's supposed madness is divinest sense, both through Cervantes' lens, and a reasonable modern one.  Is that which somehow has earned the name "reality" so lovely and magnificent that it would be madness to escape it, or is it quite the other way around?  Is it not more rational to reject nature, red in tooth and claw, and to instead build a true-to-scale TARDIS in your den?  To choose your reality instead of suffering through it?

Which instinct is, of course far more prevalent than one might think at first.  The world is in fact full of LARPers.  Far more than half of all humans are following Don Quixote into the field, even as they vigorously deny it. Unable or unwilling to cope with the desolate waste of reality, they throw themselves into a half-conscious fantasy world created long ago by now dead authors, and have so convinced themselves that they pity those who don't do the same.  We sometimes don't recognize the prevalence of this instinct, because people doing largely don't call it fandom; they call it religion. It is this point that reveals Cervantes' most brilliant, though subtle, observation: the crux of the argument is that when Don Quixote adheres rabidly to the text of his stories, such as "when Carloto left Baldwin wounded on the mountain, a tale familiar to children, not unknown to youth, and even believed by old men, though for all that no truer than the miracles of Mahomet,"  the Don is doing something indistinguishable from religion (53).

It was perfectly safe, of course, for Cervantes to draw a connection between Quixotes' madness and that of the Muslims.  But the Catholics in his book, though they escape such direct comparison, are in no way painted differently from the supposed heathens.  In fact, they suffer from the increased attention, and their irrationally dogged adherence to ancient texts, when placed besides Quixote's, are revealed to be of the same nature.  Cervantes tacit observation is proven true by even casual contact with those ubiquitous LARPers of religion today.  Who is to say that the Bishop's mitre is not in fact a chamberpot that society has agreed not to notice?

Italo Calvino: The Baron in the Trees

In my early teens, I discovered The Great Brain series of novels by J.D. Fitzgerald, and within a chapter, I was home.  I had never read a book that seemed to be written so exactly for me.  Encyclopedia Brown, while ostensibly on a similar topic, was clearly written by someone who didn't know what he was talking about, had never had the thoughts and feelings that he was trying to describe.  But the titular Great Brain knew, or at least his brother knew, because the stories were true.  This was really what it was like.  I wasn't imagining it.  Somebody understood.

As an adult, I've since found actual people who thought and felt like me.  Sometimes we get along, and sometimes less so.  One would think that such meetings are a comfort, and indeed they often are.  But equally often, they are a warning that whatever gifts I have, they are not in and of themselves enough.  There are so many variables at play in this existence, and so many of them are hostile.  It is vanishingly rare for things to turn out the way people would want them.  And for those of us who think and feel deeply, it is even more difficult because we want so much more.

Cosimo, the eponymous Baron, knew this.  And he couldn't have known this if the author--serendipitously also speaking in the voice of a younger brother--hadn't known it himself.  It is so easy to withdraw, to live in and for oneself, among the trees as it were.  On the surface, scouring yourself free of all the messy variables that come with people and society seems like a cure.  But it is not.  It makes it worse, drives you mad with frustration, until the only end left to you is to hop on a balloon and drift over the ocean.

But there is an alternative to a life in the trees, and it is put so precisely here that I will end by quoting it:

"...association renders men stronger and brings out each person's best gifts, and gives a joy which is rarely to be had by keeping to oneself, the joy of realizing how many honest, decent, capable people there are for whom it is worth giving one's best (while living just for oneself very often the opposite happens, of seeing people's other side, the side which make one keep one's hand always on the hilt of one's sword)" (106).

Banana Yoshimoto: Kitchen

Sometimes you meet a person that reminds you so much of what you don't like in yourself, you hate them on sight.  What makes it worse, your similarities mean you travel in the same circles, compete for the same attention, and generally can't escape each other.  This is not a bad thing, necessarily.  Viewed properly, it give one the chance to reflect on her or his own behavior, on the way it affects others, and perhaps make adjustments.

It is unsurprising that the same phenomenon can exist in writers.  I didn't hate this book; in fact my response is rather positive.  Even that positive response, however, is muted by the realization that what weakens her writing is the same thing that weakens my own attempts at fiction.  Her engaging heightened reality, the vivid and memorable characters experiencing deep, recognizable, and universal thoughts and feelings, and her purposefully oblique scene-painting were all effective and engaging.  But they grabbed me in the way that an instagram story does, when they really could have held the weight of a full season of television.

So much was touched upon, underdeveloped here.  I suppose it's a testament that I was left wanting more, wanting to dive more deeply into this world, but wanting more is only a virtue when there is more to be had.  If this novella were the first in a series, I would be addicted.  But after the last page, all I'm left with are withdrawals. 

James Agee: A Death in the Family

Surely, the author could not have known that the titular death would be his own.  And yet, considering the depth of spirit that is evident in this work . . . perhaps he did?  It's entirely plausible that he knew this would his final word, and that the reader would be left behind to put it together in a way that makes sense.
Thus is death, and thus is grief.   They take their version with them, the dead, their director's cut, their final draft. What we are left with is fragments, our version of their story, and it is that which we mourn.  And just as the humans in this book will each hold a different Jay in their mind, so will each reader be left to wonder forever what Agee's final edition would have been.
My Maternal Grandfather will die this week.  He fell, and there's really nothing to do but inter him in palliative care, and then eventually in a hole in the ground in Kansas.  Why was he the way he was?  I have my version, my explanation why a decade ago he decided he never wanted to speak to me again.  Well, he got his wish.
But it is the privilege of the living, and of the reader, to have the last word.  To look at the fragments of stories left behind, and to declare them, as in the case of Agee, good, beautiful, necesary.