The Summer of Summer: Flights

 

This might sound trite, or too on-the-nose, but reading Flights, Olga Tokarczuk’s unique book about many things under the umbrella of “travel” is like taking a journey. The best kind of travel journey, where you meander down one road to discover something that wasn’t in any of the guidebooks or maps. I’m not even sure how to describe this read, this wholly original book.

At times, it reminded me of another book with a big impact on me: Outline by Rachel Cusk. In that book, our narrator never introduces herself in a traditional way, and we learn about her as she moves through the world and interacts with others—thus, an outline of the person she is emerges. In Flights, Tokarczuk introduces herself from the start. She relays some of her earliest memories and talks about her parents’ methods of travel and therefore, her childhood exposure to the concept. After her parents spent time at a campsite or abroad, like most of us, they’d return home to jobs and bills and a worn path in the carpet of their flat. But the author claims her divergent path:

“That life is not for me. Clearly I did not inherit whatever gene it is that makes it so that when you linger in a place you start to put down roots. I’ve tried, a number of times, but my roots have always been shallow; the littlest breeze could always blow me right over…My energy derives from movement—from the shuddering of buses, the rumble of planes, trains’ and ferries’ rocking.”

And then, unlike Cusk’s traditionally undefined narrator, Tokarczuk gives a full run-down of herself:

“I have a practical build. I’m petite, compact. My stomach is tight, small, undemanding. My lungs and my shoulders are strong. I’m not on any prescriptions–not even the pill—and I don’t wear glasses.”

Etc., until the focus narrows.

“My abdominal aorta is normal. My bladder works. Hermoglobin 12.7. Leukocytes 4.5. Hematocrit 41.6. Platelets 228.” 

And more!

Why? Again, it’s hard to describe this book, which meanders down so many paths having to do with travel and permanence, moving and staying, life and death. There are stories heard during travel, stories about people met and places visited. There are conversations relayed from life on the road: on plane trips, in foreign cafes and bars, discussions had while waiting to go someplace else. And the book returns many times to meditations about the human body and everything it means to have one, as our physical forms fortify us, change, and die, as we move through time and space trying to find meaning in our relation to what lies beyond us.

Have you ever gotten into to your car to drive a familiar route and sort of blank out at some point, not remembering the specifics of how you progressed to your current location? Reading Flights reminded me of that. At some point, I would pause and think “Huh. Now I’m reading about a slave whose body was preserved against his family’s wishes,” or “Now I’m following the travels of Peter I, tsar of the Russian Empire.” What all the meandering paths have in common is always some consideration of travel, or the body, or both. Flights is unlike anything I’ve read, with this tight focus on the topic while at the same time, feeling that it’s going in every direction at once. You might be thinking that it sounds like a frustrating or challenging read, and I will say that maybe early on, I felt that way, as I wet my feet. But once you’re in, you’re in, and the stories and segments wash over you easily, as if you’ve been the passenger all along. The structure of the book itself, with its short sections and asides, its starts and stops and recurring segments and themes, makes it the perfect book to take on a journey, short or long. I believe the more I think about this book, the more it will resonate. And it definitely made me want to plan a trip.

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The Summer of Summer: The Natural

 

I didn’t know much about The Natural, except that it was a movie I hadn’t seen starring Robert Redford, and that some consider the book, written by Bernard Malamud and published in 1952, the quintessential, literary baseball novel. And baseball is a summer game (in theory, although it runs from April into October, if you’re lucky); choosing this book for my Summer of Summer seemed like an easy choice. I even got my son to read along with me on vacation.

I was expecting a hero’s journey type of book, the story of a scrappy slugger and his rise in the leagues (again, with the image of Redford in mind). Certainly, those elements are there. The book opens with Roy Hobbs, a nineteen-year-old pitcher on his way to try out for the Chicago Cubs. We know his talents are considerable when the train stops at a carnival and he strikes out “the Whammer,” a top hitter in the game.

But this hero’s journey has its trials, as they do, and Roy is a tragic character more than anything else. Without giving away any of the plot’s surprising twists, I will tell you that often, Roy’s challenges come wrapped in a female package. Sidenote: the women in this story have great names: Harriet Bird, Memo Paris, Iris Lemon. In fact, everyone has great names, from the beleaguered manager of the New York Knights, Pop Fisher, to the journalist trailing Roy for a scoop, Max Mercy, to the star player and Roy’s nemesis, Bump Baily.

You can get a feel for the tone of this book, written in the fifties, by these names. In this world, the men call each other “bub” and “kiddo” and “son,” and the women say things like “How droll!”

But did I like it? I appreciated the atmosphere, dialect, and winding plot, and once I got a feel for the tragic element, I appreciated the character of Roy on a symbolic level. He’s a striver, a uniquely American character in his quest for fame and greatness—spurned on by an unhappy childhood and a string of bad luck. He’s a man of appetites that cause, in many ways, his demise. And in the way of tragedies, often we readers see what’s coming down the track before the character can; many times, I wished Roy would wise up, act better, do right.

I also liked some of the exaggerated elements of the book—such as when Roy literally hits a ball so hard that the cowhide falls off—these bits felt almost apocryphal and compounded that feel of heroism and the way we raise our sports competitors to mythic levels.

When I finished the book, I started to imagine how they took this story and filmed it, and now that I’ve watched the trailer, it would seem they made it into what I imagined the story to be before I picked it up—a story of a slugger making his way to the top. We’ll see. I’m planning to watch the full movie soon.

Next up for my Summer of Summer is quite a shift, the 2007 “fragmentary novel” by the Polish author Olga Tokarczuk, Flights. Let me know what you’re reading, or if you try any on my summer list! 

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The Summer of Summer: Seating Arrangements

 

My second read for the Summer of Summer reading project is Seating Arrangements by Maggie Shipstead. In this story, the Van Meters have gathered for the marriage of their eldest daughter, Daphne, who is well bred and educated and nevertheless, seven months pregnant for her nuptials. This irks the father especially. Winn Van Meter was raised with certain ideas about class, gender, and appearances. He’s never moved beyond the identity he earned when he joined an exclusive Harvard club, and ramifications and associations from those days continue in his life, thirty-plus years later. As they do. The family has gathered at Waskeke, an island where rich families have summered for generations, and Winn’s ongoing, current obsession is his pending application to the elite golf club there.

It may seem from my initial notes that the novel is about Winn, and it certainly focuses on his thoughts more than others, but the story moves from character to character, giving glimpses into the perspectives of several. I have to admit, for many pages, I didn’t like anyone much. These are people who remember what they spent on oysters for their first wedding, and when young children are caught playing dress up with their mother’s jewelry, they say “This is nothing. The good stuff’s in the safe.” And then I caught myself wondering why I was feeling a bias against these characters for their lifestyle—fiction is about relating to people unlike ourselves, isn’t it? And I was thinking, too, about what I felt were the horrific “jokes” about the wealthy explorers who perished trying to see the Titanic wreck. Why is antipathy—or, at least, a lack of empathy—against the rich acceptable? Shouldn’t be. Their concerns and issues are still human.

Still. Another aspect of the novel is the sexuality that simmers from the first pages. Winn, you see, is harboring a painful attraction for one of his daughter’s friends, and he has since she was young. Overall, I found Winn tiresome, with his continual fussing to keep things in place at the house, his obsession with the golf club and why they won’t let him in, and his awkward lusting after the young woman. There are additional affairs, relationships, and thwarted romances to deal with amongst the wedding guests. The other Van Meter daughter, Livia, has recently been dumped by the son of Winn’s nemesis—the man he thinks is keeping him out of the club. As the wedding party frolics and drinks, and drinks some more, there are sexual misadventures but also mishaps with the lobster intended for the rehearsal dinner and with a wayward golf cart. Also, a dead whale has beached nearby. I did enjoy some of the ironies of the book and how they played out. Such as the fact that Winn was a “ladies’ man” in his day and now has to deal with two daughters and their forays into the sexual world, and the outing Livia (an aspiring marine biologist) makes to view the whale.

And I will tell you that at some point, it started to come together for me, this darkly funny, orchestral novel. I don’t want to spoil anything else in the plot, but I will say that the book left me contemplating privilege and class, money and expectations, gender conditioning, and sexuality as it relates to power dynamics, and the way Shipstead brought all of the simmering tensions to a satisfactory, touching, and entirely realistic finale was truly inspiring. Do I recommend this book? To a certain, patient reader, yes. To those who like to relate to a character(s) from the start, maybe not. But it definitely has something to say about wealth (and many other things) and in its own way, Seating Arrangements is a richly American story, I think. And a good summer read.

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The Summer of Summer: The Summer Book

 

The back cover copy on this 1975 novel claims that it "distills the essence of the summer - it's sunlight and storms - into twenty-two crystalline vignettes." And that it does. The Summer Book by Tove Jansson centers on two characters - six-year-old Sophia, who has recently lost her mother and is navigating the loss and change that entails, and her grandmother, a headstrong expert of living on the rugged and mutable island where they spend their summers.

It's a book you'll want to read slowly - for me, a rare, five-star read. There are so many wisdoms, so many glimpses of human nature to contemplate, so many twists and dialogue that rings with the deepest truth. If there's a third, noticeable character in the book, it's probably Nature. The island consists of rocky coastline and the forested interior, and the weather can cause drought or near-swamp conditions. Sophia and her grandmother are in constant contact with their environment - exploring, playing, noticing, building. Both are angry about certain things. The grandmother, near the end of her life, resents the loss of some of her autonomy. Sophia is angry about things she's unable to voice in her young age. Of this novel, a friend of mine said that the grandmother is the best untrained psychologist she's seen. And certainly, there's a nurturing wisdom in the way she handles Sophia's meltdowns, questions, and sometimes, personal attacks.

Written in deceptively simple prose, this novel encompasses depths and depths. Each story lingers, as layers of meaning continue to rise to the surface long after reading. I could choose from many excerpts in this wonderful novel, but here's one.

The sun came up. The fog glowed for an instant and then simply vanished. Out on a flat rock in the water lay a scolder. It was wet and dead and looked like a wrung-out plastic bag. Sophia declared that it was an old crow, but Grandmother didn't believe her.

"But it's spring!" Sophia said. "They don't die now; they're brand new and just married - that's what you said!"

"Well," Grandmother said, "it did die now, all the same."

"How did it die?" Sophia yelled. She was very angry.

"Of unrequited love," her grandmother explained. "He sang and scolded all night for his scolder hen and then along came another and stole her away, so he put his head under the water and floated away."

"That's not true," Sophia screamed. She started to cry. "Long-tails can't drown. Tell it right!"

So Grandmother told her he had simply hit his head on a rock. He was singing and scolding so hard that he didn't look where he was going, and so it just happened, right when he was happier than he'd ever been before.

"That's better," Sophia said. "Shall we bury him?"

"It's not necessary," Grandmother said. "The tide will come in and he'll bury himself. Seabirds are supposed to be buried at sea, like sailors." 

I highly recommend this wonderful book for your summer pile. Next up in my summer reading project, Maggie Shipstead's Seating Arrangements.

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Summer Reading Project 2023

It's that time again! Every summer for many years, I have chosen a stack of books to tackle over the warmer and in theory, less busy, months. I choose books around a theme. I have spent summers reading books about trees, books related to France, books featuring notable houses, and last year, I read several Faulkner novels. That was one of my favorite projects so far, because Faulkner certainly is a project AND a mood, and it was an experience to be immersed in his world for that extended period. 

This year, I'm not feeling as ambitious. Lately, I read a lot for my jobs and sometimes have trouble finishing books in a timely manner. I wanted to choose novels with a decidedly summer vibe, books I might pick up while traveling. Books that really piqued my immediate interest. So I thought, why can't my theme be summer itself? I perused some lists and a couple novels came immediately to mind, and here you are, my choices for this summer's reading project, the Summer of Summer, which I'll read in this order and hopefully, share my thoughts with you. Click on each for a description:

The Summer Book by Tove Jansson

Seating Arrangements by Maggie Shipstead

The Natural by Bernard Malamud

Flights by Olga Tokarczuk

Thirst for Salt by Madelaine Lucas

If any of these pique YOUR interest, join me. And I'll be sure to update you on my progress and my impressions of these stories. Happy summer!

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Summer of Faulkner: Absalom, Absalom!

 

My final read for my Summer of Faulkner is one a panel of judges in 2009 called the best Southern novel of all time (one scholar called it “the only serious rival to Melville’s Moby-Dick as the great American novel”—and well, I hated that book so I call into question this entire panel.) But I do get that Absalom, Absalom! explores the complex structure of the South—class, race, tradition—in an notably comprehensive way.

The novel tells the story of the rise and (because it’s Faulkner) inevitable fall of Thomas Sutpen, a white man who starts out poor with ambitions of power and wealth. He lives a complicated life, with past indiscretions casting shadows on his present circumstances. And his prior sins come back to haunt not only him, but his children. The whole thing is like a Shakespearean tragedy, if I’m being honest, with twists and violence and no way to a happy ending for, really, anyone.

Like the other novels I read this summer, Absalom, Absalom! (titled after the Biblical story of King David and his wayward son) addresses the decline of plantation culture, the evils of slavery, and sexual misconduct. And the novel is often lauded for its method of—you guessed it, multiple narrators. But for me, this time the method was a problem. Every narrator is both reliable and unreliable to some degree—the point being that this is how history is relayed. Sutpen’s “story” is recounted in flashbacks narrated by Quentin Compson, who got his information from a variety of sources/other narrators. There are layers upon layers as to what is “true.” And for me, the storytelling method was too cumbersome, too convoluted, and in the end, weighed down the overall effect.

Who knows—maybe I have Faulkner fatigue. I’ll allow that I didn’t read this last novel on a vacation but rather, during my regular, busy life. At times, it was a struggle to read (and don’t get me started on the almost-forty consecutive pages of italics in the middle of the book). Of course, it’s still Faulkner and there were many moments of brilliance and enough to keep me plodding along. Perhaps I’ll file Absalom, Absalom! in the “Give Another Chance” column, for sometime down the road.

And that’s a wrap on my Summer of Faulkner. Usually, I have some idea of what I’d like to do for the next summer, but I haven't really considered. I may do another author—I liked immersing myself in a single writer’s voice. Or maybe some other theme will hit me. In the meantime, I don't think I'm finished with Faulkner. I intend to read a few more over the non-summer months. He really is an incomparable writer.

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Summer of Faulkner: Light in August

 

Light in August begins like this:

“Sitting beside the road, watching the wagon mount the hill toward her, Lena thinks, ‘I have come from Alabama : a fur piece. All the way from Alabama a-walking.’"

and it ends like this:

“’My, my. A body does get around. Here we aint been coming from Alabama but two months, and now it’s already Tennessee.’”

The novel covers this short period during which Lena Grove finds herself in Jefferson, Mississippi, where she’s come to seek the father of her unborn child, Lucas Burch, a man who promised to send for her and didn’t.

Lena is a sympathetic character from the start, because of her situation and gumption, and because of her naivete in believing that somewhere, Burch will be waiting with the house and marriage she thinks he promised.

But Lena Grove isn’t the main character of Faulkner’s seventh novel published in 1932; one of the masterful things about the author’s method in Light in August is the alternating points of view. It’s a common, Faulknerian technique and yet, he seems to go about it in a unique way for each novel. Here, an alternating omniscience allows us into the minds of several of the characters, but often a new, periphery character is introduced at a particular moment as if to lend a degree of objectivity. In this way, the points of view contribute to the furthering of plot, while also lending depth to the themes of the book. I don't even know if I'm describing this well. A simple way to say it is that everything in this book is doing several things at once. Everything. It's truly masterful, a novel I could read over and over, I believe, and find new satisfactions each time.

We follow young, pregnant Lena into Jefferson much like a camera follows a subject. We meet other characters, each, like her, carrying some burden from the past. Reverend Hightower spent a childhood obsessed with his grandfather, a Civil War hero, and was ousted from his church position after a personal tragedy. Byron Bunch maintains a friendship with the reverend but is otherwise solitary and isolated until Lena’s arrival. Joanna Burden is a spinster whose family has a long history of anti-slavery activism and intermixing with blacks. And because one of Faulkner’s primary preoccupations in the novel is the relationship between and status for both whites and blacks in the South—well, it makes perfect sense that Joanna, with her confusion about her place among the races, becomes involved with our main character, Joe Christmas, a light-skinned man who has lived as both white and black at certain times of his life.

The characterization of Joe Christmas is nuanced and deep; he’s an orphan who suffers abuse and alienation throughout his childhood and becomes a drifter. I think one of the most impressive things about Faulkner’s drawing of this character is that even when Christmas becomes more and more corrupted and driven to terrible acts, we still feel sympathetic. Because of his violent upbringing and the lack of a mother, Christmas’s feelings for and about women are convoluted, his feelings about race, the same. He has never been allowed any sort of peace and when he finds it in short spells, he sabotages and destroys. On the race issue, never fitting in completely, he lives his life ready to fight.

“Now and then he could see them: heads in silhouette, a white blurred garmented shape; on a lighted veranda four people sat about a card table, the white faces intent and sharp in the low light, the bare arms of the women glaring smooth and white above the trivial cards. ‘That’s all I wanted,” he thought. ‘That dont seem like a whole lot to ask.’”

Note the repetition of the word "white" in that passage. It should be noted that in addition to an intricate plot and a cast of memorable characters, Light in August contains some of the best prose I’ve read on this Faulkner journey. Like this, our first glimpse of five-year-old Joe Christmas:

“Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders. Knows remembers believes a corridor in a big long garbled cold echoing building of dark red brick sootbleakened by more chimneys than its own, set in a grassless cinderstrewnpacked compound surrounded by smoking factory purlieus and enclosed by a ten foot steel-and-wire fence like a penitentiary or a zoo, where in random erratic surges, with sparrowlike childtrebling, orphans in identical and uniform blue denim in and out of remembering but in knowing constant as the bleak walls, the bleak windows where in rain soot from the yearly adjacenting chimneys streaked like black tears.”

I mean. Could the story of Joe Christmas have gone any way but tragically?

For each, well-drawn character, the past guides the present, and the plot of Light in August reveals, through twists and turns, all of the connections between these complex people. As is the case with the other novels I’ve read this summer, Faulkner has something to say about the choices for women and sexuality, about the lasting effect of slavery and racial violence and injustice, and about the South’s rich history and traditions. But race is perhaps the major consideration of the novel and about that, he reflects the devastation but offers no answers or resolution. It’s left for the characters to trudge forward, as Lena continues her journey through the South.

I remembered this book as a favorite from when I read it over twenty years ago; it’s my favorite of the books I’ve read this go-round.

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Summer of Faulkner: As I Lay Dying and Sanctuary

I often think there’s no better place to read a book than on an airplane. Suspended between places with few distractions (especially if you have earplugs), it’s a prime opportunity for a fictional world to take over. And maybe another fantastic place to read a book is on vacation, when perhaps you’ve put the concerns of work and everyday life on the back burner. It follows that maybe reading a novel on a plane before or after a vacation is the best of all. After experiencing three Faulkner novels (so far) this summer, I can tell you that it’s particularly suited for reading him. Faulkner is a big mood. His stories are immersive, each with its own language and method. Particularly the method. Reading his novels in a single sitting increases accessibility; there’s no reorientation period as there might be if you read in segments during breaks from your normal, busy life. And so, I give you my thoughts on As I Lay Dying and Sanctuary.

When I chose the novels for my summer project, I selected five books in chronological order during a particularly productive writing period of Faulkner’s life. The historical notes on the first three novels I've read are interesting. Of the first, the author stated, “I had just written my guts into The Sound and the Fury though I was not aware until the book was published that I had done so, because I had done it for pleasure.” Faulkner bounced between writing what he wanted and writing to make money over the course of his entire career, and it’s not surprising that what is probably his most critically lauded novel was an act of creative passion. 

Of Sanctuary, however, he wrote:

“To me it is a cheap idea, because it was deliberately conceived to make money. I had been writing books for about five years, which got published and not bought…I took a little time out, and speculated what a person in Mississippi would believe to be current trends, chose what I thought was the right answer and invested the most horrific tale I could imagine and wrote it in about three weeks.”

The editor who received Sanctuary told Faulkner he couldn’t publish it, or they’d both end up in jail. In need of money, Faulkner took a job in a power plant, shoveling coal during the night shift. Between midnight and 4 a.m., when there was less to do because everyone was sleeping, he wrote As I Lay Dying in six weeks, “without changing a word.” He told the publisher, “by it I would stand or fail.” Another novel, it would seem, inspired by pure, creative passion.

By then, he had forgotten about Sanctuary but undertook a comprehensive rewriting when asked. He claimed to make a “fair job of it” and hoped not to “shame” the other two novels. He seemed to know that it was in another category altogether, and I certainly found it so.

As I Lay Dying is the story of the Bundren family. It opens with the point of view of Darl, who observes his older brother, Cash, building a coffin for their mother, who lies in the house nearing death. There’s some discussion about whether he should be doing this right outside the window where Addie, their ailing mother, can see. Everyone seems agitated by the sound of the sawing and hammering. And with these first images and sounds, Faulkner sets a mood and tone that masterfully prevails throughout the novel.

The Bundrens are a hardscrabble, farming family who can never seem to make out right. Bad luck, the patriarch of the family would claim. Throughout the novel, Anse Bundren bemoans his fortune: “I have heard men cuss their luck, and right, for they were sinful men. But I do not say it’s a curse on me, because I have done no wrong to be cussed by.” This is up for debate throughout, not only in relation to Anse but for each character. Cash and his brooding brother, Darl, the sole daughter of the family, Dewey Dell, whose personal problem weighs more heavily on her than her mother’s impending death, Jewel, the mother’s favorite, and the youngest, Vardaman, who possibly has mental disabilities and associates his mother’s death with a fish he caught earlier the same day.

Like The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying rotates points of view but each chapter is short and immersive, and the effect of the blending of these scenes is quite mesmerizing, like a collage around Addie. The family’s matriarch was tough and bitter; she has requested that her body be delivered to Jefferson to be laid with her ancestors—although she knew this would cause complications and expense her family couldn’t really afford. Faulkner gives Addie a voice, post-mortem, in a chapter when she recounts the birth of each child and the frustrations of her life.

The novel maintains a tragic tone laced with dark humor, as the family carts Addie’s body while vultures circle above. You wouldn’t think you would laugh about a scene when they attempt traversing a river and the body lurches into the water, but you do. It’s no farce, though; the novel speaks volumes about the South and the struggles of farmers, about roles for women and sexuality, and a new generation shackled by the demands of family and tradition and the past.

If I had one thing to say about Sanctuary, it would be that the content is unpleasant from start to finish, really. No character is truly likable or, more importantly, particularly sympathetic. As Faulkner claimed, it was “the most horrific tale” he could imagine. In the story, a young debutante named Temple Drake arrives at the home of a bootlegger after a car crash. It’s a house of horrors, as she is attacked several times throughout the night, becomes semi-intelligible due to trauma, and is kidnapped by an impotent criminal named Popeye and eventually, after suffering more abuse, ends up in a Memphis brothel.

Although the book seems to be an attempt at a potboiler (those “trends” Faulkner talked about), the author can’t help but draw commentary about women’s sexuality through the characterization of Temple herself, a young woman who seems to flirt with danger until it comes to her in severe fashion. The novel has something to say about the South during prohibition, a time that encouraged lawlessness, and about alcoholism—the car is crashed by Gowan Stevens, an alcoholic and Temple’s companion on that fateful day. But again, most of the content is just…well, unpleasant. Much has been said about the famous scene (or lack of scene) with the famous object—but I’ll leave that for you to find out.

Sanctuary is written without shifting point of views and much of the literary flair of Faulkner’s other novels. But again, the author was writing with a certain thing in mind, for the broader audience he imagined. And, dear readers, it worked. The success of Faulkner’s potboiler in 1931 freed him from financial worries, for the most part.

Next up: a reread of Light in August, the book I remembered as a favorite, to be followed by the last book of my summer project, Absalom, Absalom! Fortunately, I still have some summer plane rides left.

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