So many unread books stacked on my floors, on my shelves, on the couch, and still I bought a new one—
Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi. I blame
Porochista Khakpour's review in The New York Times. It was smart; it was seductive.
And so is this book. The story of a run-away, a rat-catcher's daughter (her name is Boy), who arrives in a place called Flax Hill, marries a widower with a fair daughter named Snow, and discovers, when she gives birth to a girl she calls Bird, that the family she has married into has masqueraded all along: they are light-skinned African Americans. The fair, sweet Snow has (unwittingly) allowed this family to live their lie, to hide, to elegantly pretend. Boy will have none of that–or of Snow—once the darker-skinned Bird arrives. Snow is banished. Bird grows up. Weird things happen with spiders, with storytellers, with (but of course) mirrors.
Boy, Snow, Bird must be trusted. Its readers must relinquish their hold. Don't try to guess where this is going. Don't look for Dopey. Don't think Oyeyemi is actually going to chant "Mirror, Mirror on the wall." Don't read thinking that this is all about race or all about fairytales, because it's bigger and more wild than that.
Boy, Snow, Bird is brand-new country. It's a young writer (Oyeyemi is not yet thirty but already a veteran of publishing) inventing her own kind of fiction. Her sentences and images, often, are beguiling. Here is Bird, imagining herself in a spiderweb hat:
No, a spiderweb hat is a better warning to beware. Bird would look out from under this hat with the watchful eyes of a girl from long ago, each pupil an unlit lamp, waiting for the magic ring to be rubbed, for the right words to be said. She'd give a lot to know why she and her mom have those eyes—the eyes of people who come from someplace strange they can never go back to. Bird and her mom and that servant-of-the-lamp look they go around giving people. Bird can't think of a single excuse for it.
More and more, I think, we are seeing writers who are willing to go to the edge, to carry us forward, to take daring risks, to suggest that we set aside our expectations and follow along. We see critics embracing the brave and tangled; we see other readers not so sure. There are new fractures breaking in the land of literature. Personally, I'll always be grateful for the sure-footed flights of fancy that abound in books like
Boy, Snow, Bird.
Twelve books, twelve years, four genres, and seven publishing houses ago, there was a lovely small
New York Times review of a book I'd written called
Into the Tangle of Friendship.
Between that day and this one, I have been buoyed by readers and friends, by an agent and editors, by good-hearted bloggers and students, and of course by family in this strange but essential writing dream. I have written odd books (a river speaks in one, corporate America is transformed into a Wonderland in another), "small" books, books that might have been more than they were and books that reached more readers than I thought possible. I have kept writing because I can't help it, because it is, as I have said before, medicinal, because even when I tried to stop, I didn't know how stopping worked. What does a life look like without story making and sentence crafting, without reaching and metaphor? I don't know. I don't want to find out.
Over the past few weeks, extraordinary kindnesses have been shown toward
Small Damages, a book that I had worked on for many, many years. Kindness within Philomel, that big-hearted publishing phenom that has gifted me with the talents and deep hearts of my editor Tamra Tuller (do I love her? yes, I do), Michael Green (president and (also) writer of some of the best emails ever), Jessica Shoffel (publicist extraordinary—unbelievably smart and quick and precise and there), Julia Johnson (who told me once that she has a secret third eye), Jill Santopolo (that uber-bright cutie who forged the original link), a fantastically talented design and editorial team, and an amazingly generous sales team. Kindness from interviewers like
Abby Plesser and
Dennis Abrams. Kindness from magazine editors like
Darcy Jacobs of Family Circle and
Renee Fountain of Bella and the super nice people of the
LA Times. Kindness from friends and from bloggers, each of whom is so dear to me, so valued. (In case you are wondering, the spectacular quilted cover of
Small Damages above was created by blogger and friend,
Wendy Robards of Caribousmom.)
That should be enough, truly, but a few days ago, something else happened. The phone rang, and it was my agent, Amy Rennert. Fortunately, I was sitting down, for Amy had called to read me Jen Doll's most amazing review of
Small Damages—a review that appears in this weekend's
New York Times.
We yearn, as writers, to be understood. We yearn to be read with an open heart. We can't even believe our good fortune when this happens to us in the pages of the
Times. When we are read and assessed by one as intelligent and thoughtful as Jen Doll.
The
Times.I have always loved the
Times. Today I love Her even more than always and forever.
There are no words.
A final note: I have been typing this blog post with fumbling fingers, and I'm quite sure that I have erred somewhere up there. But my fumbling became a trembling when Jillian Canto
David Bowman has an interesting and timely
back-page essay in
The New York Times Book Review this weekend. It's called "Read It Again, Sam," and it celebrates books fine enough to be read again. Patti Smith reports on her plan to read again
An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter. Stephen King professes to having read
Lord of the Flies eight or nine times. Bharati Mukherjee reveals that she re-read all of Louise May Alcott at least a half-dozen times at the tender age of 9.
And you?
Earlier this week, while on a plane home from London, I reached for
Book of Clouds (Chloe Aridjis), a book
I'd read at once upon its release in 2009. It's just the right size for an eight-hour flight (with a nap tucked somewhere in between), and I'd wanted to re-read it because I craved the surreal mood it had engendered within me—the fog, the mist, the strange; I craved the Berlin at the book's heart. How had Aridjis achieved her effects? I would examine this. I would study it.
I had remembered
Clouds as a lyric of a book, and indeed extraordinarily beautiful images float throughout. But what was also fascinating to me, upon my second review, is that Aridjis is not tricking her reader with language here; she is never overreaching. Indeed, some of her oddest moments and most surreal, memorable constructions are rendered with thoroughly uncluttered, even straightforward prose—a glorious effect that I had not deconstructed my first time through. So caught up was I in the mood of her Berlin—in the underground worlds, in the residues of a sinister past—that I failed to see that passages like this one, describing an abandoned bowling alley beneath the streets, had been meticulously and not (until the very end) metaphorically put forth. Aridjis gives us the facts. She lets us do with them what we will.
After traversing several dark, damp rooms, plowing ever deeper into the labyrinth, though it was hard to tell how many doorways we'd actually crossed, we arrived at the so-called Gestapo bowling alley, a rectangular room, somewhat larger than the others as far as I could tell. Our guide asked us to fan out so that everyone could see and directed his flashlight at different spots. I stepped out from behind a girl with pigtails and began to look around. It was a pretty chilling sight. Everything, it seemed, was just the way it had been left decades ago. At the center of the room lay a metal contraption, about eight feet long, an obsolete machine once used for spitting out wooden bowling balls, and with its rusty corners and thin bars, it looked, at least from afar, like a medieval instrument of torture, like those racks to which victims were bound by their hands and feet and then stretched.
I would not have known this about
Clouds had I not read the book a second time. I would have carried with me a false idea about Aridjis method—a first-blush idea, not a studied one. I loved the book even more the second time I read it through. I loved it, though, for somewhat different reasons.
Always, in perpetuity,
Clouds will be a signifier for me—a book that in large part sent me to Berlin this past summer, a trip that subsequently led to my own work on a new (and very different) book set i
6 Comments on On Berlin, Re-reading, and Book of Clouds, last added: 12/10/2011
Congratulations :-) I pick up my copy of You Are My Only today and so look forward to reading it.
Nobody deserves it as much as you. Period.
Congratulations :)
Sarah Allen
(my creative writing blog)
Smiling through and through for you - so much good karma coming back to you, so well deserved. xoxoxxoP
Again, so so thrilled for you Beth. You deserve every bit of this and more. All my love. xo
Wow, wow, wow - SO deserved, Beth!! I am so glad you are getting this recognition so that more readers will discover your incredible talent. Congratulations, my friend!
I'm so happy for you Beth, I can't think of anyone who deserves it more.
Can hardly wait to read the NYT review. Congratulations; it's so wonderful for this to happen to such a good writer, who takes the time to do it right. Sometimes, it works out! Yes, it does!
It is such great news and so well deserved!
This is AWESOME, Beth. Well deserved. You are fantastic. xo
Congratulations. That's amazing news.
I am so happy for you...and happy that you shared the great news with me so i could share it with our Combat class today...I will put your signing in Reading on my calendar. Smiles and more smiles for you!!!
Congratulations Beth, I am STOKED to see Small Damages receiving so much praise:)
Again, tears have sprung to my eyes for you, dear Beth. Your talent is obvious. Your goodness is clear. Your kindness has been felt by everyone you mention, I feel sure, as well as by me, a stranger. What goes around comes around. So happy that it's coming around again and again and again for you!!
Delighted, pleased, clapping my hands with joy for you and all the generous and good words you've sent into the world-- see their tides now coming back to you?
My enormous thanks to all of you for being there for me right now. It means the world.
And Teresa, as always, you made Combat a party. I love Saturday mornings with you, even if I'm not, shall we say, the best at back kicks.
I am excited. I loved YOU ARE MY ONLY. I know I will love SMALL DAMAGES. Waiting.
I just read it—amazing review. Congratulations!