kimberlywade

Sam Savage’s Glass is the story of Edna, a writer who has been asked to write a preface for the re-issue of her late husband’s one novel.  But that’s not what she wants to write.  She wants to write her own story, and she does so in a stream of consciousness style that delivers a deeply moving sense of isolation, of being behind glass like the neighbor’s fish and the rat in the terrarium Edna’s reluctantly agreed to care for.

And there’s a further conflict: Edna doesn’t respect her Hemmingway-esque husband’s work.  “…Clarence was not a thinking person.  In fact he was able to do what he did and, incidentally, write the way he wrote, only because he was simply blind to alternatives, his sentences stamping across the page like little soldiers, each armed with a dangerously active little verb.”  And later: “I told him it was not up to the events to make the story significant, but the other way around, but he was never able to see it that way.”

Another quote that struck me: “It was an epoch when being authentic seemed important to people.  It is interesting how things that seem obvious and are even part of the atmosphere of a certain epoch become incredible later—now, it seems, something or somebody can be blatantly fake and nobody cares.”  Yeah, what about that?!

Edna’s story reflects perfectly what it is like to be alone with one’s thoughts for a long time without trying to assert any control over them.  It’s its own revelatory sense of pleasure.  As she writes, “I am trying to make the really simple point that summoning thoughts is out of the question: they just come, and the matter seems complicated only because it is really so simple.  That is often the case, I suppose, simple things being slippery because they don’t possess any angles by which one can get a firm grip on them.”  Edna prevaricates because she realizes reality can’t be pinned down, her thoughts are just thoughts and her memories may not be true.  It’s all slippery.

So, if you like plot, this is probably not for you.  If you like stream of consciousness in a witty, distinctive voice, you may love it as much as I did.  And I loved it for one more reason.  When Edna searches for a photo she used as a bookmark—“I finally remembered, in The Lord of the Rings, which I was trying to read a few years ago—trying once again, that is, there was such talk about it after they made it into a movie, though I was just as bored as the first time…”  I’m not alone!

For an interview witht he author, discussing the book: http://www.coffeehousepress.org/authors/sam-savage/

http://www.amazon.com/Glass-Sam-Savage/dp/1566892732/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1336580142&sr=8-1

The Scale of Maps by Belen Gopegui is the story of a cartographer, a lover who thinks the only way to hold onto his perfect love is to end it and at the same time preserve the memory of it undiluted by the disillusioning influence of time.  Sergio Prim is a narrator so self conscious he sometimes writes of himself in the third person.  Here he describes his fear of intimacy:

“I am a retreating pair of hands, a body in retreat, alone in the bustle of bodies…I enter desire and maybe I find a place to rest, but right away a luminous fence lights up, a flashing orange blaze that compels me to cross, to run.”

Sergio addresses the reader and sometimes his young lover, Brezos, as he searches for the “interstices,” the gaps between time and space that he calls, “hollows”:

"Consider the precise dimensions of the word hollow.  Pay no attention to the container, no matter how empty it might be. Every container is a source of danger.”

He quotes DeBussy’s “Music is the silence between the notes.”

When Sergio finds a hollow, the moment unfolds like a landscape in his mind, an hallucinatory experience.  Where else have you ever read a sentence like this:  “As the first streetlamps were coming on, a sudden brightness shone in the window; you stretched out my body with your slender arms and every one of your sighs was like a step downward, a descent from the cross, a descent from the mirrors, laughter in a pit like an abyss that opened onto Australia, its great plains and sky of red suns.”

Gopegui knows her audience, addressing her readers as “my fellow introverts,” while striking at the nature of reality, the quiet, solitary spaces without thought.

I’ve said before that I’ve never read a Spanish to English translation without feeling like I was missing something.  I have to take that back; this book may be more beautiful in Spanish, but I don’t know how.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Scale-Maps-Belen-Gopegui/dp/087286510X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1334162058&sr=8-1

Brooklyn Bridge by Leslie Kaplan is unlike any other book I’ve ever read—just as I hope every book I pick up will be!  Kaplan’s style is too rich to be called spare, but she uses very few words to create a startling effect.  Here’s a sample:

            “The sky, clear and blue.  Smell of grass.  Heat rises.
            “Trees in light, and all the leaves pierced.  Here and there beautiful and worn little spots where paths meet.  Sweaty, rotten wood.  All around the air is fuzzy, loose.  Folds of shade.
            “In a hollow, a big merry-go-round, stiff and colorful horses that spin, peaceful, like an embedded music, a floating memory.”

The story is of a young man’s attraction for a little girl.  Julien knows his attraction for Nathalie is not primarily sexual, but he’s confused about its true nature.  The other adults in the novel, including Nathalie’s mother, her boyfriend and Julien’s girlfriend, Anna, are all unsettled by the relationship, but since there’s no physical impropriety between Nathalie and Julien, none take action against it.  Nathalie remains oblivious of the emotions that swirl around her, thus her charm.  Here Kaplan describes Nathalie’s use of language:

“They’re adult words, of course, and yet she makes objects of her own out of them.  She uses them with slight excess, with laughter.  As if, thinks Anna, she were stressing a barrier, a line.  And, Anna thinks more, the pleasure of discovery is there.”

Kaplan offers that pleasure of discovery on every page.  I was intrigued by her use of tenses.  It is predominately present tense but occasionally drops into past tense to describe a moment that has just passed, such as when two events occur simultaneously, the first will be described in present tense, the second in past then she reverts to present tense to continue the scene.  I wish I had thought to mark such a passage to give as an example.  I wonder if this has something to do with the translation from French to English.

I haven’t been this excited by a book in a long time.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1886449325/ref=cm_cr_mts_prod_img

It's worth the wait!  here's Bill:

Hi Kimberly, 

I’m a day late getting to your blog, and I feel terrible.  I’ve been over at Left Coast Crime all weekend plugging my new archaeological mystery, American Caliphate, and I just lost track of time.  Also, I was exhausted from carting home the dozens of books that I’ve now added to my Must Read pile.  So I hope you’ll still invite me to any and all reindeer games, and I promise to never miss another deadline. 

You and I first started talking about archaeology over twenty years ago, and we’ve both written archaeological fiction, so I wanted to start by talking about that.  Back when we were in graduate school, our professors stressed the point that the past was knowable.  And archaeology was our primary toolbox for the investigation of the past.  And it may be, but most of the tools are blunt and indelicate. 

We may be able to unearth pottery, stone tools, and the occasional pyramid, and that’s pretty cool.  But it’s not the half of it.  Our tools are woefully inadequate for investigating the perishable and the intangible.  We can excavate the palace complex, but we can’t tell you what color it was, or whether its inhabitants were sad or joyful. 

So while some of the past may be knowable, much of it is beyond our scientific reach, lost to time.  Now that I’m a professor, I tell my students that archaeology is a wonderful toolbox for the investigation of prehistory, but beyond that, it’s a potent catalyst for imagined histories. 

As scientists, we are told to never exceed our evidence.  But as writers, we are free to do just that.  In Thrall, you invoked the dawn of consciousness and populated it with vibrant characters.  You can’t do that in American Antiquity, but neither could you have written Thrall without having worked as an archaeologist. 

So this is basically what I was exploring in American Caliphate.  I spent several years working on the excavation of an ancient Moche pyramid complex on Peru’s north coast, the driest, most desolate place on earth.  In 1548, Spanish missionaries built a church in front of the complex, a church that now lies in ruins. 

This would have been one of the first Christian churches in South America, and during the course of our excavations, we encountered native religious elements depicted on its walls.  This intrigued us because historical documents suggest that the priests came to Peru to convert the natives, and were largely successful in their endeavors. 

The reality appears to have been more complex.  Anyone who spends any time on the north coast can see how important shamanism is to the local people today.  Shamans still hold their ceremonies on the pyramids, and their congregations are numerous. 

Back in 1548, the fires of the Inquisition were burning hotter in the Viceroyalty of Peru than they were home in Spain, so these missionary priests had better report good things to their superiors.  But religious conversion is never without strife, and the presence of non-Christian art adorning the church walls suggests that the priests had to tolerate a little local religion in order to do their job. 

OK, so that’s where the evidence takes us.  That’s as far as I can go as an archaeologist, but as a writer, it’s my jumping off point.  I became certain, after studying colonial Peruvian architecture, that large numbers of Spanish Moors emigrated to Peru in the decades following Pizarro’s capture of the Inca emperor in 1532. 

Since it was illegal to practice Islam in Spain, since it was illegal even to be a Muslim in Spain, many fled.  And I think they came to Peru.  Lima and Cuzco are filled with old colonial buildings that would look quite at home in Granada or Seville.  I think Moors came to Peru by the thousands.  But like I said, the fires of the Inquisition were burning hot, so it is unlikely that any Islamic evangelism would have been tolerated. 

So that’s the premise of American Caliphate.  I try to imagine what that time and place would have been like.  I can’t pursue this any further as an archaeologist because I’d be overstepping my evidence.  But as a writer, I can run with it. 

The past might not be entirely knowable, but it sure can be scientifically imagined.

Check out William Doonan's latest mystery novel here: http://www.amazon.com/American-Caliphate-William-Doonan/dp/1610090438/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1333500416&sr=8-1