I promise this blog has a book in it -it isn't all about nails (though I love them).
I was expecting a Pinstrosity (for definition, please refer to "Pinstrosity, Noveltrocious"), something like newsprint stuck in gummy nail polish with words going every which way. I selected a backup plan, but considering my art skills are abysmal, I wasn't expecting that to come through, either...
Anyway, the Pinspiration was not a Pinstrosity: it actually turned out pretty well, we had fun doing it, and I particularly like the ampersand that came through. This was a novelist's dream, after all.
What a great idea. I'm so excited that it worked, and it was so much easier than the simple instructions implied -because you know when instructions are "simple," there's still hidden complexities. Not here. It was simple and easy. It just took a little patience and time.
Okay, girly part over.
So this morning with coffee in hand (nerdfest: I picked a mug to match my nails), I sat down with a
copy of Alessandro Barico's Silk. Have you ever read it? It's a novella at 91 pages and I was drawn to it because of its price set at $2.49, which was the only reason I justified purchasing it in Grand Junction, CO, over winter break as I had already purchased a gaggle of books. Later I recalled a ghost of a memory from when I worked at B&N and I shelved a copy only with a different cover, that of a motion picture adaptation with Kierra Knightley. I never saw it and never thought of it again except to see if B&N had a copy of the DVD in the Music Dept (which, of course, we didn't). It's funny to think that I had never spent much thought on it thereafter as I am drawn to 19th century (setting or era) literature, but being in grad school, I had so much to read as it was (the Lord knows).
Confession: I keep a reading journal and there's something so satisfying about adding another completed book to your "Read this year" list, even if it's a novella and even if it only took two hours to read.
Books finished this year:
-East of Eden by John Steinbeck
-The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
-Silk by Alessandro Barico
(Okay, the year has just gotten started, but I can do better than this.)
Yes, I was able to read Silk in two hours, but it wasn't because it was easy or simplistic. Silk starts like this:
"Chapter One
Although his father had pictured for him a brilliant future in the army, Herve Joncour had ended up earning his crust in an unusual career which, by a singular piece of irony, was not unconnected with a charming side that bestowed on it a vaguely feminine intonation.
Herve Joncour bought and sold silkworms for a living.
The year was 1861. Flaubert was writing Salammbo, electric light remained hypothetical, and Abraham Lincoln, beyond the Ocean, was fighting a war of which he was not to see the finish.
Herve Joncour was thirty-two.
He bought and sold.
Silkworms."
And that's the entirety of Chapter One. Each chapter is told this way, in crisp prose limited to a page, each a vignette which weaves a story not unlike the beautiful fibers of silk itself. The story plays with this idea that silk is light, lighter than air, and yet its beauty is so intense that it can't help but to be heavy with imagery and symbolism. The story is like that, too, including but not restricted to a thread woven about an aviary, birds in a cage, birds that released and come back, expensive, exotic birds as gifts to concubines as symbols of their love and more beautiful than jewelry. Herein lies the escapism, because I see these threads and for once don't think about the threads of a Discussion Board in Blackboard -school. Instead is a different kind of school, a school which will follow a writer her whole life if she's willing, a school that instructs through example, the school that demonstrates the art of literature.
I have two favorite devices used in this book: one is repetition. Each time Herve goes on his journey to Japan -this mesmerizing journey driven by desire and curiosity- he "crossed the French frontier near Metz, travelled the breadth of Wurttemberg and Bavaria, entered Austria, reached Vienna and Budapest by train, thence to continue as far as Kiev. He travelled two thousand kilometres of Russian steppe on horseback, crossed the Urals, entered Siberia, continued for forty days until he reached Lake Baikal, known locally as: 'the demon.'" In his second journey, this lake is known locally as: "the last." In his third journey, this lake is known locally as: "the holy." Then, from there, he "descended the course of the River Amur, skirting the Chinese border as far as the Ocean, and when he arrived at the Ocean he stopped in the port of Sabrik for ten days, until a Dutch smugglers' ship conveyed him to Cape Teraya on the west coast of Japan. Taking secondary roads, he crossed the provinces of Ishikawa, Toyama and Niigata on horseback, and entered the province of Fukushima," and the town of Shirakawa. What I love about this repetition is that it makes the journey come alive: the first time through this description feels like necessary detail to understand his travels, and each time thereafter feels like a return to familiar places, as his kind of travel is -something mundane or familiar in real life, but art in literature.
My other favorite device is his sentence fragmentation. You can already see how he does this in the first chapter, but Barico does this several times, one of the most jarring and beautiful is when he meets the concubine -unnamed, but described with repetition: "Her eyes did not have an oriental slant, and her face was the face of a young girl." The same as with the repetition of the landscape is the landscape of her face, like recognizing someone in literature without the author telling us that she's recognizable.
And when he sees her, this jarring fragmentation is seen like this:
"All was so silent and motionless in the room that what next occurred, though nothing in itself, seemed quite momentous.
Suddenly,
without the smallest movement,
that young girl,
opened her eyes.
Herve Joncour continued talking but instinctively lowered his eyes to her and what he saw, as he continued talking, was that her eyes did not have an oriental slant, and that they were fastened upon him with a disconcerting intensity: as thought this is what they had been doing from the start, from beneath lowered lids."
This is proof that poetry can exist in prose.
After I finished the book, I explored around Google Images for a bit. First reflection: I might have to watch the Kierra Knightley movie.
Second reflection: Silk worms look weird, and the cocoons look like they've been left in the vegetable drawer of the refrigerator for too long.
:}
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