Last week the Neland Women's Book Club gathered together to discuss Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer. I've waited until now to report on it because I wanted to finish it first.
In Foer's novel, young Oskar is mourning the loss of his father, who died in the September 11 attack in New York. He has found a key in his father's closet, and he sets off, searching New York, to find the lock that it opens. The novel incorporates several narratives, as well as unusual design elements such as pages with only a few words, and photos of Stephen Hawking, fingerprints, gemstones and other images that give insight into the main characters more than they illustrate the story.
The overall response to the novel was positive, though there was a feeling of disappointment from some regarding the way the quest ends.
Karen, our enthusiastic leader, started us off with some biographical information about the author. Then she opened the discussion by asking "What do you think this novel is about?" The fact that this question got a few different answers is indicative of the odd nature of the story. Don't read it if you like a story that moves from point A to B to C all the way to Z. This one starts at point A (sort of) then has more of a G, F, B, J, D style.
And so, what did we think the book was about? Here's what we came up with: It was about a boy working out his grief, Aspergers syndrome or autism, post traumatic stress syndrome, and missed communication. And of course, 9/11.
Now that I've finished the book, I can tell you that I absolutely loved it. I love the way the weird characters and strange narrative weave together to give you a picture of love and sadness and loss. This sad little boy is brilliant, funny, awkward and utterly honest. It's surreal--you have to be willing to suspend disbelief on several occasions--but if you can do it, you'll be rewarded.
The broken, hurting people in the book love each other fiercely, even against their wills sometimes. But none of them tell each other how they really feel. They keep secrets, and they keep quiet. At one point, the grandfather is going through customs with a pile of suitcases, and he tells the customs officer that he has nothing to declare. "'That's a lot of suitcases for someone with nothing to declare,' he said, I nodded, knowing that people with nothing to declare carry the most..." This line is only a small portion of the sentence, which should also show you that Foer plays fast and loose with the commas.
In spite of the comma issues, Foer is a gifted writer who brings the reader into the emotions and experiences of the characters. He gives several images of people who have put away emotions with physical items. Oskar hides a phone with messages from his father recorded on it from the day of his death. He wraps it up in a scarf, puts that inside a grocery bag, inside a box, inside another box and under a pile in his closet. Another boy ends a long relationship with his female best friend next door when she says "I love you" into the can on her side of the string between their houses. The boy breaks the string, puts a cover on the can and "put her love for him on a shelf in his closet."
There are so many lovely, odd, heartbreaking moments. The grandparents, who lost everything in the allied bombings on Dresden, found each other in America but could never share their grief. They lived in self-imposed silences--he refusing to speak, she refusing to see--unable to visit the reality of the past and therefore turning the present into a fiction. Oskar's mother tries to protect her son from her grief, and Oskar, in turn, tries to protect his mother from his own sadness. Oskar's elderly neighbor has cut himself off from the world by refusing to hear.
In spite of the sadness, there is also hope. In one remembered section, Oskar's father is telling his son a story. Oskar is questioning the factuality of the story. Oskar's father asks him if he's an optimist or a pessimist, and Oskar responds that he's an optimist. His father says "Well, that's good, because there's no irrefutable evidence. There's nothing that could convince someone who doesn't want to be convinced. But there is an abundance of clues that would give the wanting believer something to hold on to."
Real life, we women of Neland concluded, is "extremely loud and incredibly close." Sometimes that's too much for us, whether we are fragile, or grieving, or somewhere on the autistic scale. In good times, we take too much for granted, and we live with the guilt of that when disaster strikes. Karen did her best to bring us to tears by reading from the letter from the grandmother, who lost her sister Anna, along with the rest of her family, in the Dresden bombings.
"I said, I want to tell you something.
She said, You can tell me tomorrow.
I had never told her how much I loved her.
She was my sister.
We slept in the same bed.
There was never a right time to say it.
It was always unnecessary...
I rolled onto my side and fell asleep next to her.
Here is the point of everything I have been trying to tell you, Oskar.
It's always necessary.
I love you,
Grandma"
Saturday, September 25, 2010
Thursday, September 16, 2010
Another Hero Bites the Dust
Lest some of you expect to see a report on the Neland Women's Book Club meeting tonight, you'll have to wait a few more days for that. I have a little more to read in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer before I write it up. So on to something else.
Just last week I told some friends about my crush on Michael Chabon. I'd read The Yiddish Policeman's Union, and Chabon came to Calvin College two years ago to speak. He was so charming, intelligent and handsome in a tweedy professorial sort of way. The day after my "confession," I started listening to his book Manhood for Amateurs, which is a collection of essays reflecting on, as the cover says, his life as a son, husband and father.
First off, Chabon is a beautiful writer. In his novels, he concocts detailed, imaginative, real-to-the-reader worlds and characters. In these essays, he applies the same talent to describing the worlds of his childhood, teen years, young adulthood and his current role as a husband and father of four children. I found his essay on being the grateful son-in-law of a loving father-in-law, and the sorrow that he caused that father-in-law in the subsequent demise of his first marriage, to be an honest and touching examination of the way brokenness affects us.
But I wouldn't recommend this book to, well, anyone I can think of. I might recommend sections of it. I found myself ping-ponging between disappointment and warm feelings of familiarity and recognition of common experiences.
Disappointment at his contempt for "the God of Abraham" and Christians in general, as well as his honest-to-a-fault descriptions of his long-term use of marijuana and early sexual experience. Close to the beginning, he uses a profane nickname to express his disgust for the God of the Old Testament. While I have thought often that the God of the Old Testament is at times frightening and confusing, this was so disturbing to me that I almost turned it off for good. The fact that I had paid good money for this particular CD is probably the overriding, if not appropriate, reason I continued to listen at all. That and the fact that the story from the Bible he referred to was when Abraham was asked to sacrifice Isaac, which has always been one of the most difficult stories for me to process. He also refers to the Christmas story, strangely affectionately, as a lie that tells a truth.
And yet, profanity not dismissed but set aside, I also nodded knowingly when he discussed the change in the landscape of childhood, from adventurous wilderness exploration when we were young to the ultrasafe, prescribed bubbles of our own kids' lives. I laughed out loud at his reaction to finding out that the "oldies" station no longer played 50s and 60s music, but was playing Phil Collins and other 70s and 80s music. It gave me food for thought that the Lego sets of our childhoods were collections of uniform, brightly colored blocks that we put into whatever shape we thought up, while the sets that our children play with are designed to be turned into predetermined airships from Star Wars movies or sets from Indiana Jones movies. And Chabon's loving and unvarnished description of his wife, his children and their family life is one of the high points of the book.
In the last week, the only way I could read anything was to listen to it as I drove from place to place. Listening to a book is such a different experience than reading it. The things that offend me most stick in my head in the voice of the author, and the beautiful or humorous things don't. I had the same experience a while back when I listened to the young adult novel Feed by M.T. Anderson. The story had me, but the extreme language was intensified by hearing it spoken. On the other hand, that particular story that revolves around a futuristic world where people have some sort of internet feed in their heads, was quite effective on CD since it felt a bit as though the feed were inside my own head!
To counteract the downsides of Manhood for Amateurs, and to put something on when the kids were in the car and the book wasn't an option, I enjoyed listening to "Welcome to the Welcome Wagon" by the group called, you guessed it, The Welcome Wagon. The Welcome Wagon is headed up by a pastor/husband and wife duo, and their trippy music ranges somewhere between folk music, gospel, Salvation Army Band, and the age of Aquarius. It is often joyful and sometimes beautifully mournful, and it's great for a singalong in the car. A nice break from the musings of a dapper, sort-of-Jewish, liberal agnostic who has little use for me and my beliefs.
Just last week I told some friends about my crush on Michael Chabon. I'd read The Yiddish Policeman's Union, and Chabon came to Calvin College two years ago to speak. He was so charming, intelligent and handsome in a tweedy professorial sort of way. The day after my "confession," I started listening to his book Manhood for Amateurs, which is a collection of essays reflecting on, as the cover says, his life as a son, husband and father.
First off, Chabon is a beautiful writer. In his novels, he concocts detailed, imaginative, real-to-the-reader worlds and characters. In these essays, he applies the same talent to describing the worlds of his childhood, teen years, young adulthood and his current role as a husband and father of four children. I found his essay on being the grateful son-in-law of a loving father-in-law, and the sorrow that he caused that father-in-law in the subsequent demise of his first marriage, to be an honest and touching examination of the way brokenness affects us.
But I wouldn't recommend this book to, well, anyone I can think of. I might recommend sections of it. I found myself ping-ponging between disappointment and warm feelings of familiarity and recognition of common experiences.
Disappointment at his contempt for "the God of Abraham" and Christians in general, as well as his honest-to-a-fault descriptions of his long-term use of marijuana and early sexual experience. Close to the beginning, he uses a profane nickname to express his disgust for the God of the Old Testament. While I have thought often that the God of the Old Testament is at times frightening and confusing, this was so disturbing to me that I almost turned it off for good. The fact that I had paid good money for this particular CD is probably the overriding, if not appropriate, reason I continued to listen at all. That and the fact that the story from the Bible he referred to was when Abraham was asked to sacrifice Isaac, which has always been one of the most difficult stories for me to process. He also refers to the Christmas story, strangely affectionately, as a lie that tells a truth.
And yet, profanity not dismissed but set aside, I also nodded knowingly when he discussed the change in the landscape of childhood, from adventurous wilderness exploration when we were young to the ultrasafe, prescribed bubbles of our own kids' lives. I laughed out loud at his reaction to finding out that the "oldies" station no longer played 50s and 60s music, but was playing Phil Collins and other 70s and 80s music. It gave me food for thought that the Lego sets of our childhoods were collections of uniform, brightly colored blocks that we put into whatever shape we thought up, while the sets that our children play with are designed to be turned into predetermined airships from Star Wars movies or sets from Indiana Jones movies. And Chabon's loving and unvarnished description of his wife, his children and their family life is one of the high points of the book.
In the last week, the only way I could read anything was to listen to it as I drove from place to place. Listening to a book is such a different experience than reading it. The things that offend me most stick in my head in the voice of the author, and the beautiful or humorous things don't. I had the same experience a while back when I listened to the young adult novel Feed by M.T. Anderson. The story had me, but the extreme language was intensified by hearing it spoken. On the other hand, that particular story that revolves around a futuristic world where people have some sort of internet feed in their heads, was quite effective on CD since it felt a bit as though the feed were inside my own head!
To counteract the downsides of Manhood for Amateurs, and to put something on when the kids were in the car and the book wasn't an option, I enjoyed listening to "Welcome to the Welcome Wagon" by the group called, you guessed it, The Welcome Wagon. The Welcome Wagon is headed up by a pastor/husband and wife duo, and their trippy music ranges somewhere between folk music, gospel, Salvation Army Band, and the age of Aquarius. It is often joyful and sometimes beautifully mournful, and it's great for a singalong in the car. A nice break from the musings of a dapper, sort-of-Jewish, liberal agnostic who has little use for me and my beliefs.
Sunday, September 5, 2010
Working through a Good Book
As a reader, I am drawn to a good story. Good characters are high on my list, too. Nonfiction is not my first choice, though I still like it (when it reads like a story). I want to lose myself in a book, and if along the way I learn some facts or history, that's great too. Which made most textbooks a drag. Lots of facts, not enough story.
Another book that at times I have thought of as less than compelling reading is the Bible. Strange that a book that is so central to my faith, to my life, would be such hard going. Geneaologies, ritual laws, commands. Add some difficult language and the fact that I felt like I knew every story already from years of church education and Christian schools, and it became like my opinion of other textbooks--lots of facts, not enough story.
Of course, the relationship of a reader to the Bible goes through many phases. Sometimes the words come alive to me, breathing into my very soul. Other times the words run together and I can barely stay awake to make sense of them. But almost all of the time I tend to read the Bible as piecework--pick a book, start studying it, and I may or may not finish the job. I've always been impressed by people who make a commitment to read the whole Bible, in order, as a book, but I have yet to accomplish that myself.
About a year and a half ago, I began freelance work on study Bibles for Zondervan. I do some of the picky editing of the notes and articles--checking that quotes match the actual text, making sure that references actually refer to the correct verse, checking that the space after an italicized word is not italicized. Though I love the work, I am aware that my passion for finding an errant italicization is not a widely shared passion.
Beyond the edit, though, I learn a lot of little facts along the way. Did you know that the men of the tribe of Benjamin were mostly left-handed? Did you know that Abraham's wife Sarah, looker that she was, was taken into Pharaoh's harem at age 65 (when Abraham lied that she was his sister) and later into another harem at age 90--NINETY!--when Abraham lied again. Tattoos and nose rings are not a new trend--you can find them throughout the Bible, if you're reading the right translation, though the good Israelite was warned against getting inked. And in an interesting euphemism, where most modern translations refer to male prostitutes, the King James Version talks about "raisin cakes."
As fascinating as these tidbits may or may not be, I have learned something else. When you spend 2-3 months skimming the major points of the Bible, and then you go back and review the same Bible from different angles two more times, you realize how interconnected all of the stories and the promises are. God's book, that tome that sometimes seems so ancient and distant from my life, is alive with the struggles that I face in my everyday life, and it's overflowing with the promises that God offers (and fulfills) for both Biblical figures and to myself.
I may never get around to reading the every word of the Word from start to finish. Yet, the opportunity to work through it time and time again, by way of study notes and articles, has changed the way I look at the book, and I count it as a blessing.
Another book that at times I have thought of as less than compelling reading is the Bible. Strange that a book that is so central to my faith, to my life, would be such hard going. Geneaologies, ritual laws, commands. Add some difficult language and the fact that I felt like I knew every story already from years of church education and Christian schools, and it became like my opinion of other textbooks--lots of facts, not enough story.
Of course, the relationship of a reader to the Bible goes through many phases. Sometimes the words come alive to me, breathing into my very soul. Other times the words run together and I can barely stay awake to make sense of them. But almost all of the time I tend to read the Bible as piecework--pick a book, start studying it, and I may or may not finish the job. I've always been impressed by people who make a commitment to read the whole Bible, in order, as a book, but I have yet to accomplish that myself.
About a year and a half ago, I began freelance work on study Bibles for Zondervan. I do some of the picky editing of the notes and articles--checking that quotes match the actual text, making sure that references actually refer to the correct verse, checking that the space after an italicized word is not italicized. Though I love the work, I am aware that my passion for finding an errant italicization is not a widely shared passion.
Beyond the edit, though, I learn a lot of little facts along the way. Did you know that the men of the tribe of Benjamin were mostly left-handed? Did you know that Abraham's wife Sarah, looker that she was, was taken into Pharaoh's harem at age 65 (when Abraham lied that she was his sister) and later into another harem at age 90--NINETY!--when Abraham lied again. Tattoos and nose rings are not a new trend--you can find them throughout the Bible, if you're reading the right translation, though the good Israelite was warned against getting inked. And in an interesting euphemism, where most modern translations refer to male prostitutes, the King James Version talks about "raisin cakes."
As fascinating as these tidbits may or may not be, I have learned something else. When you spend 2-3 months skimming the major points of the Bible, and then you go back and review the same Bible from different angles two more times, you realize how interconnected all of the stories and the promises are. God's book, that tome that sometimes seems so ancient and distant from my life, is alive with the struggles that I face in my everyday life, and it's overflowing with the promises that God offers (and fulfills) for both Biblical figures and to myself.
I may never get around to reading the every word of the Word from start to finish. Yet, the opportunity to work through it time and time again, by way of study notes and articles, has changed the way I look at the book, and I count it as a blessing.
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