everybody's searching

May already? How did it take me three months to finish "On the Road"? Well, considering it took Jack Kerouac years to live it and only days to write it, it's a pretty good compromise. It was easy enough to go a while without reading, because Kerouac writes with great detail about major events, but skips giant amounts of time. So while I was busy hanging out in New York doing my thing, Kerouac (er, Sal Paradise) was busy hanging out in New York, doing his thing. And it was nice, catching up with an old friend, because Sal was always just catching up with Dean, seeing him for the first time after years, noticing how he had changed or remained the same.

Some of what I've been doing book-wise during the last few months is building up my Daphne du Maurier collection, some from eBay, some from the Strand, some from the Half Price bookstore in Omaha ... you never know. But when I finished reading "On the Road," I jumped into "The Loving Spirit," which is her first novel. She talked a lot about its writing in the memoir I read, "Myself When Young: The Shaping of a Writer." I guess I didn't write a blog post on that one, but I read it directly after the short-story collection, "Don't Look Now." As I read her shorts, I pictured Daphne in her seaside Cornwall cottage, and I wondered how empty rooms and expansive sky equaled dark, twisted intrigue. And I was able to get a really nice picture of her life before her writing career as well as her penchant for solitude. And even though it's been a while since my mind has imagined the details, I'm finding it pretty easy to recreate that atmosphere while reading "The Loving Spirit." It's such a beautiful mental transformation -- but I am truly glad I've got a more personal view of Daphne now. I'm not sure I would fully appreciate it if "The Loving Spirit" was the first du Maurier book I'd read. Because knowing what I know about the woman, it definitely reads like a first novel. You can clearly see how much of herself she put into her protagonist, but she manages to do it in a most-endearing way. For me, it's all about the context. I feel like I'm reading her work now more as a study than for leisure. I'm giving myself a thesis in du Maurier.

And that thesis is going to extend beyond Daphne, and I'm pretty excited about it. Her sister, Angela, has a series of books, one of which I've already purchased. Her grandfather was a writer and illustrator, George du Maurier. He's got three, one of which is available at the Strand in a lustworthy two-volume British first edition for a mere $60. I can't say that will be easy to ignore for long ... I have a feeling I'll be giving in on that one before it slips away. But I have also collected various related paperbacks, including a short-story collection and a biography of Katherine Mansfield, one of Daphne's inspirations. I'll probably tackle the bit of Mansfield fiction when I finish "The Loving Spirit." But enough gushing ... here is what I've taken from the first 30 pages or so of Daphne's debut.

Janet Coombe is representative of Daphne's heart. She feels obligated to fulfill her "womanly duties," so to speak, but she dreams of the ocean and sailing and even voices regret that she wasn't born a man. In the books first chapter, she marries her cousin Thomas. "She loved Thomas dearly, but she knew in her soul there was something waiting for her greater than this love for Thomas. Something strong and primitive, lit with everlasting beauty." This theme is so clearly a piece of Daphne's life, and I feel I've already seen it recur in some of her other work.

In the third chapter, Janet has her first child, and you get glimpses of her personality in some of her actions related to the baby. Her family members tell her to rest, but she feels strong and annoyed. When they won't leave her alone, she makes her irritation clear. "I wish you'd away, all of you, and go about your business and let me be. I'm not feared o' pain nor trouble, and if I had my way I'd leave you to your ribbon-tyin', and soup-makin' and take myself to the quiet fields to have my baby, I would, 'midst the cattle and the sheep who'd understand." When the baby is born, she finds it annoying that people marvel that the baby looks like it's father as though no baby ever did before.

After another chapter and another child, Janet gets more brazen and tells her husband of her fantasies of being a smuggler. And all I could think of was "Jamaica Inn" and the short story of the ghost ship, where Daphne shows her readers just how knowledgeable she is of boats and smuggling, and you see the author's heart's desire.

yes, please

Jack Kerouac loves the word "lugubrious." As Sal Paradise, he paints his memoir with an engaging mix of earthy and intellectual thoughts. The man of the earth is the poet. The unwashed bum is a secret genius. But so far, his life "on the road" is anything but exaggeratedly sorrowful. A lugubrious nature is merely observed in others and spun into the frame of a catchy sort of American dream, whereby a man can set out across the country with $50 and a few names to throw around and end up happy living 10 different lives in the span of one summer.

At about page 100, "On the Road" could almost end. Sal has spent an amazing summer adventuring across the country, and now he's headed back to New York. But if that were the case, this book would never have become the beat bible. At this point, you can feel that Sal is just getting started, even though he's done more hitching and busing than most people do in a lifetime. There's so much in his mind that Kerouac has only hinted at, but it lies in that fascinating mix of matter-of-fact storytelling and keen insight. It's as if ignorance and intelligence spent some time "alone and mixing up [their] souls ever more and ever more till it would be terribly hard to say good-by." Alas, that was just the result of stimulating conversation between Sal and his Mexican mistress.

He references a lot of things I have to look up to get. And at the risk of sounding like somebody on Yahoo! Answers, I'll admit even page 2 left me quizzical. But when you type Modigliani into Google, you get a much clearer picture of Marylou. If you want to know what pulling wrists is, you have to weigh arm wrestling against debating, and it's pretty clear which he means, I think. I wonder if people in 1955 sometimes made a point to read next to the encyclopedia shelf? But even if you don't bother to look up hincty or Hassel or fellahin, there's plenty of easy richness to savor: "Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon fields; the sun the color of pressed grapes, slashed with burgundy red, the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries." California, of course. Not far out of this romantic mood, he first sees his exotic princess, and like any good poet he marks the occasion with the familiar sauce of life: "A pain stabbed my heart, as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world."

Sal's travels bring new meaning to the idea of living paycheck-to-paycheck. Everywhere he travels, he's looking for work, and he'll go as low as picking cotton to find it. Luckily he's got an extremely loving and understanding aunt back in New Jersey, who sends him cash when he's in a pinch. That's the result of living one of the classic American dreams backwards -- you usually try to leave the small towns to make it big in New York, but Sal left New York to try and make it in Hicksville. But he brings New York with him, carrying it in his pocket to rub when he's lonely: "LA is the loneliest and most brutal of American cities; New York gets god-awful cold in the winter but there's a feeling of wacky comradeship somewhere in some streets. LA is a jungle." And for as much enjoyment he got out of living in hotel rooms and tents, riding on truck beds and in rail cars, picking grapes and spending his last dollar on whiskey, he lives with the knowledge that life isn't lived in stillness. He keeps moving, even in solitude, even away from his best friends, his new friends, his love whom he knows he'll never see again: "We turned at a dozen paces, for love is a duel, and looked at each other for the last time."

YOU in the afterlife

I first saw "Sum" at Barnes & Noble one day, sitting on the new paperback wall. I read a page, found myself intrigued, and promptly forgot the book existed. Then I saw it again about a month ago at a thrift store near my apartment, and borrowed $2 from a friend to purchase the collection of "tales from the afterlives." Each of the 40 nugget stories is fiction, written by a neuroscientist named David Eagleman. A scientist writes fiction? This you have to see.

It took about two days to read this book, and I loved how quick it was. Basically, Mr./Dr. Eagleman thought up 40 different scenarios that we might come upon in the afterlife, some more plausible than others, some include God but some do not, and some include odd versions of God. Some include aliens. Some include different versions of yourself -- you at different phases of life, you being all the things you could have been but chose not to be, you as an actor on the stage of someone else's life, you with greater intelligence than your creator(s). And they all make some comment on the state of life. Individual life, universal life, cellular life. Most sound pretty dreadful, but the point is to make you appreciate more fully what you choose to do with your life on Earth.

"Your eyes hurt, and you itch, because you can't take a shower until it's your time to take your marathon two-hundred-day shower." In this afterlife, you experience similar events consecutively, which is supposed to help you appreciate the randomness of real life, but on a microscopic level. As though you could say: "Hooray! I don't have to cut my fingernails every single day! I'm so looking forward to that next joyful cutting session." But the scenario doesn't acknowledge that you can still be bored with life in general. That's for another story -- the one in which Earth is populated only by people you met during your life. Of course, you end up lonely because the joy of life comes from *new* experiences.

A few of the stories include gods that are weepy and regretful, as though they blame themselves for the mess of humanity. When God isn't mentioned, there is usually some sort of Technician, Collector or Caller that serves as a crossing guard at the intersection of Now and Later. Eagleman makes playful metaphors about immortality and relationships. Self-realization and empathy are major themes, but (happily) religion is not. It's an exercise in creativity for both author and reader -- it's almost a challenge to stretch your imagination to places most people don't think much about. It reads like a Choose Your Own Adventure novel, where "you" are the main character, and you have to decide your next step. But this book wants you to take that step literally. You're heading down Now, will you make a right or a left onto Later? He's not saying you need GPS navigation, but maybe you shouldn't just wing it. Just in case.

I am homes

Quotational endorsements on book covers don't always give you a lot of insight into the real impact of a piece of potential literature. A quick browse of my roommate's bookshelf tells me "The Time Traveler's Wife" is -- and I nearly quote -- enchantingly beautiful and dazzlingly romantic. But that doesn't make me want to read it. At all. Luckily, works that are both amazing and aged penetrate enough intellectual minds to accumulate more thoughtful words. In those cases, pull quotes are classy and beautifully free of exclamation points. Such an inspired word byte appears on the backside of "Don't Look Now," a collection of Daphne du Maurier short stories. The little nugget of wisdom caught my attention because its author was able to say exactly what I had been thinking the whole time: "Daphne du Maurier's genius lay in her plots, which she spun with astounding originality and ease ... (they) have an effectiveness that makes them seem almost traditional, belonging not to any one author but to the imagination of the world." -- Alberto Manguel. When you read Daphne's stories, you feel as if you're reading fables of the ages -- tales that have been embedded in the collective subconscious since tales were things to tell. The kicker is that you simultaneously feel like du Maurier's singular imagination is a bottomless pit of newness. What this adds up to is that these are stories that simply need to be written, told, heard.

Du Maurier writes little mysteries -- riddles almost -- that tangle like hair and resolve like the release of a long-held breath. For me, each story was a tiny masterpiece, from "The Birds" to the lengthy "Monte Verita." I can honestly say there wasn't a story there I didn't finish without a satisfied smile slowly creeping up my cheeks. But so out of reverence for my obsession, I don't intend to expound upon my individual infatuations with du Maurier bits until my second readings of them. I'll obsess, but I won't over-permeate. Which leads me to post-part 2.

On my way to Short Story Town, I most recently finished the A.M. Homes collection "The Safety of Objects." I sped through this large-fonted paperback, relishing the stories in a similarly rewarding way. Du Maurier tells stories you can feel in the world's imagination; Homes tells stories you knew existed, but until now, no one would admit to it. You want to point your finger at the characters and yell in italics: "I knew it!" These aren't fairy tales, they're tattle-tales. They're windows into our neighbors' homes. You might see into their hearts, more likely you will see into their pants -- and it's not pretty. Homes knows how to convey familiar (if ugly) sensations, like the sweaty thigh sticking to the vinyl lawn chair or the chewiness of a Barbie doll foot in a child's mouth -- as well as unfamiliar urges like the near-heartbreaking quest of a kidnapper to replace his (dead?) son, or the desperation of a mother who goes to extremes to end her family's suffering. On top of this, she outs the secret sexual curiosities of ages 1 to 100, with a precision that keeps the reader one step short of uncomfortable. We ogle, but we know these are the exploits of others. It's the type of "fiction" we see sometimes exposed in the news, but more often we picture it the ignorance of trailer trash or the stuff of Lifetime movies. "Stiletto sharp," says the front cover quote.

Speaking of movies, I'm planning to watch "The Safety of Objects" in film form asap ... and I'm hoping "Don't Look Now" and "The Birds" aren't far off the horizon. Apparently D du M wasn't much of a fan of Hitchcock's version of the latter, but that only makes me want to see it all the more. I've got another short-story master on deck, this time it's inspired by what inspired Daphne. "Stories" by Katherine Mansfield ... I figure if Daphne loved "Jane Eyre," we might have more tastes in common. But not before I finish my detour in man-town with "On the Road." Then maybe I'll pull A.M. Homes's "Music for Torching" out of the dugout. It's the continued story of a set of surburbanites who spend their staycation experimenting with crack. Yes, crack.

obsession

It always starts with "Rebecca." The book that is so good you don't want to share it with anyone. It never leaves you. It possesses you. It possesses me, and now so does its author. I'm not sure I could accurately explain how my obsession with Daphne du Maurier has come about, only that I'm basically in love with her. Or maybe I just wish I could have been her in another life. Alas, I can only hang onto the thought that I was born about eight years before she died -- so we shared some meaningless time on Earth together. Twenty years later, the dormant presence has come back to life.

The obsession began when I declared "Rebecca" my favorite book. But I wasn't convinced the author could interest me further until I learned of her association with Alfred Hitchcock. I let the thought marinate all through "Jamaica Inn," but the fever hadn't quite peaked. The day I bought the story collection "Don't Look Now," I knew I was in for something, and it took me to about page 3 to figure out that du Maurier would soon dominate me. With each page she owned me more and more, and by the time I'd finished "Monte Verita," I knew I had to get my hands on every piece of this woman's work.

I bought a decrepit copy of "Rule Britannia" at a used bookstore (surprisingly not The Strand) and added a heap of fiction and biographies to my Amazon wish list. I repeatedly fondled a copy of "The Daphne du Maurier Companion" at my nearest Barnes & Noble, but opted not to drop the $18 in favor of my favorite contemporary author, A.M. Homes, when a coupon begged redemption. But The Strand did beckon, and I swooped in on the D shelf and snagged a handful of relics as a Christmas present to myself. Those plus a couple more I got for Christmas, and my current collection is as follows:

Rebecca
Jamaica Inn
Rule Britannia
Don't Look Now
Myself When Young - The Shaping of a Writer
Mary Anne
My Cousin Rachel
The du Mauriers
The Young George du Maurier
The Rebecca Notebook and Other Memories
The Daphne du Maurier Companion
Daphne du Maurier by Margaret Forster
Daphne du Maurier: A Daughter's Memoir by Flavia Leng

It's a short list compared to what I'll continue to compile over the years, and doesn't even include other things I'm buying as companions to the collection, such as works by her grandfather and sister, and others that inspired her in some way (I've already invested in "Tales from Shakespeare" by Charles Lamb and "Stories" by Katherine Mansfield). I've also now seen the Hitchcock "Rebecca," as well as "Daphne" and its accompanying "Vanishing Cornwall."

It's time I admit it: I'm a total geek. But why not? It's about time I had something to collect other than random books I "might" like. Besides, it's a match made in heaven -- there's the sea, there's writing, there's reclusive nature, a desire to wear pants rather than dresses ... there's Cornwall (can I mention that's where Tori Amos lives? Rereading my mention of the Tori song in an earlier post has total new meaning. It wasn't just a coincidence!).

There are so many details I'd love to go into, but I'm just a du Maurier baby-fan. I can dream of being an authority, writing research papers for no one but myself to read, attending the festivals, acquiring that rare, signed first edition (I already made one purchase from The Strand's Rare Book Room -- so it was only $15 and unsigned, it's still cool as hell). I want to dig, I want to know, but it's barely the honeymoon stage and I'm already the jealous boyfriend. I'll read the professional criticisms but shield my eyes from Goodreads or Amazon "comments" on the lady. What could they know?! They don't love her like I do! It's mine and you can't have it. More to come.

picking some brains

Moving into an apartment that puts you one short subway stop away from work is a surefire way to slow down your reading progress if you're used to the trip taking an hour. In the past five months, I've managed to make it through a few great books, though. Unfortunately, the closest I've gotten to blogging about them is the automatic Goodreads updates that tell you things like I'm on page 100 of "Comic Book Tattoo," a Tori Amos collector's item I got for Christmas, and will likely get into here a little later.

The first book I started after Olive Kitteridge, I believe, was Robert Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance." I was heading back into my nonfiction stream, and I wanted to wax philosophical. I didn't quite make it all the way to the end, though the 225 pages I did read were amazing, and I plan to finish it off in the not-so-distant future. That book is best read in long sittings, and after August and September I was quite short on those. But I can say I underlined in red something on almost every single page of that little 380-page pink book. I'd like to do a more in-depth post on it one day when I start reading the end of it. But I'll grab a random snippet: "She was strangely unaware that she could look and see freshly for herself, as she wrote, without primary regard for what had been said before." How appropriate.

"Zen" was too heavy for short sittings, but I wanted to stay with the "inspirational" nonfiction, so I read "On Writing" by Stephen King. And it was very inspiring -- it made me want to write both fiction and memoir (and even read more memoirs of authors). I've always been a King fan, though I've barely put a dent in the 10 or so novels of his that I own, my favorite being "Dolores Claiborne," of course. Anyway, I liked "On Writing" for its honesty. You got to see Stephen at home, letting his wife make sweeping literary decisions for him, and him being perfectly happy to have it that way. He made me want to get on paper every potentially silly (read: groundbreaking) idea that pops into my head. I'll have to spend some time identifying my Ideal Reader, though. Maybe it's him. I feel like I could go to "On Writing" with a question, and Stephen would answer it. Reading that book is like having a conversation with the man. He made himself the protagonist of a plotless narrative, and I felt I knew him pretty well by the end.

Inspired by King's "Carrie" confessions, I decided it was high time I read that classic. I can't remember why, but I was quickly distracted from it. There's a mysterious black hole in my memory (well, that's not so mysterious if you know me), where I might have picked up something else, but eventually I ended up cracking another author memoir, this time A.M. Homes's "The Mistress's Daughter." I put a short review of this one on Goodreads, where I express my desire for "more narrative and less fact-spewing" about the adoptee's reunion with her biological parents. I hope Homes writes another memoir, and I'd hope for something under the category of "more personal," but you don't get much more personal than your search for identity. And the drama isn't missing. On page 60 Homes drops the drama into one succinct sentence: "Ellen thinks I'm her mother, Norman thinks I am Ellen, and Norman's wife thinks I am the mistress reincarnate." But it's interesting to watch Homes dig into her ancestry, more so on the reflective side than the genealogical analysis. When her biological mother dies, she goes through this relative stranger's things and finds pieces of herself: "It creeps me out, this indescribable subtlety of biology. In her pockets I find the same things I find in mine" (page 98). You don't have to be adopted to appreciate her words. "Did I ever say how precariously positioned I feel--on the edge of the earth, as though my permit could be revoked at any second?" (page 117)

the only olive i'll consume

I finished "Olive Kitteridge" quite happily just over a week ago. I've started recommending it at work, emphasizing its ability to portray silver linings amid all the dark clouds. I've been distanced from the book because I've already started reading "On Writing" by Stephen King, but I'll do my best to stay true-to-form today, but covering just a few of the stories. I also owe Goodreads a review, since that's why I have the book in the first place. Random House sent it to me all shiny and crisp, but even the short time it spent traveling in my bag wore it out pretty well. Nothing's ripped, but the edges are soft now, and you can see scratch marks from my keys and wallet. I knew this book wouldn't stay pristine, though, because I marked important passages with fun little arrows. Some look like sideways smiley faces, others like enigmatic Chinese characters.

A Different Road
I didn't mark much in this story, because most of the words simply drove the narrative to the climax, where the reader is left to gawk at Olive and Henry's near-lethal bickering. Coming home from a restaurant one night, Olive is in dire need of a restroom. The closest one is at the hospital (remember, we're in the sticks), and Olive remarks that since she was born there, the least they can do is offer her a toilet. The emergency-room doctor insists on checking her out, and I was surprised when Olive didn't resist. But the timing was unfortunate, because two masked gunmen arrived and forced Olive, Henry, a doctor and a nurse into the bathroom. One masked man remained their captor while the other presumably stole drugs. As hostages, Olive and Henry spewed insults at each other. They were uncontrollable under the pressure and revealed deeply buried resentments. This, combined with the already traumatic experience, had sad consequences for their relationship.

"No, they would never get over that night because they had said things that altered how they saw each other. And because she had, ever since then, been weeping from a private faucet inside her, unable to keep her thoughts from the red-haired boy with his blemished, frightened face, as in love with him as any schoolgirl ..." The captor had unmasked himself, revealed his fear and vulnerability, and Olive had taken notice. I could probably write a whole paper on how this event allowed Olive to embrace a side of herself she had neglected. But the author didn't revisit this, so I'll not dwell on it. That's something both good and bad about this book. The stories involve deep issues of so many characters, your imagination could run wild with any one, and as a result, we're left to make our own assumptions about Olive. Just like everyone else.

This wasn't my favorite of the stories, but it was pivotal for the characters' lives. I wish it had felt more dramatic so it would have had more entertainment value. As it is, no one is shot, and the event is both shattering and inconsequential. I suppose the author thought the conversation needed something extreme to bring it about, but if the event were too extreme, it would overshadow other important events in the book. The town believes Henry shuts down because he was faced with his mortality, but Olive knows the truth. Unfortunately, we don't have a second story from Henry's perspective, since he soon lapses into a vegetable state because of a stroke. Some insight might be available in the initial story, but the average reader doesn't have time to revisit that without devoting much too much energy to one (albeit Pulitzer-winning) book, and neither do I.

Highlights from Winter Concert
"Funny to have tickets in order to get into a church."
"What a lonely thing to be a young girl!"
"Mrs. Lydia was looking at her with those new eyes; unnerving to have a sixteen-year-old's eyes looking at you from an old woman's head."

In this story, a man admits to cheating on his wife. But first, they comment on the marriage of Olive and Henry Kitteridge, and introduce the idea that Henry can "stand" his wife simply because he loves her.

Tulips
Another plot-driving narrative, though this one includes more palatable circumstances and just plain better writing. The most poignant moment occurs when Henry collapses: "She shouted at him, waiting for the ambulance to come. His mouth moved, and his eyes were open, and one hand kept jerking through the air, as though reaching for something beyond her." This statement brings up valid questions. Was Henry continuously reaching for something beyond Olive? Was his love for her really enough?

Olive visits her neighbor, Louise, and we get a juicy back story concerning Louise's son, who stabbed his wife to death, thus driving his mother to the brink of insanity. Olive has problems, but she's grateful they're nothing like Louise's. Louise claims to live for her son, so he knows he's not alone. This parallel story magnifies Olive's issues with not being needed by her own son. "Oh," said Louise, laughing softly. "You came here for a nice dose of schadenfreude, and it didn't work."

I love some of the author's imagery, and one of the best examples of this is when moving windshield wipers are compared to shaming fingers: "It was shame that swiped across her soul, like these windshield wipers before her: two large black long fingers, relentless and rhythmic in their chastisement."

-------

In the rest of the book, I did a little marking, but mostly I was ready to finish it and get back to my nonfiction foray. Olive attends a funeral, reminisces about a lost love, visits her son in New York with his new wife (while relating the visit to the dubious ear of vegetable Henry), watches her husband pass away, and meets a potential kindred spirit to live out her days with.

Unfortunately for my constant reader, I'm even more eager now to get back to Mr. King's advice on fiction and writing in general, so the rest of this page-turner's meat will stay in the freezer unless you decide to cook it yourself.