Category: books

Really?

Really?

Well, yes, of course, because whenever I think of the raging feral love between Cathy and Heathcliff, I always think of a soft white tulip climbing a stately staircase on red ribbon legs.

I mean, don’t you?

So I’ve bound and gagged The Banshees — as any loving aunt would
do — just so I can take three minutes to tell you this all-important thing. Get ready. Seriously. GET. READY. I mean, your little patch of earth? Well, it’s about to be completely shattered, Crackie. Please remain calm. Or sit down if you’re the excitable type. I won’t be held responsible for how your world is forever altered. I’m sorry. I just won’t.

Ready?

I finished Wuthering Heights last night and, well, that book annoyed the bejeebez outta me.

I’m not kidding. I have NO bejeebez left. Pffffft. Gone-zo.

Sadly, I don’t have time now to express my irritation with this book — because I see The Banshees are beginning to struggle against their restraints and I suppose I should do something, blahdie blahdie blah — but, oh, I WILL be talking about my irritation with this book.

You know, after I get out of jail and such.

More later, pippa.

The Banshees are asleep for good — fingers crossed — and I’m reading Wuthering Heights, a book I tried to read years ago, didn’t ever finish, so I’m giving it another go.

And, you know, I really feel compelled to say:

Heathcliff? Cathy? Uhm, please calm down, ‘mkay, peaches?

I’ve been rationing my reading of Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence because I don’t want it to end. Because I basically want to devour this book and I fight against that. I don’t want to, but I easily could, gorge like a glutton without really tasting. The book needs to be savored, slowly, knowingly. On top of this voluntary rationing, there was some involuntary rationing when I lost track of this red book in my current flood of red-book reading — I misplaced its particular redness and tried to satisfy myself with other redness until it resurfaced once again. Thank God! I was becoming frantic. Where is “The Enchantress of Florence”? Where is it? WHERE??

I imagine that some part of my delight in this book has been discovering that Salman Rushdie is the complete opposite of the image I had of him — the dry fusty intellectual. I can’t say how I came by this view of him; it may have been based purely on his looks alone. But the man is witty, bawdy, and, yes, SMART, prodigiously so, but not intimidatingly so. I’m so thrilled to discover him and to have the realization dawn on me, page after gorgeous page, that he is, well, somewhat of a little scamp, I think. He’s impish and clever. He’s made me laugh out loud repeatedly. He’s secure enough to be whimsical and somewhat mad. The book centers on an enchantress, but Rushdie is the enchanter here, casting a spell under which I’ve willingly fallen. The book is like a Matryoshka doll: the fine points, the deep points, beautifully hidden, but not undiscoverable, inside layers of fable and fairy tale and dreams. It travels in and out of chronology and place yet I’ve never felt disoriented. Quite the opposite. I feel completely oriented in this world of the invisible and and the pretend and the mythical and the real. I don’t know how he does that, honestly. I’m completely in his thrall and will now be gearing up to read basically everything he’s ever written.

Some short excerpts that I’ve particularly enjoyed:

I.

By proper use of Sunni-Uzbeg potato-based spells it was possible to find a husband, chase off a more attractive love rival, or cause the downfall of a Shiite king. Shah Ismail had fallen victim to the rarely used Great Uzbeg Anti-Shiite Potato and Sturgeon Curse, which required quantities of potatoes and caviar which were not easy to amass, and a unity of purpose among the Sunni witches which was likewise difficult to achieve. When they heard the news of Ismail’s rout, the eastern potato witches wiped their eyes, ceased their wailing, and danced. A pirouetting Khorasani witch is a rare and particular sight, and few who saw the dance ever forgot it. And the Caviar and Potato Curse created a rift between the sisterhood of potato witches which has not been healed to this day.

II.

Ignoring his wounded right arm in its sling, he galloped home upon the wind. For indeed there was a wind that night, and they saw olive trees uprooted by it, and oaks flung aside as though they were little saplings, and walnut trees, cherry trees, and alders, so that as they rode it seem that a forest was flying through the air alongside them; and as they neared the city they heard a great tumult, such as only the people of Florence knew how to make. However, this was no tumult of joy. It was as if every man in the city had turned werewolf and was howling at the moon

(ed.: In this excerpt, Emperor Akbar’s mother and one of his wives have a conversation with their despised rival, Jodha, the emperor’s favorite — and invisible, possibly non-existent — wife. Out of necessity, they feel they must align themselves with her to protect the emperor from what they believe is his impending madness. They need Jodha, to exercise her many “powers” over the emperor.)

III.

They genuinely couldn’t see the woman to whom they were speaking, yet they were willing to arrange themselves on her carpets, lounge against her bolsters, drink the wine her servants offered, and tell the sexual secrets of women throughout history to the empty air. After a while they stopped feeling that they had lost their minds and acted as if they were alone, just the two of them talking to each other, speaking openly about what had always been closed, laughing helplessly at the shocking comedy of desire, the absurd things men wanted and the equally absurd things women would do to please them, until the years dropped away from them and they remembered their own youth, and recalled how they had been told these secrets by other stern, ferocious women, who had also dissolved, after a time, into guffaws of joy, remembering, in their turn, how the knowledge had been given to them, and by the end of it, the laughter in the room was the laughter of the generations, of all women, and of history.

They spoke in this fashion for five and a half hours and when they finished they thought it had been one of the happiest days of their lives. They began to have kinder thoughts toward Jodha than ever before. She was one of them now, part of the women’s relay; she was no longer the emperor’s creation alone. In part, she was theirs as well.

Okay. So I now have a crush on Salman Rushdie. Whatevs.

You had me at “potato-based spells,” Salman.

I found In the Frame, Helen Mirren’s autobiography, at the bookstore recently and fell in love with it. It’s really more of a scrapbook of her life, great photos, juicy anecdotes, little scribblings alongside the old photos, all giving the sense that you’re just sitting with Dame Helen on her cozy couch as she turns the pages and walks you through her singular life. It’s lovely, so personal and inviting. In all honesty, I read the book in one sitting at the bookstore — for shame! — and wrote the following anecdote down on a scrap piece of paper.

(BUT! I always buy a least a coffee at the bookstore and I always clean up after myself and I’m writing all this so Kate P doesn’t get mad at me because, basically, I need constant approval. At every turn. All the time. Ad nauseum. To infinity and beyond.)

Proceeding apace.

This short excerpt is actually a little piece written by Mirren’s father, Basil Mirren, about his cat. (Speaking of anthropomorphizing.) Note the detail here — how much he reads into his pet’s personality — as anyone with a pet always does. It’s just human nature to do that. But this is charming to me. He seems to just revel in the separateness and the otherness of his beloved cat. I’ve read this several times and never find it anything less than delightful. I love the unselfconscious, almost childlike, insights.

My cat’s name is Flossie. I call her all sorts of other things at times, but Flossie suits her soft fluffiness. You couldn’t draw her with clear lines, her outline is too hazy, like a leafy tree, but she is full of strong flowing shapes from her pink ears to her ankle-length Victorian drawers. She is a golden-eyed long-haired white Persian Queen.

Flossie is an out-of-work or, rather, a retired actress who last appeared on TV with Sir Laurence Olivier in a new Pinter play. She worked well, but modestly, and didn’t upstage Larry. The play was a success and got an EMI award. But the lights, noise, bustle, and general backstage confusion put a severe strain on her sense and sensibility. Sanctuary in suburbia seem better for her than occasional caresses by the famous and she was fostered by us.

Away from the stage she still has a whiff of theatre about her. She understands ordinary Green Room talk like “There’s my darling pearly whirly girlie” or “Piss off” and responds correctly, her timing always absolutely right. She can show her feelings in every movement from her head to her drawers. But always a Lady — dignified, controlled, and fussy.

Our communication is mostly telepathic. I can recognize a range of body signals that give a lot of information. She can, for example, say, “Thank you for my dinner” by rubbing her head against my arm as I put the plate down or “I don’t like your cooking” by shaking her hind leg at it. But beyond that sort of thing, something in me can sometimes be in tune with something in her, the same strings vibrate, and there is an exchange of sympathy rather than information.

She has a lovely character, gentle but brave, loving but independent; since her operation no longer tortured by the lunacies of sex.

Flossie is also lazy, has fleas, and catches pigeons. But that is how she was made. She’s unpolluted by knowledge, thank God.

It was appropriate that a man who falsified his name should be judged by an elephant driven insane by his own whimsical naming.

Preach it, Salman. You are making perfect sense to me.

One book per answer.

Oh, I’m borrowing this from Sheila.

One book you’re currently reading: Winter’s Tales by Isak Dinesen.

One book that changed your life: Hm. I have honestly never met one other person who has ever read this book, it’s obscure, I guess, but The Rock and The Willow by Mildred Lee. I think it may even be out of print now. Much to my delight, in the middle of all our upheaval, I recently found my beaten-up paperback copy with my fat junior high writing sprawled on the inside cover, not once but twice, “Property of Tracey So-and-So.” It’s actually one of the first books I can remember owning for myself. It was mine. So that was part of it, I’m sure. This, this is mine. Beyond that, I related to Enie Singleton. She was shy and unpopular and good at school. Just like me. Okay. So her family was huge and she lived in Alabama and it was the middle of The Great Depression, so those particulars didn’t match mine, but I related to the imposed narrowness of her life. Enie longed for things that don’t seem possible or that she wasn’t supposed to long for. She wanted to travel, to write, to see and to be part of the larger world. Oh, and when one CD (Seedy) Culpepper showed up in town with his whiff of danger and mystery and became a hired hand on their farm and fell in love with his “little red-headed Enie”? Uhm, I was gone. I was 13 and Seedy Culpepper thrilled me and scared me and I wanted him SO BAD. I was breathless to find out how “little red-headed Enie” would handle her life. That entire book showed me, living in my narrow dictated life, that it was okay to long for things, that longings meant something, that I wasn’t alone in my yearning. Whenever I felt alone in my home with the kinds of thoughts I kept to myself, I would always remember Enie Singleton. She validated me.

One book you’d want on a deserted island: Oh dear. Oh dear. How about The Collected Works of C.S. Lewis? Uhm, one that includes Narnia? Which doesn’t exist to the best of my knowledge.

One book you’ve read more than once: Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. Yep. I’m a cliche.

One book you’ve never been able to finish: I have not yet finished One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I was becoming shrunken and demoralized from all the characters with, hello, the same damn name. And last week, when the movers were moving our bed, I found my copy of the book on the floor smack dab under where my head would lie, with the back cover and the author’s photo facing up and I realized that Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s chocolate pastille eyes had been boring into my head for lo! these many months. Well now. No wonder I couldn’t sleep.

One book that made you laugh: Well, Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray made me laugh out loud at times. When I was reading the book a couple of years ago, I was carrying it everywhere, even to church. I was in “the band” and sang at both services so my day at church was very long. In the half-hour break between services, while other people were socializing and eating donuts, I was crouched on the stairs at the back of the stage, reading Vanity Fair. At one point, my girlfriend K found me back there, looked at me for a second, then put her hands on her hips and scolded, “Tracey! How can you be reading that book! And at church!” I just stared at her, totally bewildered, then said, “Uhm, well …. it’s a classic. A 19th century classic.” A pause. A huge pause, actually, and then she was full of remorse. “Oh, Tracey, I’m sorry. I went to San Diego State, you know.” Hahahahaha. The San Diego State Defense. And we both immediately knew what she meant. When I asked her what she thought the book was, she didn’t have an answer. Maybe the word vanity messed with her head? Like how could I be reading a book about vanity AT CHURCH?? Hahaha. I don’t know. What a naughty girl.

One book that made you cry: The Old Man and The Sea by Hemingway. Which I reread a couple of years ago. Something in that book, a particular moment that I won’t go into here, completely broke me down at 2 in the morning. I sobbed my eyes out because of this one distinct moment and how I related to it. To an old man and the sea. It seems absurd in a way, but that’s how it was. Amazing how you can go back to a book years later and see something totally different, isn’t it?

One book you keep rereading: Oh, anything by my Christian author boyfriend Disco Stu. Blahdie blahdie blah already.

One book you’ve been meaning to read: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. Will I ever do it? I don’t know. Now it seems like my shame over never reading it outweighs my desire to read it. It has crippled me.

One book you believe everyone should read: Well, I’m with Sheila on this one: “Everyone”? Just how much of a tyrant do I want to be? To play along, though, how about Les Miserables by Victor Hugo? Don’t just go see the musical and say you know it. You don’t. (Wow. I really am a tyrant. Boooooo.) Okay. Slighly modulating my tyranny here: I think anyone would feel richer for having read this book.

Grab the nearest book. Open it to page 56. Find the fifth sentence…

“These are terrible words to the ear of a Legitimist,” she cried.

My sister and I, on the phone.

She: You know what bugged me about the love scenes?

Me: What?

She: The breasts were completely ignored! What is up with that? So Bella has no breasts?

Me: No, Sis. No, I guess she does not.

She: That sucks.

Me: Bad.

She: She needs to fix that.

Me: Right now.

(pause)

She: What’s wrong with us?

Me: Nothing at all.