“Why read otherwise?”

Tags

Books About Books, Essays, Excerpts

“The opportunity to single out a book that ‘changed my life,’” says Billy Collins, “makes me realize that no book leaves us unchanged, for better or worse. Why read otherwise?”

Subtitled “71 Remarkable Writers Celebrate the Books that Matter Most to Them,” The Book that Changed my Life, brain-child of bookstore owner Roxanne J. Coady collects testimonials from the writers who frequent her shop about the books that, well, changed their life. Little impacts, or irrevocably sea-changes, and all-around book love.

“Every book I read changes me in some way, which is the very reason I read, and why books matter. But not every book has changed my life; not every book has that power, not every author that skill.” — Lisa Scottoline

The anecdotes range from the practical to the humorous, the casual to the profound. For some reason, your Senator John McCain is in these pages, and there’s this really touching anecdote of how he came to love For Whom the Bell Tolls. Da Chen’s tender-and-brave story, for example, about growing up in Communist China had me sniffling a little—a village who copied out books because there was never the certainty of keeping a volume, people crowding around the best storyteller, an ex-convict as the librarian, the same tough guy who fell apart when officers burned all his books.

I don’t know all the writers within these pages, nor all the books. But there’s that easy-to-recognize love of the written word. Ah, this peculiar kindredness—the love of books drawing people together. [Yes, I draft this with rum in my belly.]

And, of course, I had a notebook handy to write down some of the books mentioned within these pages. Reading Begets Reading: Ida, by Gertrude Stein; The End of the Road, by John Barth; The Denial of Death, by Ernest Becker. And I’ve been reminded that I ought to go back to Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, and Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus. And it might interest you to know that Anne Perry’s pice on The Man Who Was Thursday had me getting a copy. Oh, hell.

I bought The Book that Changed My Life (PhP300) years ago. In the bargain bin of NBS-Katipunan. No, seriously, years ago. I think I was still in college, huh.

Why, Indeed?

Tags

Books About Books, Essays, Excerpts, Italo Calvino, Martin McLaughlin, Translation

Doing more reading of the Classics as I have been lately, it seemed only right that I pick up Why Read the Classics? by Italo Calvino [translated by Martin McLaughlin]—and not so much because I needed to convince myself that there really was something good with all my befuddlement and the near-constant-feeling-of-being-out-of-place of late.

Key to the book is Calvino’s title essay that sought to define what exactly a classic was—and it’s a complex definition, developed before the reader’s eyes, or written to give the impression that the writer was still working it out for himself.

I know that in the next couple of months, give or take, I’ll be referencing to Calvino’s definitions, and add to them, disagree with them—basically, modify them as I see fit. I mean, if Calvino showed me how fluid the very act of defining was, has he not already extended me the freedom to take on the process myself? So. Here’s one, for now:

Classics are the books which, the more we think we know them through hearsay, the more original, unexpected, and innovative we find them when we actually read them.

Of course this happens when a classic “text” works as a classic, that is, when it establishes a personal relationship with the reader. If there is no spark, the exercise is pointless: it is no use reading the classics out of a sense of duty or respect, we should only read them for love.

How many times have I heard about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby? A number of people hate its guts because it was required reading for most American high schools. My darling Richard Yates (who’s birthday-ing tomorrow, if, er, he were alive) counts it among his favorites, and was an influence while he was writing his first novel. But then I read it, and I loved it, and even now [as I smugly look at it on my shelf], I am all a-tremble by how glorious it was to me. What a revelation, this book.

What else? A Study in Scarlet, Arthur Conan Doyle debuting Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. And here, I thought the book would be starchy—and I’d lived with the Disney-fied version of Holmes most of my life. But man, it was genius. And I only thought “Man, if DNA and finger-printing were around then—” just once!

I think it’s the same with most books. Hearsay, that particular pick-it-up-dammit compulsion, and the subsequent revelations upon actual reading. Classics, however, create more discourse—or, more accurately, Classics come to us, dragging along shadows of decades [even centuries] of discourse.

But with all books come revelations. Some good, some bad; some will allow you to look at, say, a tree a different way every Thursday; some might just irrevocably alter your life.

I do have a question about that second point of Calvino’s, a question directed to the rest of humanity. I mean, why pick up a book at all, if there’s no spark? Why pick up anything at all if it doesn’t come with that little whisper of potential awesomeness?

Also. Even in duty, there’s this thrill, this anticipation—this hope of finding something within the pages that would become elemental to one’s being, or at the very least, have one gasp once or twice. Duty can be fun—not always, dammit, but it can be.

Perhaps I just damned my Lit-class-dorkus self with that statement right there, and let me cement my high school loser status with this one:

Reading the classics out of a sense of duty or respect bears fruit to endless possibilities, among them, lifelong hatred, acute boredom, or, if you’re lucky, abiding love. The kind of love that’ll inspire you to prattle on and on and on in a cobwebby corner of this being called the Internetz.

One restless night in Katipunan Avenue months ago, I panic-bought Why Read the Classics? [as well as heaps of Post-Its] from National Bookstore. It was a crazy day.

“The first thing that reading teaches us is how to be alone.”

Tags

Books About Books, Depression, Essays, Excerpts, Jonathan Franzen

Note: The following post shall be more of depository for random oohs and aahs and quotables than anything else. So, if you want the summary: Yes, I liked this book a lot. Hee.

“The first thing,” the author writes, “that reading teaches us is how to be alone.” To be alone. To read. To get lost in a book, purposefully or unconsciously. “Readers and writers are united in their need for solitude, in the pursuit of substance in a time of ever-increasing evanescence: in their reach inward, via print, for a way out of loneliness.”

I suppose I can safely say that I like Jonathan Franzen a lot. There was a time that wasn’t cool, but bah. His chunkster The Corrections swept me away, and I’m waiting for the right alignment of the planets before I get into Freedom. It was while I was reading The Corrections that I got myself his books of essays How to Be Alone [in my post about the former, I also discussed the essay “My Father’s Brain,” which shed a lot of insight into the narrative, the characters, the whole meat of the novel].

[Ah, The Corrections. How difficult it was for him to get over that book. Not only with the daunting task of having to follow it up -- but, well, how its acclaim resonated too long and too intensely, and how it crippled him. He seems so haunted by the success of that novel. A lot of these essays feel like he’s taking deep, calming breaths. And I know now, with the praise heaped upon Freedom, that I’m genuinely happy for the guy.]

The essays are so Franzen-esque. I don’t know what that means, really, it’s just that it’s right that he wrote those essays the same way that it was right that his fiction, to me, is so awesome. So. The essays cover a wide range of subjects: politics, sociology, culture, history, literature. I was particularly curious about his views on that last one — on the reading and writing of literature. I wanted to know if his poetics were as complex and meaty and true as his fiction was, or whether it would be spare, to-the-point, firm. I wanted to know if his essays would make gasp and giggle and scratch my head and curse the way his novel did. I just really wanted to know more about Jonathan Franzen.

* * *

“How could I not feel estranged? I was a reader,” Franzen says. “My nature had been waiting for me all along, and now it welcomed me. All of a sudden I became aware of how very hungry I was to construct and inhabit an imagined world. How could I have thought that I needed to cure myself in order to fit into the “real” world? I didn’t need curing, and the world didn’t, either; the only thing that did need curing was my understanding of my place in it. Without that understanding — without a sense of belonging to the real world — it was impossible to thrive in an imagined one.” Ah, but I sought a cure. Depression was an impediment to living. It’s a draining of the ability to care that I possessed in me an impediment to living. Perhaps it’s more selfish, more trivial — that I sought a cure because, as much as I would like to, I do not just read and write through life.

How open he is about his depression — first, how central it is to his The Corrections, and now, in his essays, how seamlessly he weaves the presence of that black dog in his life into his literature. Brave enough to put it in fiction, admirable still, from this viewpoint, to write about it under the contract of “Dear Reader, this is all true.” See:

Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular. But the realism is merely a mask for depression’s actual essence, which is an overwhelming estrangement from humanity. The more persuaded you are of your unique access to the rottenness, the more afraid you become of engaging with the world; and the less you engage with the world, the more perfidiously happy-faced the rest of humanity seems for continuing to engage with it.

Writers and readers have always been prone to this estrangement. Communion with the virtual community of print requires solitude, after all. But the estrangement becomes much more profound, urgent, and dangerous when that virtual community is no longer densely populated and heavily trafficked; when the saving continuity of literature itself is under electronic and academic assault; when your alienation become generic rather than individual, and the business pages seem to report on the world’s conspiracy to grandfather not only you but all your kind, and the price of silence seems no longer to be obscurity but outright oblivion.

I hope you are well, Mr. Franzen.

* * *

I know that what I like best about Franzen is how in love he is with the art, how much he respects it. And, well, how strongly I agree with his views on the subject: “Fiction is the most fundamental human art. Fiction is storytelling, and our reality arguably consists of the stories we tell about ourselves.” And also: “Fiction, I believed, was the transmutation of experiential dross into linguistic gold. Fiction meant taking up whatever the world had abandoned by the road and making something beautiful out of it.” Writing is serious business with this guy. I love him all the more for that.

His appeals speak of this: To write sentences of such authenticity that refuge can be taken in them: Isn’t this enough? Isn’t this a lot? Why write fiction? Why bother, indeed? Who cares anyway? And even as we ask this, why do we feel that there is so much at stake? Why read it?

[Don de Lillo and Franzen are penpals. Great. In a letter to Franzen, de Lillo wrote: “Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals.”]

* * *

Franzen distinguishes between the Status Model and the Contract Model of literature — particularly, fiction — that is, how the text relates to its audience, as manipulated by the author. So, basically, the relationship between writer and reader through the written word.

The Status Model, where: “the best novels are great works of art, the people who manage to write them deserve extraordinary credit, and if the average reader rejects the work it’s because the average reader is a philistine; the value of any novel exists independently of whether people are able to enjoy it . . . it invites a discourse of genius and historical importance.”

Meanwhile, the Contract Model, where: “the novel represents a compact between the reader and the writer, with the writer providing words out of which the reader creates a pleasurable experience. Writing this entails a balancing of self-expression and communication within a group . . . Every writer is first a member of a community of readers, and the deepest purpose of reading and writing fiction is to sustain a sense of connectedness, to resist existential loneliness; and so a novel deserves a reader’s attention only as long as the author sustains the reader’s trust . . . The discourse here is one of pleasure and connection.”

Franzen is quick to say that these models are highly subjective, and that there are books that straddle both types — both a work of art and a deeply personal experience.

Franzen is both. For a writer to tell you, “Think of the novel as a lover: Let’s stay home tonight and have a great time, just because you’re touched where you want to be touched, it doesn’t mean you’re cheap; before a book can change you, you have to love it,” and for you to experience the embodiment of these words first-hand — the application of that belief, of his poetics — wouldn’t you attest, however sheepishly, I suppose I can safely say that I like Jonathan Franzen a lot.

As much as I can allow myself on The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

Tags

Essays, Excerpts, Fiction - Novel, Jonathan Franzen

How is everyone? [A perfunctory question. Yes, I am self-involved this holiday season. And frantically tying bloggie loose ends.] Aherm.

Last Christmas Eve, if I wasn’t gorging myself with fruitcake or cram-wrapping children’s presents, I was thinking about how I could possibly talk about [that block of paper on top of that block of wood,] The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen.

It is very thick, rather yummy, and thus, rather a pain to write about. I finished reading it on the second day of the month, and since then, I’ve been agonizing about how to present a coherent — and not as word-vomit as I could manage — post on the book. My notes, of course, are a mess only I can make sense of, but can’t quite figure out how to share. I think I’ve written a informal book report already. And there is no way I can force that Dorkery on you guys. It’s Christmas-ish, after all. I lay off just a wee bit.

Oh, and in case I fail to make it clear: I loved this book. [Although it has be said: I will never forgive Franzen for describing somebody’s penis as “a faintly urinary dumpling” -- cripes, and I didn’t even have to run to my notes to look up that odious phrase.] Aherm. Yes. Here:

* * *

I think central to my notes on this chunkster is this: I am in love and in awe with Franzen’s investment in his characters. So much time, effort, patience, and pages — devoted to exploring his characters with no apparent aim but to, well, elaborate on them. To dissect them without the need to justify them. To complexify them even as archetypes are hinted at.

Of course, the characterizations will serve the author well when he sets up the bigger landscape: The Corrections is, basically, a story of family politics. And, as in all politics, there comes a shifting of roles, and with it, allegiances.

For example, as with all families [I hazard to generalize], the Lamberts are chock full of sorrows. Goddamn everyone’s sorrows, most of them secreted. And what’s particularly juicy and compelling is that when these are brought to light, it’s because one is in need of a weapon. Of course.

I mean, hello, given the inner life of Alfred Lambert? His loneliness, so at odds with his leonine stance in life: “He bowed his head at the thought of how much strength a man would need to survive an entire life so lonely.” This is something that shouldn’t be revealed. This is a weakness, not unlike love was something that should be hidden: “The odd truth was that love, for him, was a matter not of approaching but of keeping away.”

And so the use of these weapons isn’t always so blatant. Take the marriage of Enid and Alfred: at first glance, Enid is a mother hen, a nag; we encounter Alfred — the indomitable lion of a man, husband, father — debilitated, addled with the onset of Parkinson’s and dementia, his own body suddenly alien to him. Issues of control, how the body betrays.

You were outfitted as a boy with a will to fix things by yourself and with a respect for individual physical objects, but eventually, some of your internal hardware (including such mental hardware as this will and this respect) became obsolete, and so, even though many parts of you still functioned well, an argument could be made for junking the whole machine.

Which was another way of saying he was tired.

But with Alfred in particular, this means an alarming shift of power: an imbalance in favor of his long-suffering wife Enid, of the children. He’s not in control anymore, and his hold of that power characterized their marriage, the rearing of the children — reverberating to how those three led their lives.

With Enid. Then, “his work so satisfied him that he didn’t need her love, while her chores so bored her that she needed his love doubly.” And now: “Holding his hand she felt married and, to that extent, grounded in the universe and reconciled to old age, but she couldn’t help thinking how dearly she would have treasured holding his hand in the decades when he’d stridden everywhere a pace or two ahead of her. His hand was needy and subdued now.”

Enid loved him. Loved him too much: “Her life would have been easier is she hadn’t loved him so much, but she couldn’t help loving him. Just to look at him was to love him.” This was a love palpable even to their children. Artfully, Franzen notes that the youngest Denise, in utero, feels this: “She already knew the main hungers. Day after day the mother walked around in a stew of desire and guilt, and now the object of the mother’s desire lay three feet away from her. Everything in the mother was poised to melt and shut down at a loving touch anywhere on her body.”

* * *

There are two pivotal dinners in The Corrections: the first, a flashback, to The Dinner of Revenge, the second, the rather anti-climactic Christmas dinner [as Christmas has become a harried preoccupation for the Lamberts -- Enid wants everyone present; the children would rather stay away.

The Dinner of Revenge—how else can Enid fight back? The kitchen is her domain, and these is her ammunition. Here,  as felt by Chip Lambert:

Chipper trembled in the bathroom doorway. You encountered a misery near the end of the day and it took a while to gauge its full extent. Some miseries had sharp curvature and could be negotiated readily. Others had almost no curvature and you knew you’d be spending hours turning the corner. Great whipping-big planet-sized miseries. The Dinner of Revenge was one of these.

[I wish I can go on at length about the Dinner of Revenge -- I have such a soft spot for Alfred Lambert, and in these scenes, good lord, Franzen plugs him with so much humanity, the tips of my fingers hurt just thinking about it all. Sigh.]

It’s in the present, other dinners — we see those shifts in family politics. Here, from  Denise, a thought that would have been so blasphemous when she was younger:

Her father at the lunch table looked insane. And if he was losing his mind, it was possible that Enid had not been exaggerating her difficulties with him, possible that Alfred really was a mess who pulled himself together for his children, possible that Enid wasn’t entirely the embarrassing nag and pestilence that Denise for twenty years had made her out to be, possible that Alfred’s problems went deeper than having the wrong wife, possible that Enid’s problems did not go much deeper than having the wrong husband, possible that Denise was more like Enid that she had ever dreamed.

And so on, and so forth.

* * *

In his essay “My Father’s Brain,” from How to Be Alone, Franzen writes about his relationship with his father before and after the elder Franzen’s Alzheimer’s, and the relationship between his parents. Included in the essay is a letter from Jonathan Franzen’s mother, dated 1989:

It is extremely difficult living with a very unhappy person when you know you must be the major cause of the unhappiness. Decades ago when Dad told me he didn’t believe there is such a thing as love (that sex is a “trap”) and that he was not cut out to be a “happy” person I should have been smart enough to realize there was no hope for a relationship satisfactory to me. But I was busy & involved with my children and friends I loved and I guess, like Scarlett O’Hara, I told myself I would “worry about that tomorrow.”

I am giddy enough to note that a large part of The Corrections was wrought from real life. Of course, it has to come somewhere. But Franzen’s admissions — him citing scenes involving his mother and father, mirrored — sometimes the dialogue quoted verbatim — in his novel. In the essay, Franzen notes, too, the shift in roles between his mother and father:

For my mother, the losses of Alzheimer’s both amplified and reversed long-standing patterns in her marriage. My father had always refused to open himself to her, and now, increasingly, he couldn’t open himself. To my mother, he remained the same Earl Franzen napping in the den and failing to hear. She, paradoxically, was the one who slowly and surely lost her self, living with a man who mistook her for her mother, forgot every fact he’d ever known about her, and finally ceased to speak her name. He, who had always insisted on being the boss in the marriage, the maker of decisions, the adult protector of the childlike wife, now couldn’t help behaving like the child. Now the unseemly outbursts were his, not my mother’s Now she ferried him around town the way she’d once ferried me and my brothers. Task by task, she took charge of their life. And so, although my father’s “long illness” was a crushing strain and disappointment to her, it was also an opportunity to grow slowly into an autonomy she’d never been allowed: to settle some very old scores.

Which is also reflective of one of the most stirring [to me] passages in the novel, Enid looking upon her husband fiercely, to make up for those old scores:

. . . Enid couldn’t tolerate the least error. If he mistook her for her mother, she corrected him angrily: “Al, it’s me, Enid, your wife of forty-eight years.” If he mistook her for Denise, she used the very same words. She’d felt Wrong all her life and now she had a chance to tell him how Wrong he was. Even as she was loosening up and becoming less critical in other areas of life, she remained strictly vigilant at the Deepmire Home. She had to come and tell Alfred that he was wrong to dribble ice cream on his clean, freshly pressed pants. He was wrong not to recognize Joe Person when Joe was nice enough to drop in. He was wrong not to look at snapshots of Aaron and Caleb and Jonah. He was wrong not to be excited that Alison had given birth to two slightly underweight but healthy baby girls. He was wrong not to be happy or grateful or even remotely lucid when his wife and daughter went to enormous trouble to bring him home for Thanksgiving dinner. He was wrong to say, after that dinner, when they returned him to the Deepmire Home, “Better not to leave here than to have to come back.” He was wrong, if he could be so lucid as to produce a sentence like that, not to be lucid at any other time. He was wrong to attempt to hang himself with the bedsheets in the night. He was wrong to hurl himself against a window. He was wrong to try to slash his wrists with a dinner fork. Altogether he was wrong about so many things that, except for her four days in New York and her two Christmases in Philadelphia and her three weeks of recovery from hip surgery, she never failed to visit him. She had to tell him, while she still had time, how wrong he’d been and how right she’d been. How wrong not to love her more, how wrong not to cherish her and have sex at every opportunity, how wrong not to trust her financial instincts, how wrong to have spent so much time at work and so little with the children, how wrong to have been so negative, how wrong to have been so gloomy, how wrong to have run away from life, how wrong to have said no, again and again, instead of yes: she had to tell him all of this, every single day. Even if he wouldn’t listen, she had to tell him.

That’s awesome. No other word for it: awesome.

* * *

In his essay, “Meet Me in St. Louis,” Franzen describes The Corrections as “a family novel about three East Coast urban sophisticates who alternately long for and reject the heartland suburbs where their aged parents live.” I realize that most of this post concerns Enid and Alfred Lambert — those aged parents. The novel is about the Lambert brood — and, yes, there is much richness to be found in each of the three Lambert children — their successes and failures, the decisions they made to get where they were now, their loves, their families, their disappointments, their deceptive joys.

But I’m going to have to settle for Enid and Alfred for now. That is, I’m going to have to calm down and settle for sharing just Enid and Alfred for now.

Thank you, Universe, for your patience. [Please know that this post is like that proverbial thorn off my side.]

---

* Reading Begets Reading >> As mentioned above, I am making my way through Franzen’s collection of essays, How to Be Alone. And, of course, his much-hyped Freedom is waiting in the wings. I don’t much care about the hype messing it up for me. I mean, y’all know that I only marked as To-Read all them Freedom posts. I think I only read Charles Baxter’s review, and this was when the book wasn’t even released yet. And since I trust Charles Baxter’s views on literature, I let that give me permission to indulge in Franzen. So, yeah. Sometime within January, I guess?

And, yes, you can totally skip that review.

“. . . be a crowd unto yourself—”

Tags

Classics, Essays, Excerpts, Michel de Montaigne

[beautiful artwork by M. Lewandowski]

♦ “. . . it is not enough to withdraw from the mob, not enough to go to another place: we have to withdraw from such attributes of the mobs as are within us. It is our own self we have to isolate and take back into possession . . . We take our fetters with us; our freedom is not total: we still turn our gaze towards the things we have left behind; our imagination is full of them.”

♦ “We have a soul able to turn in on itself she can keep herself company; she has the wherewithal to attack, to defend, to receive and to give. Let us not fear that in such a solitude as that we shall be crouching in painful idleness: in solis sis tibi turba locis [in lonely places, be a crowd unto yourself].”

— From “On Solitude” by Michel de Montaigne.

A call for an “abiding uncertainty” — On A Plea for Eros by Siri Hustvedt

Tags

Books About Books, Essays, Excerpts, Siri Hustvedt

Where does the need to write come from? What is it? It is a need, not a choice — it’s giving way and a giving up.

As I mentioned elsewhere, I have reunited with Siri Hustvedt, c/o her collection of essays, A Plea for Eros. Another favorite writer — I’ve read all of her novels [her What I Loved still blows me away whenever I think about it] except one, and this is my first foray into her nonfiction [I’m particularly hungering for her essays on art, Mysteries of the Rectangle, which I can’t find locally].

I am, quite obviously, a fan. Know, too, that I might just name a [theoretical] daughter Siri. It’s that bad.

In A Plea for Eros, Hustvedt gives [me] twelve essays on life, love, literature, womanhood, family, childhood, reading, writing, and everything else in between. About all things Hustvedt, apparently, delivered through that uncanny Hustvedt world-view: penetrating, eerily intelligent, just the right bit of sensuality. Here, an essay about wearing a corset, there she writes about inhabiting a man’s soul while writing. She writes about 9/11 and the year after. She writes about “a divided self,” how she became a writer – she writes about her favorite authors, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Charles Dickens.

These essays are very rarely formal, but not quite conversational. I’m aware that it might not work for everyone — there’s a familiar aspect to it all. It’s best to go to this book when you’re already head over heels in love with Hustvedt. They’re not mediocre essays, no. I guess I’m just worried that the first-time reader of Hustvedt would mumble, “What’s all the fuss about?”

The pieces are reflections on a wide variety of subjects, and the personal-ness is the driving force. Yeah, that’s the word – reflections. In Hustvedt’s characteristically quiet and charged, still yet voluptuous voice that I’ve known and long loved. It’s like sitting down for a cup of coffee and listen to one of your idols ramble and rave and rant and brood and celebrate. And argue! And reason against the more mundane complexities of the universe.

I’m not making sense, haha. Anyhoo. For posterity’s sake, I shall write about only two of my favorites. >> The first one is the title essay, “A Plea for Eros” — which begins with a little flashback of a discussion on the Antioch Ruling, a law enacted at Antioch College, which essentially made every stage of a sexual encounter on campus legal only by verbal consent. My friend paused, smiled, and replied [to a question raised by a member of the audience], ‘It’s wonderful. I love it. Just think of the erotic possibilities: “May I touch your right breast? May I touch your left breast?”’

Hustvedt uses this as a jump-off to her central thesis, her plea for eros. Sharing narratives to exemplify manifestations of eros in love and romance, flirtation and commitment, she leads us to what she thinks is an erosion of eros, with little nuggets like, “Erotic pleasure, denied from the most intimate physical contact, thrives on the paradox that only by keeping alive the strangeness of that other person can eroticism last.”

This is my call for eros, a plea that we not forget ambiguity and mystery, that in matters of the heart we acknowledge an abiding uncertainty.

It’s rich, and it’s got the sensuality of prose that I have come to expect from Hustvedt. And it’s all very personal too — among discussions about the repression of eros, and her reasonings against this, Hustvedt gives little details about her past loves, and of her life with Paul Auster too.

>> Here, from “Extracts from a Story of the Wounded Self” — a fragmented-y autobiography. It’s about everything. Small doses of nearly everything in Siri Hustvedt’s life, and there are constant echoes and cross-references. And yet, as fragmented as I’m making it seem [hee], I never felt as though I were missing something. I never felt cheated of details, or bogged down by them. I respected the author’s decision of how to manipulate the format to make way for the content.

I am afraid of writing, too, because when I write I am always moving toward the unarticulated, the dangerous, the place where the walls don’t hold. I don’t know what’s there, but I’m pulled toward it. Is the wounded self the writing self? Perhaps that is more accurate. The wound is static, a given. The writing self is multiple and elastic, and it circles the wound. Over time, I have become more aware of the fact that I must try not to cover that speechless, hurt love, that I must fight my dread of the mess and violence that are also there. I have to write the fear. The writing self is restless and searching, and it listens for voices. Where do they come from, these chatterers who talk to me before I fall asleep? My characters. I am making them and not making them, like people in my dreams. They discuss, fight, laugh, yell, and weep. I was very young when I first heard the story of the exorcism Jesus performs on a possessed man. When Jesus talks to the demon inside the man and asks for his name, the words he cries out both scared and thrilled me. The demon says: “My name is Legion.” That is my name, too.

It’s a book of a very particular world view — that of the author’s. Hustvedt longs to live in “a story of exciting thresholds and irrational feeling,” “a secret place we make between us, a place where the real and unreal commingle,” “a realm of the imagination and of memory, where lovers are alone speaking to each other, saying yes or no or ‘perhaps tomorrow,’ where they play at who they are, inventing and reinventing themselves as subjects and objects.”

And I, for one, am glad that she let me in that secret place. Nothing like creeping about a favorite author’s head, for seriously.