This seems to be a big year for the literary dead. Jose Saramago, Nobel prize-winning author, died last Friday June 18th. Check out the NYTimes obit.

I immersed myself in Saramago a few years back whilst living in Chicago. I read his novels riding the El to and from work and in the few spare minutes at the end of my work day.

Our apartment had a deck built between the two crumbling edifices that our landlord generously called carriage houses. One of those was ours. I remember vividly sitting on this deck as a summer sun faded into the gloaming and finishing Saramago’s The Gospel According to Jesus Christ.

As an apostate who spent the first twenty years of my life chasing after the mirage of Jesus, I thought that I had pretty much dwelt upon every aspect of the historical Christ, explored every angle. But Saramago moved me. He made me feel for the man Jesus and I thought he even made a plausible explanation for the unwitting divinity of Christ. Mostly, though, I thought Saramago knew how to tell a damn good story. Better than Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John put together.

There is much to commend in Saramago. He seems to represent a type of literature whose time is gone.

I should add that I also take comfort in the fact that he did not become a full-time writer until well into his 50’s. A fact that is lost on the NewYorker’s “20 under 40″ debacle.

Once the Shore is Yoon’s first book, and it brings together many of the short stories that have made him a writer of note. All the stories in Once the Shore take place on a small island belonging to South Korea. Each story captures a different moment in the island’s history, from World War II and the Japanese occupation to the present day when the island is overrun with tourism. Yoon has a subtle touch in depicting his characters. He can speak volumes in a few words or gestures. He invests the landscape of the island with a character all its own, till you can taste the salt sea, the beauty, the bitterness, the loneliness of this place. This is what makes these stories compelling.

The title story first appeared in One Story and then in the Best American Short Stories of 2006. It’s good. Read it.

My favorite story in the collection, however, is “So They Do Not Hear Us.” This story narrates the tale of an old woman who makes her living diving into the sea for whatever sea-life she can retrieve. She befriends a young Japanese boy who has lost an arm in an accident. Ahrim, the woman, lost her husband during the Japanese war, and she has lived many years waiting for him. Sinaru, the boy, lives with his parents who seem to be constantly arguing. His lost arm and the circumstances surrounding it appear to be the source of their arguing. These things form a quiet background to the story, giving the story life and depth. Yoon tells the story with a derth of words. He does not insult the reader. In this passage, Ahrim meets the boy at her home after school. His classmates have been bullying him and Ahrim bristles at this like a bitch with pups.

There he was. She saw the boy through her window, crossing the street, and she thought that what seemed inherent in some was caution. She herself took it from her life in the sea, which moved and pressed against its environment in a perpetual act of provocation. She opened the door before the boy could knock and so upon first sight saw his hand in a fist, raised, his knuckles pointing at her. He wore a different shirt, cleaner, fresh. Cinched at the waist this time was a long thread of twine. A stick was tucked inside it., the end of which he had sharpened to a point. His bruises were healing. The skin of the young does so, much faster than the old.

Two days ago, three boys had wanted to see his stump.

The first punch was to the side of Sinaru’s head. When his body bent, they kicked his shins and hit him on the shoulders, and then ripped the sleeves of his shirt. ‘The Jap has a second dick,’ they said….

She knelt beside her door and examined his legs. The bruises were the color of a mussel’s shell, the color of the outer rim of stars.

“I made this,” Sinaru said, tapping his sword. He looked down at her. He was filled with pride.

“Let’s have a look.”

She stood and he presented the sword to her. It was a branch of forsythia, its gold flowers gone. At the sharp end its flesh was revealed, nearly white against the bark. He would have used a kitchen knife, perhaps, something a bit dull. She could tell from the uneveness of his cuts.

“I would like something for this,” the boy said, raising the stump where his arm once existed. “I’d place it there and then I would be a knight and I could cut paths anywhere.” He made swooshing noises.

“You’d rescue the princess,” Ahrim said.

“Yes, I would.”

“And would you rescue me?”

The boy considered her question. “You’re too old to be a princess.”

“True.”

“But maybe I would.”

“Here,” Ahrim said, lowering the bowl. “Eat.”

With her chopsticks she picked a few strips of the seaweed salad, twisted them, and fed the boy while they were standing at her door. She asked whether anyone had bothered him at school today. He shrugged while chewing.

This passage illustrates all that is great in this story and all that is grand in Yoon’s writing. The brutality of the world. We sense the violence behind this scene. The violence of the bullies, yes, but the violence of the world that would take her husband so young, like the sea in its “perpetual act of provocation.” But the interaction between Ahrim and Sinaru is what is truly touching. Here is a boy being a boy. After being beaten up he has fashioned a sword, and he is proud of it. He dreams of vanquishing his foes. He dreams of glory. She needs to feed him. Subtle and beautiful.

In an interview over at the Rumpus, Yoon describes his motivation for writing:

Writing fiction is kind of a love letter to all the books that have stayed with me and all the readers that share in that feeling I have when I finish a book: I look up and I feel like my surroundings have shifted in some way and I have no idea what has just happened. Your sense of the world has changed, and it is wonderful. And that fuels my obsessive desire to enter fictional worlds, learn about and experience various cultures and history through the imagination.

You feel this yearning in Yoon’s fiction.

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Once again, I’ve fallen behind in writing thoughts on the books I’m reading. Some other books I have read of late:

• Everything here is the best thing ever, Justin Taylor
• 66 Stories, Donald Barthelme
• High Lonesome, Barry Hannah
• Last Days of the Dog-Men, Brad Watson
• How to Read an Un-written language, Philip Graham
• Liars and Saints, Maile Meloy
• Erasure, Percevil Everet
• The Lonely Polygamist, Brady Udall
• Elizabeth Costello, J.M. Coetzee
• Waiting for the Barbarians, J.M. Coetzee

If any of these strike your fancy, send me a note, and I’ll post a review.

Bill Murray reading poetry to construction workers.

The past year, I have been diligently sending out my short stories to various journals.  This is a major psychological step for me.  My stories have always been just that, mine, and I have not wanted to share them with a larger audience.  A feeling, I’m sure, that is partially rooted in my own fear of rejection.  So far rejection is all my stories have found in the wider world.

This past week I received yet another letter saying “no thanks.”  This one came from Cezanne’s Carrot, a journal whose speciality is fiction that explores the metaphysical and mystical.  I sent them my story “Puppet Storm,” a story that fits nicely within their editorial guidelines.  This story is one that I started many years ago but finished only recently, and it narrates a comic moment of cosmic import.

The story has, so far, garnered no fewer than four rejections from journals large and small.

In the words of a poet friend of mine, “I want the rejections that are rightly due me.”  Nevertheless, I cannot help but feel a low, every time thsoe damned emails/letters arrive.

“We appreciate the opportunity to read your work, but after careful consideration, we have decided not to publish it.”

Very succinct.

Whilst moping about this latest rejection, I read a great post on HTML Giant.  The author, Roxanne Gay, is an editor at Pank magazine, and in that role, she has the pleasure of sending more than her share of rejection notices.  Her post explores the stages of grief that every writer goes through when dealing with rejection:

1. It’s not me it’s those damned editors.
2. It’s all my fault.  I will never be published.
3. People just don’t understand the brilliance of my writing.

I have felt all these things.

Gay cautions folk like me not to fall victim to an entitlement mentality.  To put that energy back into the work.

She concludes:

Growing up, my father (like many fathers, I’m sure) was fond of reminding my brothers and I that life isn’t fair when we were pouting about one trivial thing or another. I often want to dispense that advice to writers who feel like publication is inevitable, that publication is  their right by the grace of their talent.  I’m afraid such is not the case.

‘Tis a good word.  Not very soothing to me at the moment.  Maybe it’s simply the reference to father figures, but Gay’s post strikes me as a bit trite right now, however, true I know her advice to be.

I have much work to do with my writing.  I want to write well.  I have yet to acheive what I want with writing.  I recently read an interview with Barry Hannah, in which he discussed a certain story of his (I forget which), it was a story that he wrote several years after publishing a book of stories.  Hannah was well on  his way to achieving some noteriety for his writing.  Yet he said of this particular story that it was the first time he felt like he got it right, like his words captured the essence of what he wanted.  I’m still waiitng for that moment, and I do not wait passively.  I write.  I read.

And I try to ignore the rejections.

The Literature of Oppression

The current wave of obsession with the Christian notion of the Rapture and the Apocalypse, on the surface, has little to do with literature and certainly even less to do with the writing of Herta Muller, the Nobel Prize winner of 2009. Rapture literature is low-brow fiction, for sure. The Left Behind series written by Christian hacks Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye in no way participates in what the Nobel committee calls the “great conversation of world literature.” Jenkins and LaHaye cannot even reach a level of literary art that is concerned with things like: how can I craft a good sentence? are my characters believable? Is my dialog authentic?  Their sight is set on a more lofty aim, viz. presenting a conservative Christian doctrine with the goal of selling millions of books and converting people to their peculiar (though wildly popular) theological perspective.

Left Behind , however, has its roots in a perversion of the Book of Revelation, the last book of the Christian Bible, and Revelation, in turn, owes its existence to a popular form of literature in its own day called apocalypitc. This genre flourished among the Jews and Christians immediately before and after the time of Jesus. As a genre, apocalypitc is charaterized by the use of symbols, world events cast in a cosmic perspective, mythic beasts, and ecstatic visions. Readers of the Old and New Testaments catch glimpses of the genre only in the books of Daniel and Revelation; however, there is a large body of work outside the Jewish and Christian sacred texts that defined the genre long before John was exiled to Patmos. When the Book of Revelation is read in the context of the entire genre, it is not nearly so mystifying.

Apocalyptic as a genre is the original literature of oppression. It is the answer to the biblical Psalmist’s question: “how can we sing the songs of YHWH in a foreign land?” The answer is to code the message. The ruling empire is thus a beast and/or a whore. Death at the hands of this beast becomes a martyrdom and vengeance for the martyred will come swiftly and from on High. Apocalyptic is a genre that can only arise from an oppressed people as a way of coping with and resisting their oppressors.

It is here that it becomes clear that the true heir of the book of Revelation is not Left Behind (the literature of the oppressor class, truth be told), but writers like Herta Muller.

Muller was born and grew up in Romania under the reign of Ceausescu. She labored under this regime, coding her language, speaking quietly with others of her kind, until she could escape to Germany.

Muller’s books are filled with imagery. In The Land of Green Plums, the verdant plum tree becomes a symbol of life attempting to flourish under a reign of death, but it also is a symbol of how the empire appropriates the life of the oppressed. The soldiers fill their pockets with the little green plums, even as they dream of rape.

Muller’s book The Passport is laden with these images. In The Passport, the miller Windisch has one goal: to obtain his passport and thus his freedom. The reader sees the village through Windisch’s eyes, their passivity, the caprice of the authorities (priest, soldier, and politician). The oppressive regime has the side-effect of isolating families and friends.  Who can you trust? Each person in Muller’s story is desperately alone and yet dependent on everyone else for survival.

Neither Green Plums nor The Passpport are structured around chapters or books. Instead, there are short anecdote-like sections, each containing a single image that moves the narrative forward. Windisch is trying to buy his passport with flour stolen from his mill and paid to the magistrate, yet he is becoming increasingly aware that only his daughter’s sex will serve as payment. But the reader only gets this message in images like this section titled “The Golden Oriole”:

There were grey cracks between the blinds. Amalie had a temperature. Windisch couldn’t sleep. He was thinking about her chewed nipples. Windisch’s wife sat down on the edge of the bed. “I had a dream,” she said. “I went up to the loft. I had the flour sieve in my hand. There was a dead bird on the steps up to the loft. It was a golden oriole. I lifted the bird up by the feet. Under it was a clump of fat, black flies. The flies flew up in a swarm. They settled in the flour sieve. Then I tore open the door. I ran into the yard. I threw the sieve with the flies into the snow.

This small section is indicative of Muller’s writing as a whole. Dense and evocative, full of meanings that the reader must decode, and there are many ways one might decode her writing.

Muller is the real deal. She even uses imagery in her Nobel lecture to call out oppressors. I highly recommend reading the entire lecture. In it, she uses the simple handkerchief and her mother’s daily question, “Do you have a handkerchief?” as a way of exploring life under the regime. In the conclusion to her lecture, Muller sums up the goal of apocalyptic writers from herself all the way back to John the Revelator:

I wish I could utter a sentence for all those whom dictatorships deprive of dignity every day, up to and including the present—a sentence, perhaps, containing the word handkerchief. Or else the question: DO YOU HAVE A HANDKERCHIEF?
Can it be that the question about the handkerchief was never about the handkerchief at all, but rather about the acute solitude of a human being?

There are novelists whom I read for the pleasure of their words, others I read for the beauty of the stories, and, if I’m honest, there are some I read simply because I feel like it’s a cultural must (that damned Western Cannon), but then there are novels that I seem drawn to for psychological reasons–often as not with no rational basis. Michelle Huneven’s books fall in this category. I read her to be a better human. I read to find some solace.

Huneven’s novels are positive, weighty things that speak to my psyche. Writing uplifting stories without being cliche is not easy. For every Michelle Huneven there are one hundred Elizabeth Berg’s (Berg, I admit, is a guilty pleasure of mine). I marvel at the way Huneven can make me feel good.

To be sure, Huneven’s stories are not the stuff of fairytale. Her latest Blame traces the life of Patsy MacLemoore from the promise of her early twenties till the twilight of her life. The blame gets assigned early in the story, after MacLemoore kills two innocents (Jehovah’s Witnesses even) while driving drunk. Patsy spends the rest of her life grappling with the guilt and the blame from this accident. These, all too human, forces shape her choice of a mate, her sense of self, her entire sense of purpose.

There is, of course, a twist that comes toward the end of the novel, and this twist leaves the reader wondering, “on what do I base my life, and what if I found that basis was an untruth?”

Intriguing questions. Huneven’s answer is this narrative.

I found Michelle Huneven after reading a interview with her over at that The Millions. What impressed me about Huneven was the way in which she turned the interview into a writing workshop. She sounds more like a counselor than a writer:

“What’s wrong with you, is wrong with your writing,” Huneven told me. “It really behooves you to find out what that is, so that you can disguise that in your writing. Or compensate it, or cover it up. Or cure it, if you can.”

What’s wrong with you is wrong with your writing. This begs the question “what’s wrong with me?” I suffer from extreme bouts of self-doubt. I suffer equally from both stubbornness and malaise. The stubbornness is an absolute commitment to my own worldview. The malaise is a weariness with that very worldview. My irony is often self-destructive. My sense of others (the Other) too little developed. Combine all this together with a deep-seeded perfectionism, and the result is that I’d rather not create. “Why try when it’s only going to be fucked?”

Huneven spoke to me like my analyst. She spoke through her stories. Her other book Jamesland thundered into me like a Summer rain. Jamesland has a silk thread of religion running through it. Religion as examined by the great psychologist William James. Having long ago sloughed off religion, it was inspirational to follow this, extremely non-pedantic, thread back to the source. Notions of community and redemption that I can barely understand outside the strictures of the conservative religious bullshit of my youth came back to me, as if I was seeing them for the first time.

I owe Huneven a debt for this. She has inspired me to be a better writer and to be a better person.

If you can only read one of her books. I’d go for Jamesland

Want to know how to become the most important poet in America over night? Jim Behrle has the answer: How you can become the most important poet in America overnight.

Here’s a snippet:

There are many paths through the art. Having enough money to sit in a log cabin all day watching foxes make out, with berries on one’s breath. Having an entire university beneath one’s command. Ability to drag friends in for a little merlot and sloppy sex with students.

This is perhaps my favorite part:

Jay Leno, not Conan O’Brien, is the future. Why? Because Leno is more devious, sinister, and craven. These are things to aspire to be. Jay Leno would reach through your skin and deep into your stomach to fetch an undigested Skittle if he were hungry for one.

Makes me shy about eating Skittles ever again. That’s for damned sure.

My good friend the Hamster unwittingly helped launch this blog.  He was visiting Arkansas and we were sitting together at a chicken shack sharing a pipe and talking about books.  “You read all these books, but how much time to do you spend thinking about ‘em?”  His challenge was that I write a blurb about each book I read.  Thus, the blog was born.

Unfortunately, I read books faster than I can write about ‘em.  My desk is littered with books that are awaiting a blog post. In an effort to clear off the desk, I present a quick a dirty assessment of the past few months of also-reads.  I present them in no particular order:

Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann: McCann won the National Book Award for this novel, a series of interconnected stories that have as their focal point the famous tightrope walk of Philip Petit between the World Trade Center towers. Compelling stories, compellingly written. Still, I did not find McCann as engaging as this year’s runner up American Salvage (see previous post).

Parasites Like Us by Adam Johnson: Parasites is like two books in one. Three quarters of the book reads like the typical middle-aged man breakdown novel. A college professor of anthropology who is a failure at love and whose career is in the gutter ponders the meaning of life and the possibility of diddling one of his students (the boring stuff of Updike). The remainder of the novel, however, veers into apocalyptic. A cataclysm occurs that only the professor and his students survive, and the book prompts the kind of imaginative musings on the meaning and breakdown of culture that one would expect. A good book, though a bit tedious at times.

The American Painter Emma Dial by Samantha Peale: Peale’s first novel, Emma Dial reads like a first novel. The pacing is skewed, the plot is at time belabored, the language ill-fitting. BUT, I loved this book. The central character drives the reader onward, slogging through all the first-novel idiosyncrasies. As an aside, Samantha Peale was recently featured on one of my favorite podcasts Writers on Writing. Her interview inspires any writer who is trying to see a project through to the end. Check ‘er out here

The Land of Green Plums by Herta Muller: I love to say Muller’s name in a deep resonate monotone, a voice I imagine East German bureaucrats using when stamping passports. Herrr Ta Mew Lar.

Muller is the Romanian-born novelist who won the 2009 Nobel for Literature. Her selection is once again congruent with the Nobel committee preference for the literature of oppression. Green Plums is the only book of Muller’s that I have read, but it’s a doozy of a book. Partly autobiographical, extremely lyrical, the book follows the travails of a group of college students in Romania as they seek to be individuals (who love literature) in a society that does not value the individual. Muller’s writing is hypnotic and vivid. She’ll put a fissure in your synapses.

Ford County by John Grisham: I try hard not to be a Grisham hater. In fact, I kind of like the guy. When I was in grad school (when was I not in grad school, I hear you saying), Grisham was invited as the keynote speaker for the “Christ Haunted South” conference, a meeting that centered on Southern literature, paying a huge debt to a resurgence of interest in Flannery OConner.

Grisham opened his address by stating humbly and plainly that he was not sure why he was invited since his writing is far from literary. I admired his candor.

With Ford County, Grisham hammers the point home. Ford County is Grisham’s first collection of short stories, all of them set in the fictionalized Ford County in the Mississippi Delta. Grisham seems to have the idea of the literary short story firmly rooted in his brain, yet he cannot reach this ideal. I cannot say that I despise the stories in this collection, but none delivers on its promise, and I can almost hear Grisham’s fans screaming, “where’s the lawyer; where’s the intrigue, where’s the cheap moral?”

Tales of Outer Suburbia by Shaun Tan: If you want a weirdly uplifting fairytale of a book, read Tan’s Tales . A graphic novel written for a teenage audience but all ages should be able to embrace this fantastical world. One image from the book stands out for me. In my library work, I am always scribbling down bits of words, notes, call numbers on small scraps of paper. I carry these around with me like bills in my pockets till they have been lost. In one tale, Tan imagines what happens to the scraps of paper that we all carry around so casually, the laundry lists, poem scraps, receipts, and love letters. All these things, in Tan’s imagining, join forces and become a thing of beauty.

Read this book sometime. It will only take a few minutes of your life but you’ll want to spend more.

Methland by Nick Reding: On occasion I wander in the world of popular non-fiction. It does not happen very often. Nick Reding’s books, as the name implies, is about the methamphetamine epidemic in rural America. Reding provides not only information but narratives from those most affected. Not something I want on my bookshelf, but certainly a worthy read.

Good People of New York by Thisbe Nissen: Nissen is good. She is a good writer. Her story takes the New-York-Centric novel and stands it on its head…sort of. She does this by setting up these contrasting character studies of folks who are native to NYC and folk who have migrated there. Difficult to say who comes out on top by the end. Either way, Nissen’s story made me feel good. ‘Nough said.

American Romances by Rebecca Brown: This book of essays ranks up there with Annie Dillard for my affections. Brown has more of that post-modern playfulness than Dillard, but both are able to shift from the personal to the factual to the downright absurd in ways that make the reader reopen his eyes and reaffirm her faith. Brown has a doozy of an essay on reading (my drug of choice) called “Extreme Reading.” This is one that every Freshman English student should read. She says:

Every time you read a book you read what you desire
Every time you read a book you make that book your own

I certainly made Brown’s book my own.

Go now and read, my friends.

American Salvage by Bonnie Jo Campbell

I was born in Flint, Michigan. My parents still live there. My grandparents have lived or still live there. Flint is the quintessential Northern factory town. It is a city that General Motors built, and when I grew up nearly everyone I knew was connected in some way to the auto industry. Yet despite being a distinctly Northern town, Flint was mostly populated with Southern transplants, folks who came North to find a better life. These Southern Yankees brought their Baptist faith and their cornbread up North and started raising families. Exiles from the Bible belt, singing the songs of the lord in a foreign land.

Bonnie Jo Campbell’s remarkable book of short stories American Salvage captures this experience of the Yankee South, however unintentionally. All the stories in the book take place in Michigan, a truth made more poignant by the fact that Salvage was published by Wayne State University Press as part of their “Made in Michigan Series.” It seems rare to find a writer of Campbell’s talent stake such a strong regional claim. The notion of a “regional” literature seemed, for a time, to be the purview of Southerners alone–and the ocassional “Westerner” (Cormac McCarthy; Annie Prolux?).

American Salvage, however, is distinctly Michigan. But in being so distinct, Campbell pays homage to Michigan’s cultural dependence on the South. These characters would be just as comfortable in a Faulkner tale or a Peter Taylor short story as they are here in this colder clime.

I read American Salvage over the Christmas holiday while on my way to Michigan to visit my family. The characters evoked memories of my people, my family, and perhaps for this reason alone I felt a deep connection to Campbell and her story collection.

But these stories are more than just evocative. Campbell is a master craftswoman. She has a seemingly innate sense of how to control language and employ it in story. The beginning of the story the Inventor:

A rusted El Camino clips the leg of the thirteen-year old girl, sends her flying through the predawn fog. She lands on the side of the road and lies twisted and alive in the dirty snow.

Two terse sentences that set up a story of loss and love, a story with one small part sexual tension and one big part discovery. The El Camino driven by a man who would be good, but who has only ever been the Other. In telling the story, Campbell gives the reader just enough to move to the next sentence with growing anticipation.

The fourteen stories in the collection share a tone and often a subject, though it would be difficult to pin that subject down like a moth. It is the stuff of life, and particularly the stuff of life in rural Michigan.

Campbell’s book was the runner up for this year’s National Book Award, an honor she fully deserves. As part of the festivities for the award, Campbell gave this fine reading of one of the stories in the collection. Not the story I would have selected for her to read, but a great piece none the less.

finalistread f campbell from National Book Foundation on Vimeo.

Check out her website too www.bonniejocampbell.com .

On her blog she had some great snippets of the speech she intended to give had she won the National Book Award.  I’ll conclude with this, which, IMHO, makes Ms. Campbell a damn fine Southern Yankee.

This award is good news for writers who feel uncertain, for writers who choose to live in small towns in Michigan or Maine because they feel a profound connection to their own people and landscape. This is good news for writers who do not feel brilliant, but who want to work hard to get it right

It’s that “profound connection to their own people and landscape” part that I’ll ruminate on.

Salinger, J.D. (Jerome David) 1919-2010

J.D. Salinger and I go way back.  It was he who stuck “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a poor sinner” into my little brain.  Yep, this is that damned Jesus Prayer that drives Franny Glass bonkers in Franny and Zooey.

As much as I hate the man for giving me that ear worm, i’m sad to see him gone.

My good friend The Hamster has the best remembrance of the man I’ve read.  Go check it out http://wheresmyhockeymask.blogspot.com/2010/01/indeed-today-is-perfect-day-for.html