Disoriental, by Négar Djavadi

Disoriental was the third book I've read with my Idlewild Books Women in Translation Book Club. I read it in fits and starts. Lately, I haven't been much in the mood for reading, or maybe I haven't been able to find the time. With the sun rising later, I sleep later, and with my crosswords and Italian practice each morning, I'm not left with much reading time before I have to start work. And I'm never good about reading in the evening. And then I was starting to feel a little overwhelmed with book club books -- like I wasn't reading anything I had chosen to read. (Of course, choosing participate in the book club was my decision, so I do realize it's on me. One of my qualities, but also my faults, is that I have a strong -- sometimes overly so -- sense of obligation.) I started the wonderful Bosnian novel, Death and the Dervish back in late August, and ended up setting it aside for four weeks while I read three consecutive books for book clubs (for three different book clubs, I should point out -- again, this is all my own fault). Anyway, maybe this sense of obligation and that Disoriental was keeping me from Death and the Dervish biased me against it somewhat.

I did enjoy Disoriental, or at least several aspects of it. The narrative is divided between the present and past, jumping back and forth within each chapter as the narrator tells us her memories. Early on, these memories go back even before her birth and her parents' births, as she recounts family stories that have been passed down through the generations. Later they are her own memories of her childhood in Tehran, her escape as a young girl, with her mother and two sisters, from Iran over the border into Turkey and eventually onward to France. And finally some memories of her time living in France and elsewhere in Europe, bringing the reader up to the present day. I found the portions from the past to be much more engaging than the portions from the present day (and, fortunately, those make up much more of the book). But the story felt incomplete, particularly as it got nearer to the present. The period from the narrator's paternal grandmother's birth up to the narrator's arrival in Paris is told in great detail. The period from the arrival in Paris to the present day is summed up in a few capsules. It left me feeling like there were gaping holes in the narrator's story, things that might have better explained her present-day self. 

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.