If light pours like water
into the kitchen where I sway
with my tired children,
if the rug beneath us
is woven with tough flowers,
and the yellow bowl on the table
rests with the sweet heft
of fruit, the sun-warmed plums,
if my body curves over the babies,
and if I am singing,
then loneliness has lost its shape,
and this quiet is only quiet.
— Rachel Contreni Flynn
from The Gladdest Thing
Finished Preeta Samarasan’s debut novel Evening is the Whole Day, and it was wonderful. After a shaky, meandering beginning, the novel became a delightful, riveting, well-crafted effort from a Malaysian writer who knows how to make a good story out of a simple family tale. The novel hums. It’s not quite brilliant, but very close, and for once in modern-day fiction, it tells a story. After finishing it, I was comparing the deep sense of satisfaction I get from it with the ugly, adrift feeling I get from reading certain of Colm Toibin’s books, or from reading John Banville’s Booker-prize winning The Sea, which always feels to me like a self-indulgent, almost voyeuristic glance into the inner life of an unappetizing character. I am beginning to wonder if the reason that I find so much of modern western literature unappealing is because it is too inward-turning, too focused on the individual, one individual in particular and his inner psychological workings, too consumed with seeing the world through only one character’s eyes. I’ve always liked books which had a single strong protagonist which we can identify with and experience everything with – Jane Eyre springs to mind – but the difference is that with those books, I actually liked and respected the protagonist, so it was a delight to walk with them and perceive the world through their filtered experiences, emotions, and thoughts. It’s very rare for me to find a protagonist of any sort in modern western literature with whom I can truly identify, much less enjoy. It seems to me that modern writers have rebounded too much against the traditional story form of having clearly “good” protagonists, with the result that their protagonists are now not just judiciously or humanly flawed, but actually offputting – to the extent that reading their thoughts and minds is like an exercise in a particularly ugly form of mental voyeurism. It is alright to have flawed heroes/heroines, even anti-heroes, etc. But the world seen through their eyes, and only their eyes, becomes a particularly trivial, sordid, depressing thing, and worse, the novel as a whole becomes a claustrophobic and self-obsessive (often cyclical) experience. Which leads to me often really not caring about the protagonist, and when that all-important element fails, I have very little real story or plot to carry me through or fall back on, because what novels like these are most interested in is a sort of winding, spirally approach to the protagonist’s life and inner life, with the former much subordinated to the latter, and so what I get instead of a story is a psychological study of a single, often uninteresting or unappealing character.
But I digress. This is why I found Samarasan’s novel so appealing, and such a refreshing change – her novel is not focused on a single character, but covers each of the members of the Rajasekharan family in turn, though the heart and soul of the story is six-year old Aasha, and even more importantly her novel has an actual plot. It is not that she doesn’t rely on the elliptical narration, the jumping back-and-forth in time so popular among modern novelists, because she does, but rather that she uses a sure hand with these devices, and that the structures don’t overwhelm and seldom distract from the story itself, which is vibrant and strong enough to overcome all novelistic machinations.
Samarasan begins somewhat unsteadily, striving to incorporate in the novel a theme which really don’t belong there, an overt commentary on class differences in Malaysia, while trying also to juggle all her different characters’ consciousnesses and resorting to repetitiveness while doing so – but as soon as she hones in her focus on the Big House, as the the Rajasekharan’s house is known, and its inhabitants, she steadies, her style and plot picking up speed, condensing. The novel from that point on unfolds with a deep and steadily-increasing surety. The Rajasekharans at first seem like your average dysfunctional family – the father, a hotshot, cheating lawyer, the mother, a bored society wife, the clever, distant eldest daughter, the smart-mouthed, checked-out son, the precocious, dreamy youngest, and the demanding, chair-ridden grandmother. But, skipping back and forth in time and between characters, telling seemingly small stories and apparently large ones, Samarasan reveals, gradually, through details and facts let slip almost by chance, the hole at the heart of this family, the despair which creeps under the foundation of the house and is steadily overtaking them. She charts, over the course of several years, the events which let each member of this family slip from each other, the specific, scattered moments at which love and familial affection are not enough and falter in the face of human cowardice, selfishness, and self-protection. The delicate, fragile alliances which bound this once semi-ordinary family together – those between the eldest daughter, Uma, and her grandmother Preeta, and between Uma and her adored father – are broken one by one, and at the heart of the novel throbs a vivid, creeping secret which not even Aasha, the youngest, the watcher and eavesdropper of the family, knows. Aasha is the center of the novel as far as characters go, a perceptive, sensitive child who has long since retreated into a world of ghosts and illusions, for whom the center of the universe is her formerly bright and glowing sister Uma, whom she fixates on to an unhealthy degree, driven by a love-starved heart to a particular degree of obsession. As the novel proceeds, however, we realize that they have all – every single one of the – , have retreated in one way or another, tossed in the flag and silently agreed to simply co-exist without love or affection. They live separate, overlapping lives, drifting in and out of the house and each other’s worlds like loud ghosts. In the end, two of the six members of the family escape, and Aasha has been offered a flash of hope which may or may not sustain her, but ultimately, Samarasan tells us in a way which we can all understand, things are as they must be – each member of the family, in making their individual choices, signed and sealed their collective fate, and there can be no turning back now. It is a bittersweet but ultimately oddly hopeful ending – but it glows.
Evening is the Whole Day is a very well-written, highly satisfying, almost profound novel, and I cannot wait to see what else Preeta Samarasan has in store for us.
“She’s tired, so tired she feels she could go to bed and sleep for days…She’s tired of of life and death and truth and lies, of betrayals and loyalties, of youth and age. Of blame and blamelessness and the long, winding road in between them; of those three feeble words themselves: not my fault.“
-Evening is the Whole Day, Preeta Samarasan
Beginning Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, I was plunged immediately into a world that I am both intensely aware of and intensely uncertain of. Lahiri speaks a language I know, or rather, a language which seems to be personally half-forgotten, to portray a world that is as hauntingly familiar as it is strange. When I chose this book to be next on my list of conquests, I was pondering how transnational literature and media, at least to me, has a common quality, a quality which the displaced, the sojourners, and the trans-national individuals of the world universally recognize. Something of the sense of the constantly shifting boundaries of the world we live in, its looseness, its preciousness, and also the vivid importance that family, home, and some kind of structure, wherever it might be found, takes on to those who are forced or who choose to navigate these shifting boundaries and to live on some level at least a nomadic life. The Namesake is a clear example of this, and not only did something in me immediately respond to Lahiri’s voice and her characters, in spite of the fact that I have never been to India and have few of the specific experiences which her characters undergo, but some of her references, her obscure ones most Americans would not understand, I do know. The Namesake is not my exact story, but it could be any one of so many transnational stories, which is why it has an elusive but decided familiarity to me. Lord Mountbatten, Desh magazine, actress Madhabi Mukerjee – these I do not know, though I find on looking it up that Lord Mountbatten was the last Vice-roy of the British Royal Empire and the first Governor-General of independent India, and the last set me to wondering whether Madhabi was related in any way to actress Rani Mukerjee, whom I do know(I find out not when I look it up). But Voice of America, the U.S.’s official radio and television service to the rest of the world, representing America in a positive light and transmitting U.S. news all over the world(in many parts of the world the only source of American news, as I know firsthand) – that I do know, as much as I know the dream-like sense of dislocation that results from a plane flight that takes you halfway around the world to live in a place you’ve never seen, and the way in which the most unexpected things become a struggle, and very ordinary objects abruptly seem odd.
I don’t know where this book will take me – it, like so much else of life – will be a journey, with the destination unknown. But I do know that, even aside from its brilliant capturing of the nomadic and/or transnational lifestyle that more and more people are experiencing in our modern day world, it is brilliant on its own, as one scene in which Ashima, a young Indian girl about to become a bride, inserts her feet into her future husband’s shoes before ever setting eyes on him, so that his shoes, “brown shoes with black heels…[and] lentil-sized holes embossed on either side of each shoe”, are her first experience of him, clearly shows. I can’t wait to keep going.
“The chief problem of the philosophy of all the ages consists just in finding the indispensable connection that exists between individual and social interests” – Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
Metrophobia, or the fear of poetry, is surprisingly common. Many people first develop this phobia in school, when overzealous teachers encourage them to rank poems according to artificial scales, break them down and search for esoteric meanings. Others simply feel that poetry is somehow “beyond” them, belonging only to the realm of the pretentious and highly educated.
This phobia is touched on in an unusual way at Universal Orlando’s Halloween Horror Nights 2008. In the presented scenario, a drama voice coach develops metrophobia along with a more general bibliophobia, or fear of books. Unable to perform her job, the woman seeks therapy. As the scene takes place at a Halloween event, the therapist’s solution is to force the woman to confront the haunting images of twisted and disturbing fairy tales.
The Phobia
Metrophobia can take several forms. Some sufferers fear all poetry, while others fear poems that deal with specific subject matter or are written in a specific style. If you have metrophobia, you may become extremely anxious in English classes. You may refuse to participate in reading out loud, or even start to skip classes. You may become uncomfortable when friends forward emails that contain poems. You may be reluctant to read unfamiliar books for fear of coming across an illustrative poem.
The Treatment
Who could forget the early scenes of the film Dead Poets Society, in which teacher John Keating leads his class in ripping out the pages of their poetry textbook that deal with the numerical grading of the written works? The liberation of removing the focus on “expert opinion” and narrow definitions of greatness, allowing creative work to be enjoyed for its own sake, becomes a hallmark of the film. Many of the students then go on to re-found the title society, learning to love and become inspired by poetry of all types.
For many metrophobia sufferers, this is all that is needed. Therapy may be largely focused on stripping away the negative thoughts and beliefs that sufferers experience by helping them to realize that poetry transcends meter and verse. Helping the sufferer to recognize the creative freedom that poetry provides to both the creator and the reader is a major goal of metrophobia therapy.
You may not become a poetry lover, but you can learn not to fear it. A good therapist will work with you to develop the treatment plan that is best for you.
-from About.com
Who knew?
You draw a map of France
on my back and I ask you
to scratch, there, somewhere
near Avignon, perhaps where
we visited the abbey, plucked
fresh figs from the trees,
and sipped the Farigoule–
but you’ve gone on ahead
to Marseilles, incandescent
in the sun, its deep blue
irresistible waters. I am lost,
rocking in the swell, as you
touch, there and there and there,
every bright boat in the bay.
-Antonia Clark
I like this. I tend overall to not agree with the writer of this article, who slams Byatt’s criticism of Rowling’s work(mm, double layers of literary slamming, how delicious) and agree rather with Byatt instead, but his conclusion I do agree with.
“It’s not making distinctions between high culture and pop culture that I object to. It’s the either/or scenario proposed by high-culture guardians like Byatt that seems so churlish, so ready to make the appreciation of high culture seem the dreary duty it was when we were schoolchildren. “The only reason people read is pleasure,” Leslie Fiedler once said. And I’ll end by offering another Fiedler quote that should keep Byatt and the other keepers of the cultural flame up nights. In a Salon interview a few weeks before his death, Fiedler related a story about enraging a group of academics by announcing that when he and they were all dead and forgotten, people were still going to be reading Stephen King. The ugly truth that A.S. Byatt and Harold Bloom have yet to face is that when they have been reduced to footnotes, people are still going to be reading and enjoying the Harry Potter books. And somewhere, J.K. Rowling, keeping company with Dumas and Conan Doyle and the other “nonliterary” writers who live on, will be laughing.”
“If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be, and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger.”
-Cathy, Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
