my life to live

love me a flowchart

Loved it

(On another note, I’ll be seeing Jennifer Egan, and a few other authors, speak this fall at the Philadelphia Public Library.  Woohoo!)

I was thinking about this book for some reason today.  I read it in college.  I found it to be a surprising sort of page-turner—surprising in that it’s doesn’t exactly have a suspenseful, action-packed plot to propel you through its pages.  Rather, I found its central characters oddly endearing.  I wanted to know what happened to them, and I kept reading out of the same impulse that might lead you to, say, Facebook stalk that intriguing friend-of-a-friend who came to visit one weekend.  The same impulse that explains why you still have that one friend’s number in your cell phone, even though you haven’t spoken to them since college and they probably don’t even have that number anymore.  

The other reason I kept reading the book was because I think it helped me understand a little bit of my heritage.  My family has scarcely been in this country for a century; my great-grandparents, like so many other Russian Jews, fled the Pale of Settlement in 1912 for what I’m assuming would have been a more welcoming environment.  As a child, all I knew of their way of life was piecemeal—we had their samovar sitting on our coffee table, some stories from my grandfather, and some sepia-toned photos of dour-faced, swarthy individuals looking as Old World as can be in their dark, draped clothing.  I used to take in these items and look at my grandfather, who loved watching game shows and drinking Seagram’s, and my father, who could not have been more Midwestern white-bread middle-class, and wonder—when did it stop being important?  In that I mean, at what point along the way did all that heritage get left behind?  Being Jewish was clearly something so dear to the identity of my great-grandparents that it must have partially inspired them to pack up and move halfway across the world; cut to a only few decades later, and my father can speak barely a lick of Hebrew/Yiddish/Russian.  We assume we may have relatives in Russia somewhere, but we don’t even know from which town our ancestors left.   

Maybe this is something which will mark a generational divide—this inability to grasp the concept of certain important pieces of information being lost to time and not being automatically archived for later use in some data cloud.  Either way, I’ve always been fascinated by the assimilation process, and I think this book maybe helped me visualize how that unfolds over time. 

zachklein:

Wanderer above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich.

This was totally on the cover of one of my Norton Anthologies from college  

Well, this book just blew me away.  Now I want to read the second one.  

Sometimes I separate contemporary writers into two categories.  You have the ones who make it appear effortless and who make you think that perhaps writing, and writing well, is something achievable.  I put people like Ernest Hemingway, Joan Didion, and J.D. Salinger in this box.   Of course, you could try to emulate Hemingway/Didion/Salinger/et. al. all day long and never come up with anything approaching their level, but you still try.  

Then you have folks like A.S. Byatt—and yes, Margaret Atwood—whose novels are just these incredibly well-realized, painstakingly crafted texts, and you just can’t help but think of all the hours and sleepless nights spent poring over such things that it’s just exhausting to think about, but a pleasure to marvel over.  It’s not always a matter of minimalism vs. maximalism—I would put Cormac McCarthy in this category as well, for his almost supernatural flair for diction.  If you have literary aspirations at all, these are the writers whose books just leave you with a major inferiority complex.  

Anyway, the novel.  I feel like I’ve read quite a few apocalyptic/dystopian sci fi/speculative fiction in the past year or two.  Just noting.  I think the themes in this one were more resonant than most, but perhaps that’s just because it’s more current.  I think one criticism I would have of the novel is that I did find the character of Oryx to be disappointing and unrealistic—straight up Manic Pixie Dream Girl/Hooker With a Heart of Gold territory, which would be expected out of male writer but a HUGE letdown from a female writer, who should know better!  But perhaps this was intentional—Atwood has more than enough I Know How to Write Females points from The Handmaid’s Tale and Cat’s Eye, and this one was written from a male point of view, so…

Anyway, have any of you read this?  What did you think?  What about the sequel—is it worth it?  

Reading this book as a (not so) brief break from the Pulitzers. You should be my friend on GoodReads! Something I miss about being in college is talking about a book or a story for hours on end in English or Creative Writing courses. I don’t really have time for a book club, so this is the best I can get…