The Point

Friday, December 14, 2007

Tight

I'm going to talk about two very different books today, which I read in short succession and which left me standing in very different places afterward.

I don't know how I feel about Haruki Murakami. On the one hand, I love his style (or, I guess, how I've received his style as effortlessly translated mostly by Jay Rubin). He's sort of incessantly readable - frustratingly so. Because I can read a book of his like, say, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and feel like crap the whole way through, right til the end, and even have to put it down more than once because I feel like I'm going to vomit or cry, but five minutes later I'll be restless if I don't pick it up again. That kind of author.

Norwegian Wood fits squarely in Murakami's self-made genre of loner-alienation-pop culture junkie-fiction, and it might have been, in isolation, a poor choice to read while trying to figure out the process of grief myself. I picked it up on the basis of remembering a handsome German man had recommended it to me, and that it was sort of a love story, but fittingly enough for me right then that sort-of-love-story is jigsawed in with the question of what two people do with the chasm of a suicide hanging between them, and how they stumble towards and away from each other around it.

I'm beginning to understand, I think, what he means in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle when he's fixating on this deep dark abandoned well, on the idea of needing to find your deep dark place and go to the bottom of it. Murakami is definitely on to something in these explorations he keeps coming back to of the connection between physical darkness, loss, and the power of dreams and what comes out at night. Making contact with that immense well that only rarely surfaces from the subconscious for most of us is, I think, one of the great confrontations we city folk born under permanent orange-pink skies need to run amok with. But if you are trying to find your way out of that dark place yourself, I recommend that you do not read Norwegian Wood. In such case, I think you'll find it appeals to a nostalgia and an understanding of love that don't fall in the right space on the continuum for getting well and getting through.

Joan Didion, on the other hand, is an author I feel I know very well now after having read The Year of Magical Thinking, and I am glad for it. Oddly, I considered reading the book for this blog sometime last year, because it was on all those 2006 best ofs lists, but I couldn't be bothered until it occurred to me it might have something to say to me last month. Indeed, Didion's frank, direct account of getting through the first year after her husband John's death might have been the perfect book to stray across my path.

What struck me about the way she speaks about her own experience of the process of grief was that, as a woman who lives through writing, she found herself trying to research herself, research the last 100 years of widowhood in American culture, of public and private grief, of the slow process of accepting death as a sort of eventual marble stone with which to put a name to all these impulses suddenly turned inward when the one you love isn't there to bring them to. I love what she says about self-pity.
I recall coming in from Central Park one morning in mid-August with urgent news to report: the deep summer green has faded overnight from the trees, the season is already changing. We need to make a plan for fall, I remember thinking. We need to decide where we want to be at Thanksgiving, Christmas, the end of the year.
I am dropping my keys on the table inside the door before I fully remember. There is no one to hear this news, nowhere to go with the unmade plan, the uncompleted thought. There is no one to agree, disagree, talk back. "I think I am beginning to understand why grief feels like suspense," C S Lewis wrote after the death of his wife. "It comes from the frustration of so many impulses that had become habitual. Thought after thought, feeling after feeling, action after action, had H. for their object. Now their target is gone. I keep on through habit fitting an arrow to the string, then I remember and have to lay the bow down. So many roads lead thought to H. I set out on one of them. But now there's an impassable frontierpost across it. So many roads once; now so many cul-de-sacs."
The book, I found, to most embody this thought of Lewis' in Didion's probing exploration of herself, her own reactions to the prospect of a Christmas planned alone, to the concurrent illness of their daughter Quintana, her readjustments to her reflection in the mirror and in front of the computer or notepad. The book's unapologetically prosaic the whole way through, and I love her for it. Some trickle of W H Auden's plain, elegant talent for whipping miracles out of a simple sentence finds it way through here. I wonder, expect, it's characteristic of Didion's work as a journalist, but I haven't read anything else by her yet. I think I love how prosaic it is because she examines death as fact, as astonished but unbreaking truth, and that, my friends, is what I have to recommend to you today, and hold up The Year of Magical Thinking as a fine way to find yourself through it.

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posted by Christopher at 1:27 a.m.

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