David Grossman's elegiac
Falling Out of Time is not a memoir. It is not a memoir even though it comes from such a deeply personal place—the loss of the author's own son, an inconsolable grief. The book is, instead, a Greek chorus of a book—a concussion of voices, of grieving parents, of thoughts that wander through the dark night of loss. A Town Chronicler and a Centaur, a Duke and a Midwife, a Woman in the Belfry, an Elderly Math Teacher, a Woman in Net—each character spiraling down upon the empty place where a child no longer is. The "noneness."
They walk the night. They look for signs. They ask their wives or their husbands how they will ever again love each other "when/in deep love/he was/conceived."
They rehearse their history:
Two human specks,
a mother and her child,
we glided through the world
for six whole years,
which were unto me
but a few days
and we were
a nursery rhyme
threaded with tales
and miracles–
Until ever so lightly
a breeze
a breath
a flutter
a zephyr
rustled
the leaves—
And sealed our fates:
you here
he there
over and done with,
shattered
to pieces.
I read the book late last night and this morning, in preparation for my Tuesday class at Penn, where I will be talking about (among many other things) the various forms of memoir. The graphic memoir. The second person memoir. The third person memoir. The photographic memoir. The poem as memoir.
Grossman's book is not a memoir, as I have said. But it is a suggestion of a form that memoirists might use—a place where truth might be put and rallied after. I'm exploring that idea as I prepare for Tuesday. I put it here, to share with you.
And in the meantime, I step away from my studies today and prepare for a bit of a party in New York. We have been celebrating, this week, my father's special birthday. May the festivities continue.
President Obama is on his nine day vacation on Martha’s Vineyard with his wife Michelle and their two daughters. Obama is known for having good taste in books, because he has read Netherland by Joseph O’Neil and Freedom by Jonathan Franzen for his past summer vacations. This time he brought almost all novels. Unlike past presidents, Obama picks are serious literary fiction novels.
Winter’s Bone author Daniel Woodrell’s The Bayou Trilogy, is a trio of “Country Noir” novels. Rodin’s Debutante by Ward Just is a coming of age boarding school tale in postwar era Chicago, where Obama started his political career.
Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese is about twin boys in Ethiopia raised by an Indian nun, one of whom turns out to be a doctor. He could be reading this because Obama lived in Africa for a little while as a child, Kenya not Ethiopia, before moving back to the U.S. To the End of the Land by David Grossman is a book about war in Israel and the relationship between a woman and her two sons, each fathered by different men. The subject of a war forcing people to separate them from their families is an important one right now.
President Obama does have a nonfiction book on his reading list: Pulitzer Prize Winner Isabel Wilkerson’s A Warmth of Other Suns, about the migration of black southerners to the North and Midwest. It looks like Obama has some good reading material for his days on Martha’s Vineyard.
For his vacation on Martha’s Vineyard this week, President Barack Obama has packed a long list of books to read.
If you want to build a presidential reading list, we’ve put together Obama’s five reads with links to free samples of each title.
- 1. The Bayou Trilogy by Daniel Woodrell Publisher Mulholland Books describes this work: “The Bayou Trilogy highlights the origins of a one-of-a-kind author, a writer who for over two decades has created an indelible representation of the shadows of the rural American experience and has steadily built a devoted following among crime fiction aficionados and esteemed literary critics alike.” continued…
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