When I arrived here at my regular coffeehouse this afternoon, I settled in with my habitual iced double-tall decaf Americano (two Splendas, please) and opened the book I’d packed along, a novel by an author whose work I’d never before read — a novel I couldn’t in fact even remember having bought.
[A confession on that: I own far too many books that I haven’t yet read — and might now never read. Somehow that bad habit worsened significantly in the years during and following the pandemic. A little alarming what stress and changes of lifestyle can do, you know?]
Anyway, so I’d finally gotten around to remembering (at a time when I was at home and had my library available) that I’d not much been relishing the book I’d been toting around in my book bag for the past few weeks. So I unbagged that one and set it on the Donate stack. I poked through the other offerings on the Unread shelf, and then checked to see whether there was any old friend in my Life Library that felt due for a re-read, but in the end decided that, as I was nearing the end of my recent several-week return to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, I should choose something entirely unfamiliar.
On the Unread shelf I came across this book I have no memory of acquiring. Probably it originally caught my attention on a pass through a Daedalus catalogue — I can easily squander as much as an hour poking around in one of those and sometimes, after checking reviews at Amazon, even order a volume or three. That’s part of how I’ve wound up with all these books that, once I have them, I never find myself quite intrigued about enough to read.
In any case, this book was apparently a novel. The author’s name meant nothing particular to me, except inasmuch as it suggested someone female and foreign (possibly Slavic or at least Eastern European). For some reason, I didn’t read any of the information on the jacket, rather just removed it and left it on the shelf. (I find that jackets can get pretty badly beaten up in the backpack.)
So anyway, all I knew at the beginning of today’s reading session were the names of the book and the author.
Since then, I’ve read the first chapter, which is sixteen pages long and has left me fairly certain that I’m going to be at least reasonably happy about reading the remainder.
What I want to look at a little here is the specific aspects of those sixteen pages of (translated) prose that have caught my attention and steadily increased my interest and investment. I don’t remember having ever been quite so conscious, in reading the first chapter of a new author and work, of just what it is that’s hooking me on the content and motivating me to move forward, following the story with increasing curiosity and deepening investment.
Very likely part of why this consciousness is more front-of-mind than ever before is precisely because I’ve for these past few months been writing these Substack pieces, in each of which I’m more or less intensely focused on one or more aspects of Story.
So now, in no particular order, the aspects of Chapter One that hooked me:
The Sinister
We have a dead human, and we don’t yet know how the human died.
I’m one of the millions (conservatively) of people these days who are pretty profoundly hooked on stories about crime, and particularly violent crime. Whodunnit? and Will They Get Away With It? are highly effective adhesives, for me as for so many of my fellow humans.
In the book, there’s also a possibility that someone is killing not only wild animals in the neighborhood but pets as well, including two dogs lovingly attached to our narrator who have disappeared; and while I often enough find the deaths of nonhuman animals in fiction at least as distressing as those of certain fictional humans, there’s also a hook there: I want whoever is killing the dogs and cats to be <caught/exposed/punished>, and the hope that this will happen is an element that deepens my investment.
The Uncanny
Our first-person narrator, an older woman possibly about my own age, is evidently significantly plugged into astrology. It’s normal with her to make surmises about Signs and Houses and Traits, etc. In the Real World, I no more believe in any effect of planets and stars (excepting our own local star) upon us (except by way of psychologically self-fulfilling prophecy) than I believe in literal magic, be it White Witchery or Satanic Sorcery or Supernatural Druidism. In fiction, on the other hand, such elements can be fascinating and highly evocative (not to mention beautiful and/or terrifying), and every bit as acceptable as white rabbits who speak English or tornadoes that transplant people (and their little dogs, too) to other realms or the One Ring for which Sauron lusts. There are strong reasons why my species has developed the extraordinary powers of imagination we now possess, and just because an entity or narrative is primarily imaginal rather than literal doesn’t at all mean that it’s incapable of great power, value, and indeed truth. As a final note on this: There are evidently strong evolutionary reasons why we all must dream practically every night, whether we remember the dreams or not; and our dreams are very frequently (if not indeed predominantly) fictive, and often downright impossible to replicate in the waking world — and yet they are intrinsic elements in our remaining alive and well.
Winter in the Country
From early on we begin to learn that the wider local setting of this opening action is a sparsely populated stretch of night-shrouded winter countryside, where private cottages are scattered over the landscape. It’s dark outside, and there is snow on the hard-frozen ground. I grew up in an early-twentieth-century house on a residential street in a Midwestern city, but nearly all of the relatives we spent much time with lived on farms, and I passed significant portions of my childhood summers traveling and camping by car and trailer with my immediate family, especially in the USAyan West and particularly in the Colorado and Wyoming Rocky Mountains, with a sort of annual home base in Yellowstone National Park (where we always parked the trailer in the campground at Fishing Bridge). So I have a feel for being away from the city, and for snowy winters, and for the lightened darkness of a snow-carpeted night without streetlights or other people nearby; and probably my reactions to those elements in stories are only enhanced by their being, while familiar, mostly not aspects of my own day-to-day life. (The exception is the snow, inasmuch as I grew up with snowy winters in Northern Illinois; but then snow in and of itself has always been a big thing for me, a magical thing, the climate feature I miss most in my latter life here in Seattle where snow rarely comes down and even more rarely sticks around. Snow is mysterious, and enchanting, and never more so than at night in the country or in the wild.)
Human Complexity
Our narrator gives away a lot about herself right from the top. I’m attracted to her openness and straight talk, as well as to the complexity and wide-rangingness of her thought, but I wasn’t sure at first how well I’d get along with her over the long haul. She seems both deeply and sharply critical (of other humans as well as of herself) in a wide variety of ways, and it seems pretty clear very early on that she’s a species of misanthrope. [It’s been so long since I last applied that word that I dropped out for a moment to look it up. But the first definition I found will do: “a person who dislikes humankind and avoids human society”.] Certainly this woman seems to live alone, in her solitary cottage way out here in the country — way out here under the eaves of the forest. On the other hand, by the time I got through page sixteen I’d also seen her working (at close quarters and in fairly distressing conditions) under the direction of another person, and felt and respected her appreciation of and gratitude for his intelligence and humanity and situational capability.
Compassion
Well before the end of the sixteen pages, it was clear to me that this woman (who seems more likely than not to be my guide through the whole tale) has a deep feeling for nonhuman animals, and in particular a very sensitive trigger for their suffering. In these first pages, this arises most clearly in relation to deer and dogs; but with a universal caritas for all feeling beings, human and non-, forming the moral taproot of my own personal, entirely nonsupernatural religion, it gave me a powerful connection with our narrator. I think that it may be true for her, as it is for me, that empathy for nonhuman animals often gets accessed more easily and more, I dunno, purely, than empathy for the human sort. I find that I am much more critical of Human beings than of any other sort, and particularly of any human being that it seems to me ought to have ‘known better’ than to do whatever offensive thing they’ve done (or are now doing or tempted to do). I expect that at least one of the reasons for this differential is that humans who are doing foolish or evil things remind me too much of my own actual and potential uglinesses. I see more of my own ugly reflection in the mirrors they provide than in those provided by dogs or cats or chickens or sheep. To put all of that another way, I suspect that our narrator is all the more likely to criticize others harshly because she begins by harshly criticizing herself. Often people who have withdrawn from human society are self-damning as well as other-damning. I find myself wondering whether that might change over the course of the story: will I find her more forgiving of humans in the last chapter than I do in the first? This is particularly pertinent because the central event of the first chapter is the discovery by our narrator, in company with an older male neighbor she nicknames Oddball, of a third neighbor dead in his own cottage. This third, deceased neighbor (for whom her nickname is Big Foot) is one that our narrator pretty thoroughly abhors, particularly because of his cruelty to animals, including the wild ones (deer among them) that he hunts and traps and his own pathetic, seriously abused dog. In fact she suspects this man of having killed her own dogs, the two who are missing.
Nuance
It’s Oddball who rousts our narrator to go with him to check on Big Foot, who Oddball thinks (having looked in through a window in passing) may be lying dead in his own cottage. I never get the sense the Oddball has any particular liking or admiration for Big Foot, but it’s clearly deep in his nature to feel that everyone deserves to be treated decently, and certainly that anyone who has died alone has a claim on their neighbors for the respectful handling of their remains and the civilized closing-out of their story. I get the strong sense that our narrator is of two minds about all that, and physically repulsed besides by the corpse of a man against whom she has harbored considerable suspicion and animus; but she accedes to Oddball’s view sufficiently to assist him in decently re-clothing the half-dressed corpse and laying it out on the bed, and is evidently grateful to him for undertaking the leader rôle in all that unpleasant work
What might any of us learn about themself by taking a close look at why they like the books they like best (and why they actively or even passionately dislike certain others)?
It won’t surprise any reader of my immediately previous post to learn that I’ve just recently finished one of my periodic re-readings of Tolkien’s Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. Those four volumes have been bedded deep in the heart of my Life Library for more than half a century — and what does that tell me about me? Where are the deepest resonances of that connection in my increasingly elderly soul?
One that comes up right away (and it’s not a new thought, indeed quite an old one by now) is that, at bottom, each of Tolkien’s two tales is an entirely serious one.
Now understand: by ‘serious’ I don’t mean that there’s no humor — not at all. There’s a lot of humor (though admittedly less and less of it as the pages of either book go by and the struggles get more and more dire); but the humor never obscures the reality that the final stakes are terrifyingly high, even in The Hobbit and profoundly more so in LoTR, where the freedom and happiness of every vulnerable mortal being in Middle Earth is under existential threaten from Sauron’s malevolent ambition.
And when I look at the other novels on my very top shelf, all of them are what I would call essentially serious — are tales that somehow really matter — including even, for example, almost all of the mature novels of Jane Austen, where the comedy is often sparklingly brilliant, but where the wellbeing and happiness of our heroes (female and male) nonetheless matter very much to us.* High comedy is an element in most of Austen’s work, but high comedy only scores the higher (with me at least) if I find myself emotionally invested in the people and their world.
I suppose the edge-case here links back to my too-often-mentioned affinity for tragedy. Tragedy is famously and indubitably a downer, as well as being intrinsically frightening, and a lot of this world we live in nowadays prefers its entertainments powerfully diverting but never seriously distressing. But for me, preparing us to be able to look directly at reality — at all of reality — is a central aspect of what Story is for, and it seems to me that the human who has not dealt with virtual catastrophe and virtual evil is less likely to be well equipped to deal with the real articles when they arrive. And then there is the profound and idiosyncratic beauty of tragedy, which can only be apprehended by one willing to submit to tragedy’s hard discipline, and which can lead to the awareness that the full experience of beauty entails the apprehension of the whole tapestry of reality and existence. Returning yet again to that Sondheim lyric:
Pretty isn’t beautiful, Mother.
Pretty is what changes.
What the eye arranges
is what is beautiful.
Or (in my far less elegant gloss):
Beauty isn’t pleasant superficial attractiveness, but rather the experience of deep perception and comprehension.
So there. A ramble of loosely related personal notes for your <consideration/delectation>.
Until next time, happy <reading/viewing/audiencing> wherever you may roam.
* Of the six novels traditionally regarded as Austen’s mature works, the only one I don’t experience as ‘essentially serious’ in the sense that I mean here is Northanger Abbey, where the pervasiveness of obvious satire and heavy artifice kept me at arm’s length from any substantial caring for or identification with any of the characters. For me it was no more than a pleasant enough way to pass a few hours. If you’re looking to be diverted without ever being particularly moved, then this one may be just the Austen for you. But I never felt particularly invested, and I’ve never been tempted to go back and give the book a second try, whereas I’ve read each of the other five at least two or three times.
If you want my personal ranking of those other five books, here’s the current version as of this very moment:
Emma
Sense and Sensibility
Pride and Prejudice
Mansfield Park
Persuasion.
If on the other hand you want to know my very favorite Austen screen adaptation of all time, that would be the 1995 feature-length Persuasion, starring the astonishing Amanda Root and brilliantly directed by Roger Michell. For my palate, it’s the most truly ‘Austenian’ of all — though followed very closely by the celebrated 1995 Pride and Prejudice miniseries starring Colin Firth and the wonderful Jennifer Ehle.