All the Light We Cannot See

It has been a while...and it’s time to put my money back where my mouth is.

About three weeks ago I finished All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr.  This novel takes its place on my top-ten-favorite-novels list.  Why, you ask, has it taken me three weeks to write about?  One reason is running my children around and managing their summer activities, but the other is that I went back through the entire novel and wrote down significant passages in my notebook. My instinct upon finishing the novel was to go back through and reread the entire novel, which I will do next summer, but since I had to move on to other books on my summer reading list (about 3/4 the scintillating Sin and Syntax, which, I have to say, helped me pay attention to some of the grammatical structures of Doerr's sentences even more than I might have). 

Where to begin? First, if you have not read this novel, you must.  It should be next on your reading list.  Finish the book you are reading, then pick this one up.  The novel is historical fiction that dips into isolated moments of time in 1934, June 1940, January 1941, August 1942, May 1944, 7-12 August 1944, 1945, 1974, 2014.  Each section (there are 13—I don't think I would call them chapters, although they are numbered) is divided into short titled chapters that capture the moments of one of the several characters that populate this novel.  I am struggling here to adequately describe the novel's structure.  There are two main characters, Marie-Laure LeBlanc and Werner Pfennig. Marie-Laure is a French girl whose mother died during childbirth, who goes blind when she is six due to congenital cataracts, and is raised by her father, the master of the locks at the Museum of Natural History in Paris; Werner Pfennig is an orphan who, along with his sister Jutta, lives in an orphanage run by the French-speaking Protestant Nun Frau Elena in the Zollverein coal mining complex outside Essen, Germany.  Around Marie-Laure and Werner orbit characters who are connected with one (or both) of these two central characters.  I do not want to say too much as to the intricacies of the connections lest I unravel the beautiful tapestry of this tale.  No doubt you have already taken note of the dates and the ethnicity of the two main characters -- the rise of Hitler, the occupation of France, and the war itself are central to the plot of the novel.

The war, of course, also is central to theme.  And perhaps this is why the novel crept its way into my soul.  Doerr presents complex characters.  Perhaps Marie-Laure is beyond reproach, maybe even Marie-Laure's uncle Etienne's house keeper, Madame Manec, is a moral beacon, Jutta, Etienne, Monsieur LeBlanc...but Werner, who facilitates the murders of several partisans, is sympathetic.  Doerr reveals the way a society like Nazi Germany corrupts through fear and intimidation, and also titillates ambition, and in Werner's case, the desire to escape the colorless life and his father's fate in the mines of Zollverein.  Yet even "the giant" Volkheimer—the assassin—has a complexity that I found myself shocked that I acknowledged.  It is as if he provides the distance that Werner needs/deserves from the role he is playing in the ridding of the resistance radio broadcasts to further Hitler's plan to dominate Europe.  He protects Werner from that harshness, and even before they patrol Poland in the Opel, Volkheimer is a barrier between the more rabid boys at Schulpforta and Werner's mechanically inclined mind.  It is Volkheimer who says, What you could be, which haunts Werner later in August 1944.  And in 1974 when Volkheimer tracks down Jutta to return Werner's belongings from his duffel recently returned from an American POW warehouse, a step he clearly did not have to take, Doerr creates a scene with Volkheimer flying paper airplanes with Jutta's precocious son, Max, who "kneels on the patio in the dusk, going over his airplane, checking the angle of its wings.  Volkheimer kneels beside him, nodding, patient” (504).  In the chapter titled "Volkheimer" in the 1974 section (which parallels a chapter in the August 1942 section), Doerr writes that Volkheimer, "feels loneliness like a disease" and "on winter afternoons he moves among the antennas like a sailor through rigging. In the late blue light, he can watch the people in the streets below hurrying home, and sometimes gulls soar past, white against the dark. The small, secure weight of tools along his belt, the smell of intermittent rain, and the crystalline brilliance of the clouds at dusk: these are the only times Volkheimer feels marginally whole" (499, 498).

Volkheimer was not my favorite character. I was just struck by my own feelings of pity for him and how Doerr presented him wholly, which I admired.

I could go on about this 531-page novel—examining the depth of the characters the moral complexity of many of them. And when I walk away from the novel, I am left with so much hope about humanity.  Although the war, the prison camps, the moral depravity of much of humanity looms in this novel, it is beauty that resonates.  The beauty of thought, actions, life, nature, and even humanity. 

And if I were to go on to trace things like I will ask my AP students to do, there is so much to choose from: snails, spirals, owls/birds, bees, fire, braille (tactile sense in general, I think), life in miniature, light (well, of course), water, names, food, antenna, radio waves, locks, 20, 000 Leagues Under the Sea (I should go back and read Alex Gerst's posts on that novel from earlier this year!), chapter titles, the novel's structure, etc.  I do look forward to reading this novel again.

And there are so many passages that I copied into my notebook. He has some amazing labyrinthine sentences that knock me out, but I don't believe I have the patience to type them out.  I do, however, want to provide a sample of some of Doerr's writing:

"The brain is locked in total darkness, says the voice.  It floats in a clear liquid inside the skull, never in the light.  And yet the world it constructs in the mind is full of light.  It burns with color and movement. So, how, children, does the brain which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light? ... Open your eyes, concludes the man, and see what you can with them before the close forever and then a piano comes on playing a lonely song that sounds to Werner like a golden boat traveling a dark river, a progression of harmonies that transfigures Zollverein: the houses turned to mist, the mines filled in, the smoke stacks fallen, and ancient sea spilling through the streets, and the air streaming with possibility" (48-49).

"The sun burns away the fog and reveals the first blooms on the trees. Werner can feel the fever flickering inside him, a stove with its door latched" (365).

"A great gust of static shears past.  The voice is like something from a long-ago dream" (406).

"She says, 'When I lost my sight, Werner, people said I was brave. When my father left, people said I was brave. But it is not bravery; I have no choice. I wake up and live my life. Don't you do the same?'" (469).

Along the gravel path boys shout. Someone not far away plays a saxophone. She stops beside an arbor alive with the sound of bees. The sky seems high and far away. Somewhere, someone is figuring out how to push back the hood of grief, but Marie-Laure cannot.  Not yet.  The truth is that she is a disabled girl with no home and not parents" (493).

The entirety of the chapter "The Frog Cooks" beginning on 284 and my favorite passage might just be the chapter from the 1974 section "Frederick." I will not write out the entire passage but give you just a taste. This writing raises tears to my eyes for its beauty and truth and, I am trying not to sound pat or cliché, but the entire chapter reminds of the consequences of the kind of violence that gripped Nazi Germany, the complicity of ordinary people, and the interior of human relationships. This, remember, is only a taste:

     "As she sits, looking out through the line of trees into the great empty parking lot, a dark shape sweeps through the nimbus of a streetlamp.  It disappears and then reemerges, and suddenly and silently it lands on the deck railing not six feet away.

     It is an owl. As big as a child.  It swivels its neck and blinks its yellow eyes and in her head roars a single thought: you've come for me.

     Frederick sits up straight"  (522).

I could write so much more. I was enchanted by this novel and going back to copy down passages from dog-eared pages plunged me back in.  I am, however, in need of finishing Sin and Syntax, I have begun Camus's The Plague and will be doing some writing of my own this week at the Antioch Writer's Conference.  You better believe this book will be tucked inside my bag.

if i stay, final post

     I finished if i stay by Gayle Forman on Friday and now I am contemplating whether I should read the sequel, where she went.  I will eventually but I think I will explore some other books for now, but where she went will go on my "To Read" list.
     I burned through this book -- all 234 pages.  As I mentioned in my previous post, I admire how Forman set up the novel that paced the story in a way that I did not want to put it down. I was thinking about this -- was it just that I wanted to know Mia's decision, or was it something else?   Wanting to know the outcome was a motivation, yes, but the unwinding of the fabric of Mia's life was also motivating.  I wanted to know her past. I wanted to know how everything fit in. I wanted to know what Mia would be leaving and what she would not have anymore if she stayed.  So, as Mia contemplated her decision and her life flashed back through her mind, I was right there with her, weighing and balancing the choice.  The time counting down, the hospital scenes, and the flashbacks kept the pages turning.
    Last week I asked my students about how they might consider passing time in a piece of writing. We briefly looked at an excerpt from Leanne Shapton's Swimming Studies (but then ran out of time, which seems to be a theme at the beginning of this school year that I can't seem to shake) where Shapton, in this stream-of-consciousness way, goes from the present (she's swimming laps), to the past in a hotel "shaving" for a swim meet with her teammates then slips into a description of her race visualizing routine at home (is that the past progressive or past-perfect??) to the longer-ago continuous past where a hospital table in her room reminds her of a poster of Alex Baumann that inspires her to launch into the rivalry and life stories of Baumann and Victor Davis, then back to the hotel room, then weeks later from that hotel moment when she is bored in French class.  What? That warp of time has me in awe.  I asked students where the clues were -- how did  we know time was passing and where we were oriented in time?
     Forman's time "chapters" (I guess I can call them that) would also be a place for a study of how to structure a flashback into a narrative.  This novel depends on flashback to provide the context for Mia's life, and Forman seamlessly travels from present to past and back.  She uses several techniques. Some come naturally with the time chapters and some she uses page breaks that signal a jump into a memory.  Now that I am paging through the novel, I am wondering if there is a pattern at all.  The page breaks within the time chapters go from the present -- Mia's status in the hospital -- to the stories of her past. I just looked at five examples and they all followed this pattern.  Each "time chapter" begins with the the hospital (or en route at the beginning) and then the page breaks signal the leap into the past.  Something to share.
     I am not going to tell you what Mia chose. You should find out for yourselves.  I will tell you that I cried as I read the last two pages.  Cried and cried. Forman poked at something so human -- our contemplation of loss and love and our ability to negotiate pain that comes from profound loss.  That pain I mentioned in the last post that my dad, his sister, and his mother dealt with (the two siblings still deal with) since that awful night in 1964 when my teenaged-later-to-be-my father answered the phone and was told his dad was killed in a car accident (I am not lying here, by the way; he was told on the phone by a nurse).  Some of you undoubtedly know that kind of loss, too.  So, if you were Mia, and your immediate family was gone -- you were the sole survivor of an accident -- what would you choose and how would you weigh that choice?
    Another thing I think is cool is that there is a little discussion section in the copy I have where Forman talks about her inspiration, etc.  You all might get a kick out of an author taking you into her ideas and process.  So, come on in and borrow the book. Put it on your "too read" list!

if i stay by Gayle Forman

     I read about if i stay by Gayle Forman in my friend Penny Kittle's book, Book Love, and the next day I was at the bookstore and there it was, so I picked it up.  I started this book on Monday and I am through 152 pages.  I can barely put the novel down at night because I want to know what Mia is going to decide. You see, she has been in a serious accident with her family, and it appears she is the only survivor.  As she lingers in that invisible in between, observing her body and those gathered at the hospital but feeling nothing, a nurse tells her Gram and Gramps that "She's running the show.  Maybe she's just biding her time.  So you talk to her.  You tell her to take all the time she needs, but to come on back" (82).  Mia realizes that she has a decision to make, that living or dying is up to her.
     The narrative, broken into increments of time in that first twenty-four hours (as far as I can tell now), bumps between that present and flashbacks that flesh out the fabric of her life up to that point.  The scenes with her unconventional and loving immediate family heightens the tension -- the reality that the world she might return to will be void of that same comfort and love. She will have to deal with loss and grief for the rest of her life (I know this: my grandfather was killed in a car accident in 1964 when my dad was 15, and my dad, now 64 years-old, is still processing his grief -- that hole left by his father's absence).  Yet, Forman paints the vibrant life that is open to Mia.  Her extended family: Gram and Gramps I mentioned above, aunts, uncles, cousins; her close friend, Kim, boyfriend, Adam, and close family friends, Willow and Henry.  Mia also has her cello and the possibilities of a serious career in music.  Forman places her readers on the seesaw with Mia. The tug and pull between life and death.
    The one thing that is bothering me -- the one thing that I can't get out of my head is that I believe we did not know the first-person narrator's name until page twenty-four when in a flashback to her first cello recital her dad calls her "Mia Oh-My-Uh." That detail is foreboding to me. She has no "identity" at that point except for membership in her family. Her cello teacher, Professor Christie, is mentioned by name, Adam, her brother, Teddy, but she is not named until well into the narrative. I know that is not accidental... Why?  I am trying to push out the idea that it is because she will have  "no identity" at the end.  OR, perhaps, I fear I doubt it, it is because Forman wants to highlight all the life and love she has known up to that point, making the world a place she will want to return.
    My one critique, and this comes from the place of a forty-two year-old cynic and mother of two young daughters, is that the relationship with Adam seems too perfect. Maybe not the relationship because I do like how Mia doesn't feel comfortable or worthy of the relationship -- she reflects how those doubts I think we all have when we enter a place of intimacy creep into our brain and make us insecure.  So, I think it is really the character of Adam himself that bothers me. He is, so far, too good to be true.  He loves her unconditionally -- tells her her quirks and insecurities are the things he loves the most.  He leaves her flowers on her windowsill every day that she is laid up with the chicken pox.  He is mature and even-keeled and a punk-rocker like her father once was.  I understand that it is about providing a luring possibility on earth -- something she can return to, but to tell you the truth, I am tired of all the Prince Charmings, who maybe have their surface imperfections but love these girls with their lives ( Peeta and Gale in The Hunger Games, Edward in Twilight, to name a couple recent ones that come to mind and I have been having my fill of Disney princesses and Teen Beach Movie with my two girls as of late).  But, then I think of my teenage self and I would have lapped up every single word written about Adam that would have had me daydreaming for hours, and this book is meant for that audience, so I should just shut my trap.  AND I don't even know what Forman is going to do with this character and relationship.  I should just wait and see. Until next time!

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

     Earlier in the summer I also devoured the 2008 Pulitzer Prize Winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz (who also won the MacArthur Genius Grant).  It had been on my "to read" list, but after reading "Miss Lora" (winner of the Sunday Times Short Story Award) from Diaz's latest short story collection, This Is How You Lose Her, I had ample motivation. That short story knocked me flat.  The narrative point of view, the subject, the voice...  (I have read some commentary from people who hated it, but I will politely disagree.)  Anyway, when my grading was done for school, I hunkered down.
    The beginning was rough going -- not because the writing was not fine, but I had to get used to the massive footnotes.  I couldn't decide when to read them: right when the footnote appeared, at the end of the sentence, end of the paragraph, end of chapter?  I found my rhythm and I enjoyed the pithy history (I had missed my "mandatory two seconds of Dominican history") and cultural mythology explanations.  
     Just yesterday I was talking to my dad about these footnotes and he commented that this was much like Melville's footnotes in Moby Dick.  I hadn't read that since high school (when I actually did enjoy it), and as I said, "Oh, yeah..." I remembered that Diaz had alluded to Moby Dick somewhere in the novel (let me also say that Diaz has so many allusions to so many things, science fiction and fantasy, in particular). Then, later yesterday I found a, I don't know what to call it, "promo video" of Diaz on the MacArthur website and in this "interview" he mentions... wait for it... Moby Dick!  Why?  Diaz explains how he is interested in the  "particular granular" experiences and for him it is a certain narrator, Yunior de Las Casas, a young Dominican immigrant who grows up in New Jersey.  Although this is a small, particular experience, he believes, there is power in this story that transcends it's uniqueness.  This is when Diaz brings up Melville who wrote about whaling -- not many whalers in the mid-19th century, yet, Diaz argues, the novel is able to capture the American experience and the human experience by putting men out on this whaling ship.  Why do I  bring this up?  You know (or you will know) that I am always harping on the idea of the mentor text (or mentor author?) -- the idea that when we read we either consciously (which I ask you to do) or unconsciously (which I hope you do in this semester of reading widely) pick up the "trade secrets" of writing.  Do you think it is an accident that Diaz uses footnotes like Melville did and then alludes to Moby Dick specifically in both his novel and then an interview four years later?  I think not.
     Aside from a good lesson in mentor texts, my students would enjoy this novel for many reasons. The vernacular, the feel that the narrator is telling the story directly to them, the idea that Oscar is an outcast, the blunt sexuality in the story.   And I liked it for all those reasons, but I was thinking about what had me flying through those pages?  The idea of a long story -- a long immigrant story -- appeals to me. I am the granddaughter of an immigrant. Yes, an immigrant of a different time and place; an immigrant not running from such violence (although I have read arguments about the absolute corruption of the Catholic church in southern Italy and its particular brand of exploitation), but there is that idea of how this "other culture" shapes the experience of the next generations that I have felt throughout my life.  For me it's the wanting to blend in and not be seen as an interloper, the idea that hard work is the way to succeed, the drive to not violate my grandfather's sacrifices and ensure that my life matches his legacy.  Some of these are apparent in this immigrant story, but not exactly.  Yunior's explanation of the evolution of Fuku in the beginning of the novel that then is appropriated by the Dominican Republic's despotic dictator, Trujillo, illustrates the idea that history has a strangle-hold on its people and their descendants.  This idea that history, particularly violent history and history of fleeing a homeland because of violence, can traumatize future generations is called something...transgenerational effects?
     Then there is the idea I found in this novel that transcends the immigrant experience and I think resonates in so many of our families. It is the idea that our mothers, fathers, grandmothers, grandfathers have these pasts, and often times they leave them behind and then keep them hidden from their children and grandchildren.  I don't want to say that these are "secrets," but I guess they are.  Secrets that I do not begrudge individuals for keeping, but, but, but...  As I mentioned above, Fuku, as Yunior explains it, is wrapped up in historical exploitation of people of color by the white man, but by the end I couldn't help wondering if we all perpetuate Fuku in our own lives through our secret keeping. There is liberation in having Yunior tell this story -- putting his friend, Oscar de Leon, into a larger context to memorialize his life.  In the parallel stories of Oscar's mother, Hypatia Belicia Cabral, and then later Oscar's own experiences in the Dominican Republic, history repeats itself and it made me wonder, what if she would have told this story before Yunior needed to set the record straight?  That maybe, just maybe, things would have been different.  I am fascinated by this struggle between the past and the present. How much do we keep secret,  how much do we tell?  How those things that we think we shouldn't tell might be the very stories our children and grandchildren need to hear so they understand us better; so that maybe they can avoid the mistakes of our pasts or go into their own experiences with their eyes wide open.  Yet, it is human nature to hold back -- to keep those secrets of the things which traumatized us and make us ashamed.  Yet, story, the telling of our experiences -- the good, bad, and ugly -- could maybe set us free from the past.

The Interestings

     A couple nights ago I finished The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer.  For some reason I couldn't write about it immediately. I digested and reflected and then finally sat down to write.
     It is the story of a core group of four teenagers, Jules, Ash, Ethan, and Jonah, who meet at an arts summer camp in the 1970s.  The novel follows their lives through randomly shifting chapters of 3rd person focus until one of their group dies from cancer in 2007.  It is a fascinating ride and I have struggled to think about why I was so absorbed. There is some central drama -- and intrigue that makes you wonder -- but that is not what propelled me through the book, not what had me gobbling page after page.  The characters weren't always likeable, and I think that is what resonated for me, the truth of it.
     Wolitzer painted honest portraits of human foibles and folly, jealousy and self-doubt, longing and regret that ebb and flow as we age.  I think the most fascinating was thinking about how many people's identity becomes solidified in the late teens and early 20s -- the way we see and conceive of ourselves (I think I was somewhere between 17-21, and sometimes, my dears, I look in the mirror and feel shocked by what is reflected back because it doesn't jive with the way I "see" myself) -- yet we have all this life -- years and years -- to live after that. Wolitzer explores how this identity can help and hinder us as we age.
     I also think that Woltizer is a master writer.  The way she moves time forward -- she covers over thirty years in these four lives (and the lives of some others).  New sections beginning, "Over that next year, the changes among them were all subtle instead of striking" (125) or "It did not seem so strange, three weeks later, for Jonah Bay to find himself selling dyed pink and blue flowers out of a plastic bucket on a street corner in nearby Brattleboro, Vermont" (285). These leaps in time move the narrative forward through the vast timeline of this story.
     She also uses some of the best foreshadowing I have ever encountered that kept me turning pages.  I don't mean the masterful subtle kind that you might not notice until you are rereading one of those canonical texts, but the kind that places a provocative detail about the future that gets you wondering how the story will get from where it is at that moment to this place in the future.  For instance, on page 125 she writes, "She wished she could make Goodman do that this year, which would be the last full year that all of them would be together. Even not knowing that yet, she felt an intuitive urgency."  I couldn't help but think, "well, what is going to happen that they won't all be together?!" It was like a delicious piece of candy promised in the future, so I kept inhaling her words.
     Time also folds back on itself as the story shifts narrative perspective (although always remaining in the third person) to follow the lives of one of the central characters. The story flows in and out of time, reminds us of details from the past and connects it with the future.  Although as I am writing this something is dawning on me that I had not realized before (and I could be wrong) but the story mostly tells the lives of Jules, Jonah, and Ethan -- Goodman and Ash Wolf (brother and sister) are central to the story, but the perspective is from those who orbit around them.  Huh.  That distance lens seems to be there, which makes sense when I think about it -- the rest of them feel somehow honored to be included in beams that shoot from the Wolf's posh apartment on Central Park West in Manhattan (referred to as "The Labyrinth").
     I think some of my students might like this novel, but I bet it would be best saved for the future. I do think, however, that many of them will like the book I finished earlier this summer (which I will write my next post on), The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz.  Stay tuned!