“… We should not grieve, should we, baby?” said Celia confidentially to that unconscious centre and poise of the world, who had the most remarkable fists all complete even to the nails, and hair enough, really, when you took his cap off, to make — you didn’t know what: — in short, he was Bouddha in a Western form.”
-George Eliot, Middlemarch

I finished Middlemarch a couple of weeks ago, and was amused to find a completely accurate portrayal of new motherhood in it. The heroine’s sister, Celia, is the mother of what she regards as the most remarkable being in the world, and is content to sit and stare at him, to talk of almost nothing but him, and can’t think that anything is truly wrong in the world as long as her baby is safe and happy. She is harmlessly insipid in her new motherhood, and I understand every inch of her silliness.

I laughed when I read this because I’d been calling Mateo “my little Buddha” because of the serenity of his expressions. Honestly, it is quite hard to work on anything when I could happily watch him sleep and talk of nothing but him — how he has begun to smile and outgrow newborn clothes, how he watches me intently and studies his father’s face.

It is a kind of devotion that is difficult to write about — both because it is so consumingly intense and because I know it can be tiresome to people whose existences aren’t anchored to my own little “center and poise of the world.”

Having a baby made my anxiety spike. For the first couple of weeks after he was born, I would stare at the ubiquitous “CAUTION” tags on every baby thing we own; Brian moved some tools he had in the house back out to the shed because I kept think of how they could hurt the baby; in exhaustion at night while feeding Mateo, I cried out of terror that something bad would happen to him.

Eventually, I realized that I had allowed all of my thoughts to be devoted to the baby. I knew that I needed to bring myself back into my thoughts and actions and to integrate him into them. So I charged my Kindle — I had allowed its battery to die — and downloaded Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them by Francine Prose, which I read while I fed Mateo at night.

Devoting some time and thoughts to something besides taking care of the baby helped my anxiety a lot. It’s not completely gone, especially when I’m extra tired, but now when my thoughts start drifting and racing, I just pick up the Kindle. I finished Reading Like a Writer very quickly (my review below will cover part of the reason why), then read a few Chekov short stories (crying in an enjoyably melancholy, mono no aware way after reading “A Grasshopper”), and now I’m halfway done with Middlemarch. Sometimes I read aloud to Mateo. (He enjoys Yeats as well.)

As for Reading Like a Writer — for me, it was more of a description of how I already read than a work offering me new insight. Francine Prose examines several aspects of fiction — the importance of word choice, sentence construction, how dialogue and gesture contribute to character development (the chapter on gesture was the most interesting to me).

Prose lauds her formalist education, in which literature is analyzed on a craft level, without reference to author biography, history, or literary theory that is more grounded in philosophy or politics than literature. I agree that this a very fine kind of education for a writer to receive; my literary education seems to have been similar to Prose’s — so I am pretty well-versed in the formalist close reading and explication.

Unfortunately, Prose doesn’t offer deep explication, and when she does offer any, I tended not to agree with it. (Pride and Prejudice’s Mr. and Mrs. Bennet enjoy a marriage that is “playful” and “respectful”?) Prose also does not devote any of the book to what is the most difficult part of crafting fiction for me — plot. Most of the book is made up of long passages from other works. I appreciated the exposure to works I had not before known of and Prose’s breaking down the components to take note of in fiction, but the work struck me as a bit of an easy write — a little thin on insight and effort.

Early Days in the Range of Light: Encounters with Legendary Mountaineers

Early Days is luminous, as the title implies it should be, but also down-to-earth and solid. It tells the stories of the men and women who were the first to climb the peaks of the Sierra Nevada, that formidable, often impassible, 400-mile-long mountain range between California’s Central Valley and East Basin. But Dan doesn’t just tell you the history — though he does do that, vividly, with original research that is a testament to his scholarship; he also walks in their shoes. He reproduced their climbs without any modern equipment — what he calls in the introduction “a mess of carabiners, cams, and pitons” –a testament to his physical and mental strength. He recounts his experiences sleeping in the open air without a tent and scaling cliffs without rope so vividly that I recall fearing for his safety, even as he was sitting across the room from me in workshop.

John Muir called the Sierra Nevada “the Range of Light,” and one of the chapters of Dan’s book that made a lasting impression on me when I read it in workshop was the one about that great naturalist’s scaling of Cathedral Peak. Other chapters are more dramatic, but this one in particular shows the deep meditation that can take place on a great spire of rock:

The landscape here is profoundly still. This is high alpine terrain and movement is limited to a few squawky Clark’s nutcrackers and butterflies and gusts of wind. The gnarled dwarf pines that dot the meadows and find toeholds on the mountainside do not change from decade to decade. In this stasis, time ebbs and stops. All around, bare crags and stony peaks cut the air, the raw stuff of the earth frozen in place after breaching the top layer. Though I can’t locate God, I do feel an absurd closeness to the stars, a sensation that comes from pressed up against a thinning and blueing sky.

Squeezed between the mountain and the stars, it is the age of this place that calls me back. The difference in age and size between the mountains and me is nearly infinite, a quantity that is hard to locate in cities. Here, the scale of the universe is more visual, more visceral, the human creature at its least significant. It is both invigorating and humiliating to ride the back of something so huge, to look up in a whirlpool so deep. Muir’s God lives here somewhere, in the cycles of rock and snow and woody growth that far predate man’s self-consciousness and need nothing from him for their continuation.

It was a fine reading, and I hope Dan’s book gets the attention it deserves. It’s a unique and important work.

On a less reverent note, here is a Kate Beaton comic strip about John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt:

I am enjoying the book, but aspects of it have me pondering something I’ll call “craft transparency.” Sometime ago, I disagreed with someone in a writing group about her belief that the best prose style is the kind that is completely invisible because writing is supposed to be in service to the story. I contended that, no, they were both important, and just because a prose style (or narrative structure or whatever craft aspect of a work)  is distinctive does not make it of inferior quality. My enjoyment of a work comes just as much from appreciating the hand of the artist as the art.

However, this means that I am tuned into where the artist’s hand falters. I appreciate when the fine craftsmanship comes through and it adds to my enjoyment of the story, but I when it falters, it often makes me set down the book for a while. The difference is the difference between “Ah, I see what you did there!” and “Oh. I see what you did there.”

So back to When the Elephants Dance. The prose style is clean and simple  and the structure is like The Decameron — a group of confined people who tell stories to pass the time. As far as the first goes, this may be unfair, since Holthe also said in that interview that she admires Hemingway, but I find it a bit too obvious and a bit too naive, a narrative style that’s often used in works set in the ancient world or non-Western countries. And as for the latter, I may be wrong, but it seems that Holthe had a collection of short stories when she needed to have a novel, and constructed the framing narrative in order to force the short stories into novel format.

The joining seams are most obvious in the transitions from the framing narrative into the stories the characters tell. The first story is told by the narrator’s father, a man whose longest chunk of dialogue, before he switches to “Now I am telling a story” mode, is “We cannot hide forever. We must find food. Domingo is right. We must band together and help the Amerikanos. It is our only hope.” But when he starts telling the story, he talks like this:

“Perhaps that particular story belongs to another church, in another town. Maybe not, maybe all of it is true. But if I am to tell the true story, you must know from the start that the church was merely incidental. A symptom. Shall we say, of deeper troubles. Few know what really happened. Most have forgotten and moved on with their lives. The church was never the crux of the story. There is an imbalance here, you see? More focus on the church when, really the heart of the story lies with Esmeralda Cortez and with her mysterious disappearance. The catalyst of her strange departure was a mere boy of seven, and that boy was me.”

When I read that, I actually said aloud, “Ooookay” and complained about the awkward change of dialogue style to Brian. And I set down the book. The story that followed was quite good, but I had to put aside what led to it before moving on to it.

Another moment of disconnection with the narrative came when the band of people fantasize about eating chicken adobo. A woman, speaking to two other women who, like any proper Filipina, know how to make chicken adobo, says, “First you chop the garlic, saute it, then you add the cup of vinegar, half a cup of soy sauce, and the chopped chicken. A little bay leaves, salt and pepper…. That is all. It does not take much.”

Very service-y! Once again, I paused and complained aloud. I take this bit of dialogue as either the author or her editor thinking that not enough people know what chicken adobo is and deciding it needed to be explained. And it comes across as an explanation rather than a natural part of the narrative. I contrasted this with a scene in The Gangster of Love by Jessica Hagedorn that showed a character making adobo, his action part of the conversation that was going on. It drew me in, and even made me say, “He forgot the bay leaves!” and delighted me when I turned the page and the character realized, “I forgot the bay leaves!”

That was a moment of “Ah, I see what you did there!”

Henceforth the memory of Leon was the centre of her boredom; it burnt there more brightly than the fire travellers have left on the snow of a Russian steppe. She sprang towards him, she pressed against him, she stirred carefully the dying embers, sought all around her anything that could revive it; and the most distant reminiscences, like the most immediate occasions, what she experienced as well as what she imagined, her voluptuous desire that were unsatisfied, her projects of happiness that crackled in the wind like dead boughs, her sterile virtue, her lost hopes, the domestic tête-à-tête– she gathered it all up, took everything, and made it all serve as fuel for her melancholy.
–Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert

I love Madame Bovary as a portrait of discontent that is self-sustained. I remember a friend once identifying with Emma, as Flaubert himself did, but he attributed the similarity to them both being “romantics.” I was annoyed. Emma is not a romantic. She is a woman who desires more from her life — which is not fundamentally wrong — and then manufactures affairs and tries to convince herself that they are not sordid and empty but great romances. Flaubert does a great job of deconstructing his own protagonist’s delusions, such as the scene when Emma’s lover seduces her at an agricultural fair as awards for the highest quality manure are announced in the background.

The passage quoted above in particular reminds me of how one can feed one’s own misery, looking for reasons to prolong it — and, if finding none, creating reasons.

Living to Tell the Tale

Reading his memoir is like listening to the recollections of a wise relative. It reminds me of how my mom has encouraged me to sit down with my Nana and “write down all her stories.” I haven’t really done that — though I have recorded her a few times telling me about her life — because that process is so artificial. I’ve heard my Nana tell me stories about her life all my life — her stories are woven into our conversation, and when I’m with her, I want to experience her natural self, not to check out incidents from the  repository of her memories.

So as I read Living to Tell the Tale leisurely, it seems as if I come across stories from García Márquez’s life or what he has he learned in a natural way. There is so much to learn from a writer like him, and to barrel through his book would be to miss crucial lessons. Because a lot of times something can sound banal or useless if it comes too quickly, words piled on words — like Polonius giving advice to Laertes in Hamlet.

As I’ve been heavily revising my novel, I came across the following passage. It occurs when García Márquez is describing how he and some friends started a literary magazine called Crónica:

Alfonso, a specialist in every genre, placed the weight of his faith in detective stories, for which he had a burning passion. He translated or selected them, and I subjected them to a process of formal simplification that would help me in my work. It consisted of saving space through the elimination not only of useless words but also of superfluous actions, until the stories were reduced to their pure essence without affecting their ability to convince. That is, deleting everything unnecessary in a forceful genre in which each word ought to be responsible for the entire structure. This was one of the most useful exercises in my oblique research into learning the technique for telling a story.

This is what I need to do right now. I’ve been fairly brutal in my cutting and rewriting as I’ve discovered the structure I want to pursue, but it has felt good and purifying. There are passages in the original version of the novel that I love, and that I will always keep so I can read them, but don’t add to the structure. They’re passages from another kind of book, a kind that my novel didn’t end up being. I had ambitions to write the family epic, to be García Márquez or Steinbeck, but what my story yielded was not an epic but the story of a few weeks, of experiences that alter two young girls. It needs to shed the layers of my ambition and emerge, pristine and clear and unencumbered, as what it actually is.