Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, by Gail Honeyman

This was another one for the book club. I guess we're meeting every 2 weeks, which I guess means it will consume more of my reading than I expected it to. Last weekend, after I finished my puzzle, I started Nadine Gordimer's The Conservationist and I read it daily in the mornings and evenings through the week, but it's a slow read, so I realized yesterday I had better set it aside to read the book club book and go back to it when I finished. I thought I had checked out the e-book of Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine from the Brooklyn Public Library, but it turned out I had checked out the Spanish language edition and the English language edition wasn't available from there or the NYPL, so I had to buy it. I should have planned better.

Things did not start off auspiciously. I was ambivalent going in. I was a little mad at myself for not having finished The Conservationist already. I was annoyed that I had messed up the library thing and had to spend $9.99. And I just wasn't sure about the book. And then when I started it, I had the sense for a while that reading it was a very bad idea. There were several times when I thought this book would have to be a new addition to the list of books I had to stop reading because I was sure terrible things were going to happen to the central characters. Although I was fairly certain this was a book with a happy ending, I found myself quite anxious for the first 90 pages or so. I was afraid of what I would have to go through before I got to the happy ending. There was one chapter that was particularly painful. (This sometimes happens to me in the most unexpected places, and definitely comes down to my own mood. Like, I love rom coms, but sometimes I can't bear watching them because I know I will have to sit through the misunderstanding that threatens to end the relationship before the eventual reconciliation.) But then things picked up, and this morning I found myself looking forward to reading the book. I had to stop when I sensed a very cringey moment coming on and it was immediately followed by a section break, with the new section under the title "Bad Days." Oh no, I thought. I set aside my iPad and had a piece of cake and thought maybe I would wait until tomorrow to go back, but after the cake I felt able to face the book again and, in fact, the thing I had been dreading did not happen (though arguably something much worse did). The truth is that terrible things did happen to Eleanor Oliphant, but they happened before the book even begins and the whole book is about her own coming to terms with them - and with herself, with the support of friends. As things looked up, I found myself tearing up often. The resolution was a bit too simplistic, but it was sweet (borderline saccharine, if I'm honest) and comforting. 

The Sea, by John Banville

Now and then I get the idea that I should undertake some grand reading project -- reading all the Booker Prize winners, for instance. (The fact that I've never considered such an undertaking for the Pulitzer or National Book Awards must owe to a latent Anglophilia, at least when it comes to books.) I believe my ownership of a copy of The Sea dates to one of those moments when I was more actively attempting to collect Booker Prize winners. That said, I'm rather surprised to find that my records show (I have such good records now!) I have read 15 Booker winners, compared with 13 Pulitzer winners and just 6 National Book Award winners. In any case, I knew nothing about The Sea except that it was a Booker winner, and on that strength alone I've also acquired a couple other Banville books that I've happened across over the years (The Untouchable and Doctor Copernicus). It was the research I did when I was reorganizing my library that prompted me to actually read Banville. The second sentence of his Wikipedia page says he has been described as "the heir to Proust via Nabokov," which was enough to convince me. I don't know that Proust or Nabokov is who I would land on if I were looking for a comparison, but there is at least one common element: memory.

Memory itself forms a large part of the subject of The Sea. The narrator peers into his own memory and tells us about his past, with precisely the challenges, confusion, and lapses we encounter when we are remembering long distant things. If you try to recall a place you visited or a scene that occurred decades ago, there will be holes and incongruities. In the present day of the book, the narrator is staying in a house he visited as a child and the space - though he has been assured it has not changed - won't line up with his memory of it. A comment the narrator makes about memory, which I find is largely true for me, is that it is static moments -- snapshots in time, rather than moving pictures. Though this book is small, the language is dense. I felt I had to sort of plod through it, and yet still it was often playful and self-reflective. It takes a very interesting and surprising turn just at the end -- I truly gasped when reading it.

Reading Together

When I was writing this morning, I felt like I'd written about my history of book clubs before, but I can't think when or see anything to suggest it in a cursory look through past entries. I may have done so in a series of tweets or elsewhere I suppose. It's not a particularly long history.

The first almost book club I was in was in the summer of 2008 when myself and 3 friends decided to read Moby Dick. (I find myself certain I've written about this before!) We were at a rooftop 4th of July party in Long Island City. We agreed to read the book and meet up in 2 months at the American Museum of Natural History's Hall of Ocean Life, under the blue whale, to discuss it. Life intervened in a most unexpected way. Within a few days after that 4th of July, my boyfriend (who was one of our reading group) started experiencing symptoms of what went on to be a serious illness that put him in the hospital for two and a half months that fall. At the time of our appointed meeting, he was not yet hospitalized, but he was homebound and we did have these friends (or some combination of them and other friends) over, but none of us had finished the book and it was hardly a topic of conversation. Today, Moby Dick still sits on my shelf with a bookmark on page 350, where I stopped reading (which seems awfully far along to have given up, when I reflect on it).

The next book club I sort of joined was via a friend who I met in 2010 and went on to spend an inordinate amount of time with over the ~16 months following our meeting, until she moved to California. It was an already organized club consisting of her friends from college and her roommate. What transpired was, I was at this friend's apartment by chance when the book club was meeting and I stuck around to talk about the book because it happened that I had read it, though I can't remember what it was. It may have been The Savage Detectives? What I do remember is that it was a book I had really liked, but in the room I sensed a strong ambivalence. At that meeting, they selected the next book, and they settled on Rona Jaffe's The Best of Everything, for which I know some smart people have a strong affection, but which I couldn't stand. As I remember it, the group was kind of fizzling out at that point anyway -- I know that I and my friend and her roommate all read the book, because we read the same copy -- but I don't recall there ever being a meeting to discuss it.

Then in 2015 I was invited to a book club by someone I knew only from Twitter. It consisted of people who all lived in my neighborhood, and I gather the club had been around for a couple years before I came along, with rotating participation. We read non-fiction, which added some interesting variety to my reading while it lasted, and met every other month. I think this club too was already on its last legs when I joined it. Some members had babies (including the one who invited me in the first place) and some left the neighborhood. I read three books (The Healing of America, Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, and Between the World and Me) as part of this group, only one of which (the Ta-Nehisi Coates) I think it likely I would otherwise have read.

I guess I sensed that the previous group was not going to continue, or maybe I was looking for a group reading things I would otherwise read (though reading the stuff I wouldn't was I think a good practice for me), but whatever the reason, on or about New Year's Day of 2016 I decided to seek out a more formal book club and so I turned to MeetUp dot com. There are lots of book clubs on MeetUp, and I found three that seemed to read things that sounded interesting to me, so I "joined" all three. Two were focused on "classics" and the third focused on works somehow or another connected to Proust. The classics ones were open affairs held at bars and you could just show up, but the Proust one you had to request to join and say a little something about yourself. I read Proust back in 2004-05 and loved it and never had anyone to talk to about it (though if I wanted to talk to anyone about it today, I would have to reread it because I remember ... not a lot), and so this group seemed just right for me. As it happened, this last was meeting a day or two later and I was invited to attend, although it was not expected I would have time to read the book (which was Madame de Sévigné: Selected Letters translated by Leonard Tancock). This turned out to be the most awkward book club of all, but also the most committed. I remember that first meeting, which was in the host's apartment in the West Village, trying to determine if I had found my people. (Spoiler: I had not.) It was ostensibly pot-luck, but no one was partaking of much of anything and I felt too awkward to even refill my wine glass. The age range of the members was vast - that was the first thing that surprised me. They struck me as incredibly well read, at least in this particular area. The way this club was organized was they planned out the monthly readings in 6 month intervals and assigned one group member to lead the discussion for each book. The reading list was not quite what I had hoped it would be, but it was interesting. Probably the best thing that came out of the club for me was discovering Pierre Loti. I've still only read the one book by him, The Story of a Child (which you, too, can read for free here), but I adored it and have read so much about him since I feel a connection. This club was also responsible for my acquisition of John Ruskin's The Stones of Venice, which I finally opened ahead of my first ever visit to Venice last fall and only read a few chapters of, but immediately loved. The other book I read for this book club, which was very interesting and I never would have come to otherwise, was Why The Dreyfus Affair Matters. I opted to lead the discussion of Baudelaire's The Painter of Modern Life, which went fine and got me back to Baudelaire, who I adore. But I believe that was the last meeting I attended. (Not completely intentionally: I stayed on the email list, but mostly didn't go to meetings, and then one day they dropped me. I don't blame them.) What I found with this club -- well maybe it's better to say what I was missing with this club, which was friends. It met religiously on some Friday of the month, but I found it was rarely where I wanted to be on a Friday, even if I had read the book.

So, what I wrote this morning, and where this whole post is tending, is that I want to have people to talk to about books that I love. But I think the message of that last book club is that I also want to talk about books with people whom I love. When I was writing the post this morning I have no idea why, but I was reminded of an instance from my marriage (god, I can't believe we're here again!) that I find actually heartbreaking today, though I don't think I experienced it quite as that at the time. I'm sure I have said before that I met my ex-husband in a bookstore where we both worked. This was in the late 90s and we were in our very early 20s: a terrible age when you haven't yet read much, but you want to show off how well-read you are. Books were a big part of our life and we read a lot of things on each other's recommendations. This lasted, in different forms, for several years. When my husband went to art school and started reading a lot of theory, I was studying literature and so we still read a lot of the same or adjacent things. And we talked about what we read. This changed too, from when we were young and reading aimlessly, to when we were students and reading more closely, but then it changed more. My ex-husband, who is an artist, stopped reading fiction almost entirely. Everything he read was connected to his work. And at the same time, I had finished school and was working an office job, so everything I read was purely for pleasure. He would express interest in literature, but never actually devote time to it. Sometimes we discussed this, we -- both of us, I honestly believe -- missed the connection we once had. So, for Christmas of 2004 I got what I believed to be a very clever gift: I bought two copies of Stendhal's The Red and the Black (a book he had specifically expressed an interest in reading), so we could read it simultaneously. As it happened, I read it in the space of a week and, as far as I know, he still has not read it. As I said at the top of this paragraph, when I reflect on this now, it breaks my heart a little. I don't think I took it so hard then, but to look at it with distance and see how it reflects about on larger relationship, well, it's telling.

So, with that, please wish me luck as I try this book club thing again.

The Water Dancer, by Ta-Nehisi Coates

On Tuesday I attended a virtual birthday party for one of my oldest friends. This friend lives in Baltimore and so, while of course we all wished we could have celebrated differently, it was actually also nice that I could be part of her birthday this year, while under normal circumstances I would have only posted on Facebook or Twitter or sent a postcard (as I try to do when I remember people's birthdays far enough in advance). At this virtual birthday party it came up that she and some of her friends were in a book club, which has also gone virtual due to current events, and suddenly it was possible for me to be a part of another thing that back in our old life of a month ago I could not have joined. The book the club had already selected was The Water Dancer, by Ta-Nehisi Coates, and the meeting to discuss it was just a week away. But, thanks to my work-issued iPad (which I had barely touched before the pause and which has now become my daily companion and means of connecting with the world beyond my apartment) and my recent acquisition of a New York Public Library card, for which I enrolled electronically, I was able to check out and download the book the next morning and start it the following day. I do sometimes reflect on how this whole situation has forced us to adapt very quickly to technologies that have been available for some time and also to adapt those technologies to us. (Zoom wasn't created so I could do yoga in Brooklyn in the same class with my mom in upstate New York, but yesterday morning we did just that.)

I have often wanted to be part of a book club, and here and there I have been or have come close, but I have never gotten what I hoped from one, which I think mainly comes down to having people to talk to about books I love. This tweet from Helen Rosner really spoke to me:

What’s your favorite super weird, super niche novel that you wish you had more people to talk to about?

— Helen Rosner (@hels) March 4, 2020

For me, this is nearly all of my favorite books and authors. Have any of my friends read Javier Marías or José Donoso or Mercè Rodoreda? I write about books, in large part, because I have no one to talk to about them. Even with those among my friends who are readers in somewhat the way I am, we are rarely synced in our reading. So, a book club: sign me up!

Anyway, The Water Dancer: its publication last fall escaped my notice entirely. I don't pay too much attention to new books as they come out - it's only thanks to book Twitter that they occasionally come to my notice, and so if I see something mentioned repeatedly I will begin to be aware of it as something I might want to seek out. This did not happen with The Water Dancer - I have been aware of Ta-Nehisi Coates for quite a while and I think I would have noticed if I had seen it mentioned that he published a novel. Though, I will also say, that last fall was a busy time and so maybe I wasn't online so much and maybe people were talking about it and I just missed it. In any case, all of this is to say, that I had no idea what I was getting into when I started this book. I read the first third of the book with a sense of looming dread, but then instead of things taking a turn for the worse, as I had anticipated, the book veered off in an entirely different direction and from there, I was drawn in. The most interesting thing about the book was its use of memory as a concrete and tangible thing. I won't say anything more about it now; I'm looking forward to talking about it with some friends on Tuesday.

Chess Story, by Stefan Zweig

Inauspicious as it might seem, I first learned about Stefan Zweig several years ago from a facebook post. A former colleague of mine from a bookstore I worked at more than 20 years ago, who is an avid reader and facebooker wrote some short post praising multiple works of his. I added a bunch of them to my PaperbackSwap wish list and waited. Then at some point I came across his biography of Mary Stuart in a thrift store. I started it and read 100 pages or so, but it didn't really stick, so I set it aside. Eventually, I found myself in possession of a copy of Beware of Pity, I forget exactly how or when -- maybe one of my PaperbackSwap requests panned out; that's how I eventually got Chess Story. In any case, I read it in October of 2017 and was floored. (It made my "other books I really enjoyed" list in the year-end post, but surely would have warranted more notice if in 2017 I hadn't also read the Your Face Tomorrow trilogy, which dominated the year, and Curfew, a book that affected me to the point that I bought tickets to fly to Chile two months after finishing it so I could visit some of the locales from the book.)

If we can presume based on the date I added Zweig's books to my wishlist, July 11, 2013 was the day I first heard of Zweig. In retrospect, I'm surprised I hadn't heard of Zweig before. As Goodreads informs us, "Stefan Zweig was one of the world's most famous writers during the 1920s and 1930s, especially in the U.S., South America, and Europe." He seems like someone I should have been exposed to sometime. Maybe when I worked at the bookstore. Or maybe when I was living in Boston and taking classes at Harvard and hanging out with my husband's art school friends who were into continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, and literature, but as far as I recall, Zweig never came up.

Chess Story is brief (a novella, really) but powerful. It also takes a sort of surprising turn that I think is worth exploring. The narrator is mostly an observer of the book's events. As he is boarding a ship from New York to Buenos Aires, he discovers that one of his fellow passengers is the reigning world Chess champion, a young man from Yugoslavia who seems to have no intellect beyond his uncanny ability in chess. The author wants to get to know this young champion to observe monomania up close. In that respect, he gets his wish but not from the expected source. It's the champion's unknown opponent who turns out to be the main subject of the book, and the one truly suffering from monomania. The story of how he got there is incredible.

Transit and Kudos, by Rachel Cusk

Around the midpoint of my marriage (taken by my husband)

I have so much to say about Rachel Cusk's Outline trilogy, and I said virtually none of it when I wrote about Outline itself and I'm afraid I don't have it in me at this moment to say it all now, and further, that I might need to go back and reread all three books to really get my thoughts together. I started Transit on Friday morning and finished it yesterday morning, and then I went right into Kudos in an attempt to keep feeling what I was feeling and also to avoid having to write about Transit right away, but now here I am not so many hours later feeling that I must write about both.

One of the things that struck me in Outline and is at least as -- if not more -- present in the subsequent books were the persistent broken relationships, and particularly divorces. (I wasn't familiar with Cusk's larger body of work, but I now know that two years before Outline she published a memoir -- Aftermath -- about her own divorce.) I found this recurring theme oddly comforting. I split up with my husband nearly 14 years ago (though our divorce was only finalized in 2018) and yet it is still a tender spot for me; one that I sometimes press to feel the tenderness. I see the end of my marriage as a personal failure, even after more than a decade of therapy and - sincerely - tremendous growth as an individual. It sounds terrible, but seeing other failed relationships makes me feel better about myself. (Though I frequently forgive others their failures, and have yet to completely forgive myself mine.)

The odd thing is, despite my continuing guilt and shame around the end of my own marriage, the idea of being married now is unimaginable to me. I have a level of freedom that has become so dear to me that I can't imagine giving it up for anyone. I understand that, in theory, the right relationship wouldn't render me unfree. But just the idea of living with a partner has become repellant to me, and the thought of negotiating and co-deciding ... it all just makes me shudder.

And, indeed, freedom was another theme that came up again and again in Transit and Kudos -- mainly, the constraints on it, and its unattainability at exactly the moment when you think you will find it. I didn't expect to find freedom after the end of my marriage. In fact, I went directly into another relationship, and the first 6 months or so after I split up with my husband were perhaps the most constrained of my adult life. I was terrified of being alone; if I had found freedom, I didn't want it. It took me several more years to be comfortable with myself and with aloneness. Maybe now I've come too far to the other side.

The Underdogs, by Mariano Azuela

After reorganizing my library as explained in my previous post, I discovered that The Underdogs, by Mariano Azuela, given to me by my dad around the time we went to Mexico together in 2016, when I was trying to read more Mexican books - was the oldest book I had from the Western hemisphere that was not from the US. I chose this as my first book to read post reorg. The Underdogs originally ran as a serial in a newspaper, and you can tell. The chapters are very short, each about the same length, and the narrative thread isn't strong. It's almost more a series of anecdotes than a continuous story.

In any case, the book follows a rag-tag group of anti-Federal soldiers (and a couple soldaderas) during the Mexican Revolutions as they plunder villages, get drunk, loot valuables, and commit more than one sexual assault. And yet, these are the heroes of the book, which is not to say treats them entirely sympathetically. By the end, they truly don't know what they are fighting for. Every village has already been stripped bare and many among their group are dead.