A Spork in the Road

I picked up this book at a library sale recently, and found it unexpectedly resonant. I’ve always loved Potok, and I’m discovering he’s an author whose work I appreciate more and more as I grow older.

I love the clarity of his prose. I love the solidity of his characters. I love his balance of intellect and emotion, especially when dealing with religious themes, with the reexamination of theological orthodoxy, the struggle to stay rooted in tradition without sacrificing intellectual and emotional honesty.

One of my favorite passages from The Book of Lights:

Gershon sat alone afterward, echoes of the conversation churning within him. Street words lurched through his head, the language of rage. The smug superiority of those certain of salvation. Long-dimmed visions of teachers in dingy classrooms teaching the road map of relationships with the Higher Power, the carefully delineated turns and bends, highways, byways, bridges, the surfeit of text and commentary, the richness to the point of glutinous choking, no new lights, no unexpected visions that chilled the spine, and a sharp voice if you turned to stare out the window at the way the pigeons strutted along the sidewalk in the sunlight.

(And if you want a taste of real Kabbalah, without that sour Madonna aftertaste, this is a great place to start.)

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I finished Madame Bovary yesterday. (By Gustave Flaubert, sur bien. Originally published 1857. Translated by Geoffrey Wall. Penguin Classics edition.)

The gorgeous cover art for the book was perfectly chosen. The painting (The Woman in Blue by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot) beautifully fits my mental image of Emma Bovary.

As for the book itself, it was wonderful. I especially loved Flaubert’s wit and humor, as seen in passages like this:

She was irritated by the ritual ordinances; the arrogance of the polemical writings displeased her by their relentless carping at people she had never heard of… She persisted, though, and, when the volume fell from her hands, she thought herself seized with the finest Catholic melancholy that ever an ethereal soul could conceive of.

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I’m reading Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (beautifully translated by Geoffrey Wall). I’m also slowly, slowly working my way through Proust (and have been for, oh, longer than I care to admit).

I have to remark, based on this small sample, that English novels from the 19th century and very early 20th century have a distinctly different flavor than French novels from the same period. I suppose this is obvious now that I’m saying it. Different landscapes and different cultures and different governments will lead to different literatures.

There’s an aroma to the French work that is entirely absent from the English work, and vice versa. French novels just smell… I don’t know. More floral? English novels have more drear. Even when it’s a good drear. French novels are more ooh-la-la. Not in their themes or topics — the French are, if anything, more melancholy than the English in terms of theme. I think it boils down to a simple matter of landscape. And climate. It’s sunnier in France. Or something.

I think I might be able to describe this difference better when I actually go to France.

I feel as though I’m blathering around a thought I’ve not entirely congealed in my own mind. But it delights me how sense of place permeates a piece of fiction.

(At a conference I once asked a Very Important Writer whether he thought a sense of place affected his work and how, and he dismissed the notion, implying it was juvenile and unsophisticated. Maybe it is. But I still think it’s true.)

I am a book junkie, and Mary is my pusher. She lent me the superb Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson, which won the Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1995.

The book had notes in common with both The Shipping News and 12 Angry Men. It dipped into the lives of many diverse characters, and I admired the range of emotion it covered, from the fragile angst of young love to the abiding love of a born farmer for the land to the brutal reality of war.

I will say that there were moments it felt overwritten: a few too many words, sometimes. And I do not say that lightly, because I love words.

But that’s a quibble. The tale and its telling are both beautiful.

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Good Omens

by Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman

Culver Dow lent me this book, which is an oldie but a goodie that I’d never read. It was perfect chemo reading, clever and engaging and hilarious. I relished the humorous and completely outdated references to computers, which were archaic in specifics and all-too contemporary in spirit. I also relished the reasonable approach to what the End of the World would really entail, and how it might really be averted.

Favorite moments:

• Agnes Nutter predicting that her descendants in the twentieth century should not purchase “Betamack.”
• The “Other Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” — four hapless bikers who fall in behind the real four horsemen of the Apocalypse, with predictably poor results.
• The Hound of Hell, who ends up becoming a rather ordinary Dog who thinks Hell is serious lacking in exciting smells.
• And too many other hilarities and insightful remarks on religion to recount.
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