Nicole Krauss – Great House

A RIDDLE: A Stone is thrown in Budapest on a winter night in 1944. It sails through the air toward the illuminated window of a house where a father is writing a letter at his desk, a mother is reading, and a boy is daydreaming about an ice-skating race on the frozen Danube. The glass shatters, the boy covers his head, the mother screams. At that moment the life they know ceases to exist. Where does the stone land?

Nicole Krauss’ 2010 novel, Great House, is my favorite among those I read last year. It’s a marvel, a work layered in four first person narratives that glance off of one another, ever so tangentially, as they loosely trace the life of an enormous desk, “really more like a ship than a desk, a ship riding a pitch-black sea in the dead of a moonless night.” The four voices belong to a writer, a father, a husband, and a lover. Each carries a deeply nested and burdening truth that he or she must share. What Krauss allows them to do– pillow talk style — is unburthen so that the reader is both midwife and burial vault for their honesty. These are among the most captivating, intimate voices I have read.

The novel begins with Nadia, a writer who is deeply depressed at the loss of the desk she unconsciously associates with her modest success. Her self-awareness is acute, her self-appraisal frank. ”Something in me naturally migrated away from the fray, preferring the deliberate meaningfulness of fiction to unaccounted-for reality.” Nadia has inherited the desk from a poet she met briefly, a man leaving New York for his native Chile. Years later, she gives the desk to a young woman, Leah Weisz, and finds herself suddenly panicked and bereft. Nadia hurriedly leaves New York to search for the desk in Jerusalem.

The next story is that of the father, a man whose anguished love for his favorite son projects in a not so subtle fashion. When the old man’s wife dies, the beloved son, Dov, returns to Jerusalem and walks into the emotional firestorm maintained by his father. Krauss has created an exceptionally realistic first person account of a brutal and hardened older man’s stupefying resistance to the sensitive nature of his son, and to his own as well. This is a man who appears larger than life as he is fleshed out in towering monologue.

Suddenly I saw you as you were at the age of ten…Calling and calling to me because you thought you were lost. Guess what, my boy. I was there the whole time! Crouched behind a rock, a few meters up the cliff. That’s right, while you called, while you screamed out for me, believing yourself to be abandoned in the desert, I hid behind a rock patiently watching, like the ram that saved Isaac. I was Abraham and the ram. How many minutes passed while I let you shit in your pants, a ten-year-old boy facing his smallness and helplessness, the nightmare of his utter aloneness, I don’t know.

Following these two intense narrators are another two, every bit as profound, just as deliciously readable. First is a widower, a man bereaved by the recent death of his wife, Lotte. He mourns not only the loss of his wife, but the complicated secrets of her existence. Finally there is Isabel, an American studying at Oxford who falls in love with Yoav Weisz, brother of Leah. Isabel’s desire for Yoav lifts her out of her narrow life and into unexplored terrain, “because of what I knew he could ignite in me, a vitality that was excruciating…”

Compared to what awaits within Great House, these words of praise here are pale indeed. Krauss is a writer who pours flesh and blood into her characters, places them on the pillow next to yours, and lets them spill their hearts.

Maybe you sense that I am coming to the end, that the story that has been hurtling toward you from the start is about to turn the bend in the road and collide with you at last.

In the Old Testament book of Kings, Solomon seizes upon an interlude of peace to undertake construction of his Temple, the Great House, erected in a splendor of cedar and gold and dedicated to holding the ark of the covenant of the Lord. The ark, precious beyond measure, and so holy that even its caretakers were not allowed to look upon it, held the basics of faith, the words of Yahweh, etched by the human hands of Moses into tablets of stone. Words, thrown from stone to inhabit human history and move indelibly throughout lives. Words, the gold and cedar. Stories such as these– the Temple.

Moneyball (2011)

Come with me for a bit, let’s fall back slowly to un-see Moneyball. That’s right. Ideally, I’d take you along with me this way, beginning with last night’s audience reaction in my hometown theater, back to the meaty minutes within the film where its fulcrum is held, then further back to a sketch of the plot and characters. It would be like instant replay, only in reverse. Then, we’d zoom again and again to that brief bit of dialogue, the pivotal exchange that would have us both cheering inside and wanting to jump from our seats to punch the air. Yeah, I’m that enthused for this film and would give anything if such an approach would work. As it is, you will just have to see the film, and I’ll have to upend my thoughts, slow down, and take it from the top…

Moneyball takes place in the gritty urban setting of Oakland, a city dimmed just a bit in proximity to its shining neighbor. If director Bennett Miller had shown it, the glint of wealth and polish from San Francisco pouring across the bay with the late day sun might cause your eyes to burn. Wisely, Miller is a much more subtle and finer artist who makes no such comparison. In Moneyball’s Oakland, within the A’s clubhouse, the cheap fluorescent lighting and harsh paint of the club offices do enough to make sharper the distinction between a team with its small market payroll and that of the one who’s just handed it a drubbing, the ever flush Yankees. Much of the film takes place in the drab workings of the Oakland Coliseum, and you can practically smell the feet tramping the worn indoor-outdoor carpet as fading banners from the A’s glory days hold tenuously outside, testament to something that hasn’t been seen there in a while.

Moneyball begins in October 2001, and loss of the American League title to the Yankees weighs heavily upon Oakland’s general manager, Billy Beane, played by Brad Pitt. Beane is a man whose life has been shaped by a decision that he once made based upon numbers and whose ability to do his job is stifled by the lack of numbers representing team wealth. He’s in his forties, divorced, a manager who moans, “I hate losing more than I love winning.” He’s more anxious than superstitious, able to watch or listen to games only from the club weight room or his pickup truck. Pitt brings a depth and mystery to his characterization, a bit of off-kilter specialness that imbues his Beane with both a thinking person’s distance and a whiff of vulnerability. When he visits his daughter in the ultra sleek home of his ex-wife and her husband, there’s an almost imperceptible shift in his bearing that is more endearing than hundreds of sentimental screen moments in succession could ever be.

When he travels to Cleveland for some 2001 post-season trading, Beane meets a young assistant to the Indians’ general manager, the precise and articulate Peter Brand, played with wonderful freshness by Jonah Hill. Brand is recently graduated from Yale, with an economics degree and big ideas spoken credibly, if tentatively. Beane is so impressed with those ideas that he tells Brand, “pack your bags, Pete, I’ve just bought you from Cleveland.” Thus, the two men begin to reshuffle the 2002 Oakland team, looking far beyond the traditions of baseball to craft their lineup and, in the process, causing upset within the organization. Aaron Sorkin’s intelligent and witty screenplay cleanly propels the film with dialogue, pulling the audience along in the swoop of thought and play without once stooping to twist or manipulate.

It’s in the person of Billy Beane that Brad Pitt stretches into greatness. For me, he’s always been an uninteresting actor, his bland chiseling seemingly inhabited by nothing more than boredom, perhaps with his looks or celebrity. In Moneyball, he’s a person, a bit grizzled and weary, shadows crossing his face, ones that can’t be washed away by the fleeting nature of victory. It’s this central nugget of Beane’s character, the doubt and consideration, that’s delivered so well by Pitt more than halfway through the film when, in a few minutes of exchange with Peter Brand, Beane muses about the difference between the beige, forgettable nature of winning in professional sports, “the champagne, the money, the rings” — and what he wants it to mean. I could have kissed the screen.

If you are wishing for an easy feel-good film, one that fills you with a sense of triumph, you might shy away from Bennett Miller’s thoughtful release. But if you want to zig when zagging would be the comfortable choice, if you want to see a film about limits within the cults of money, success, and personal achievement, and then so many other things that you will take the long way home just to think about them all, well then, don’t be the last dog at the bowl. Race for your chance to see Moneyball.

Falling from Solaris

There’s a whole lot that can be said about Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 film, Solaris, but I won’t spoil anything for you by doing that here. Let it be enough to say that if you are the least bit drawn to the wondrous, you will never wish back the three hours should you choose one day to check out this film. In fact, you may want to go there more than once, to that station in between our planet and the wild cosmic frontier, fetching new things with each trip out and back. It all depends on what you’re going after.

Solaris is a film all about the space in between. There upon that lonely outpost lurks the obstacle of reckoning with oneself and of wrestling alone with what is most important. Sometimes we need to be blasted into orbit for this. More often, this unique cosmos flickers around us in the everyday. Like Tarkovsky’s character, Kris, some of us are always peeking into closets from where the desideratum beckons. Like him me, sometimes we come out from those corners empty and covered in smudges when instead we sought to reach in to embrace what we most cherish.

On Solaris, the susceptible traveler, Kris, is met and confounded by what I can only express as his heart’s deepest wish, a state he’s been unable to find amid the clamor of his life and work. What Kris finds and how it changes him is for the viewer’s delight. I can’t spoil that for you, remember?

Of course, discovery happens here on Earth all the time, smack dab in the mess and junk. On a planet where men and women can find it agonizing to talk with each other, you made intimate conversation easy. In a world where the sum of people becomes absurdly reduced to their parts, I observed your dignity and allowed you that same view. In what is forever an upside down, scrambled universe filled with defended posing, I lit up for you, and you instantly got who I am. I’ve come back from the encounter a bit bleary.

So, here is where we spin out, S., into that distant borderland, a space where the fine and natural breathe and exchange their own oxygen in balance. A place where the essential me and the rightful you whirl in elemental form. On that Solaris, I’m just now placing the finishing touches on a sandwich made especially for you, and it’s the best you’ve ever had because, alongside the grilled cheese, I’m dishing up myself. And it is enough…

Meanwhile, back on Earth, the words “love go with you—” fly from me into the reach confining us all. Those words weightless, infinite.

The Woman Who Waited – Andreï Makine

One of my cherished keepsakes is a small, handmade kaleidoscope purchased years ago from an artisan’s shop in Colorado. It’s a simple affair, a roughly imperfect and very bubbly green marble tethered by a thin wire to the end of a triangular, glass-lined tube. From the outside, it doesn’t look like much…

Months and even years may pass between the moments when I pick up the kaleidoscope for a short visit. Always, of course, I hold the scope into light and manipulate the marble to create new patterns, and this makes me smile because, after all, the purpose of a kaleidoscope is nothing but a glimpse back at the viewer’s unique and private eyeful. The only thing a kaleidoscope can produce is reaction, either the dismissal or delight of such minuscule events.

A good novel brings much the same effect, that of holding a slice of life in mutable relief, inviting the reader to turn the marble of perception and consider the patterns that are revealed. The French writer Andreï Makine’s 2004 work, La Femme qui attendait or The Woman Who Waited, casts this kaleidoscope effect brilliantly.

Outwardly, The Woman Who Waited might appear to be an overly romanticized story, that of a young man who sets forth to write a satire about the lives and customs of small town folk and finds himself in thrall to a middle-aged woman who has placed herself on the shelf waiting for… someone, or is it something?

The narrator,  a young man of sardonic disposition, begins to closely follow the life of Vera, a middle-aged woman of no apparent exception, save the one, as she dwells within the northern Russian village of Mirnoe.  There she teaches children by day while in her spare time she befriends, cares for, and buries the old, forgotten women sprinkled in poverty throughout the village and surrounding woodlands. Vera is bound to her life amid the thatched roofs and tree-darkened doorways of her village. Makine uses the forest imagery to distinguish Vera’s environ from the cynicism of Brezhnev’s Moscow and the harsh world of the young sophisticate who finds himself drawn into the physical and emotional thicket of village living.

In Leningrad, at the Wigwam, we were forever making clear-cut distinctions between good and evil in the world. I knew the evil that had laid waste to these villages in the North was boundless. And yet never had the world appeared so beautiful to me…

Within this deceptively simple premise,  Makine wields muscular, clear language as translated by Geoffrey Strachan, vibrant prose that holds up and turns around for a look-see the lovely marble which is the emotional contradiction found in the act and art of waiting. The Woman Who Waited reveals the great variegation within what would appear to be a lonely woman’s existence, and it constantly surprises with challenges to the notion of waiting as simply a state of forbearance . The expressions of delicacy and exoticism in Vera’s suspended animation, along with those of the narrator, himself yielding to knowledge of his new friend, cart-wheel before the reader in an athletic display that welcomes the incongruity of slow, close reading. Yet, Makine never plows the reader with sentiment.

But life, easy-going life, caring little for elegance, is nothing more than a constant mixture of genres.

Makine’s ability to access the fluctuating inner life of his characters is profound. He writes into and around Vera and the nameless man, charging them equally with the sense of both the quiescence and the purpose found in waiting.

In the boat she took one oar, leaving the other for me… Our rhythms were quickly matched. Each effort made by the other felt like a response to one’s own, down to the slightest tensing of the muscles. We touched shoulders but our real closeness was in this slow, rhythmic action, the care we took to wait for each other, pulling together once more after too powerful a stroke or the skipping of a blade over the crest of a wave…We were quite simply there, side by side, amid the somnolent hissing of the rain, in a dusk as cool as fish scales…

The French philosopher Michel Foucault once wrote, “Waiting is directed at nothing: any object that could gratify it would only efface it. Still, it is not confined to one place, it is not a resigned immobility; it has the endurance of a movement that will never end and would never promise itself the reward of rest…”

For a reader, The Woman Who Waited is like that beautiful, rough marble at the end of the long tube. Read the book, turn the marble, let the kaleidoscope come in.

The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey

Last winter, I met up with a snail at the fringes of an oatmeal packet. It happened just like this: early one desperately cold morning, a brain teaser from the instant oats papers caught my eye as I stood, sleepy headed, in a thin gown waiting for breakfast to cool. The cereal sleeve read, Q: Which garden creature can sleep for three years? A: the snail. I felt suddenly and warmly touched by the notion of such a small, vulnerable thing bedding down for so long, instinctively knowing that all would be well upon return. For a moment, I wished to be just as deeply slept. That morning began what’s become a slight fascination with the ancient forest dweller who chews through my hosta leaves each summer and whom I can never bring myself to banish with home remedies or harsh treatment.

Forward then to last Sunday, a merciless July day that resulted in my first ever drive to Iowa City and the iconic Prairie Lights Bookstore. After an hour or so of inspired browsing, parking meter and budget constraints forced me to get serious about one or two titles. That’s when I spied the cover of Elisabeth Tova Bailey’s The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, shyly posed on the staff picks shelf. I almost tripped in delight as I dove to pick it up. Who wouldn’t?

Bailey’s ode to the snail begins briefly recounting an illness, her own, and with it her harrowing removal from the activities of her well ordered life into forced recumbency within a sickroom. She addresses the malady and its course with grace such that her eye, and the reader’s, remains upon the gastropod who is lovingly plucked by a friend from the woods just outside her home and gifted within a pot of field violets.

These field violets in the pot at my bedside were fresh and full of life, unlike the usual cut flowers brought by other friends. Those lasted just a few days, leaving murky, odiferous vase water…But what about this snail? What would I do with it? As tiny as it was, it had been going about its day when it was picked up. What right did my friend  and I have to disrupt its life?

The disrupted life is at the heart of Bailey’s meditation upon her snail. What happens to us when things happen? Can we “love the questions”, as the poet Rilke suggests, or is there shrinking and defending afoot whenever change and uncertainty are about. Through Bailey’s thoughtful words, the life of the woodland snail provides a small template for contemplation of our larger animal selves. Snails possess so much more than their slimy reputation suggests. They have a heart, a lung, rudimentary eyes, and a sleep-wake rhythm that normally occurs within the same 24 hours as ours, though it’s true they can sleep for years. They meet disruption with slow and careful tentacles, feeling and sensing in a beautiful proportion that allows for sure footed balance.

Bailey sprinkles numerous poetic, scientific, and literary references to the snail, from the ancient Mandarin Chinese to Darwin, from mollusc experts to Emily Dickinson, all people who have thought and written about the nature of snail explorations, their architecture, slimy abilities, and their social graces.  Snails, I am just finding out, know where they are and what they are about. Though they do use some defenses, their tactics are more in line with some of my own such as hiding when the sun is too hot and cherishing a good portobello mushroom in small bites.

Then, there’s that special connection snails enjoy…

A romantic encounter between a pair of snails can take up to seven hours from start to finish and involves three phases. First there is the lengthy courtship, in which the snails draw slowly closer, often circling each other, smooching, and exchanging tentacle touches…In the second phase, the snails embrace in a spiral direction and mate…Consummation is followed by the last phase, resting; the snails, still quite near each other, both withdraw into their shells and remain immobile, sometimes for several hours.

This lovely book about the little snail traveled with me this week to Chicago and helped me to keep perspective and smile at passersby while shepherding two teenagers through the urban landscape. Snail and The City, anyone? Truth is, I would recommend this immensely charming book for just about anyone, anywhere. Who needs a noise machine, a chemical habit, or satin eye shades when there is some time to be spent unwinding with a woodland snail?

Marauder by ono no komachi courtesy of Flickr