the cassandra pages

Hermit Diary 51. Books of 2020

Roberto Bolaño and Fyodor Dostoevsky

 

Books of 2020 (list at the end of this post)

Books have been my salvation during the months of isolation. I know many people have said they've had trouble concentrating on reading, but my situation has been the opposite: for me it's been a deep dive. One thing that's helped is an online book club of far-flung friends which grew out of a desire of a friend for companionship reading Murakami's IQ84 during the early days of the pandemic. Sadly, that friend decided they didn't really enjoy reading with a larger group, but some of the people stayed on with me and we've formed a cohesive and congenial group. We've mostly been reading long, challenging books together that we might not have read alone, and meeting each week via Zoom for a discussion -- and it's been great. The other reading group of which I've been a part for several years has not met regularly, so there's been a shift, but it was with that group that I read Beloved and re-read Americanah in the early part of the year.

The #1 standout of the year for me was Roberto Bolaño 's 2666, a huge, challenging, harrowing, and brilliant book I had been afraid to read on my own, but which we tackled together in the new group after completing IQ84. I am so grateful now for having read it -- it's one of those books that changes you forever, both as a reader and as a human being. I've long admired Bolaño 's writing, and completed Savage Detectives and several of his shorter novels in previous years. But 2666 is both masterwork and monster-work -- the great unwieldy sort of literature Bolaño himself said was the only literature worth giving one's life to -- that grapples with the most important themes and questions that confront human lives. A work in five parts, each one a "book" on its own, but related, it is perhaps unfinished - other fragments were found in Bolaño 's papers after his early death - but he raced to complete these parts before succumbing to his illness, and the result feels complete while leaving many questions for the reader unanswered -- which could also have been his intention.

We're currently reading The Brothers Karamazov, which is the other major fiction standout for me this year. Supposedly I read it years and years ago, but I barely remember it, so Dostoevsky's plot and characters are coming to me afresh and vivid. I'm in awe of what he attempted and accomplished, and sad about how slight, insubstantial and superficial most literature of today seems by comparison to either of these two books.

Having said that, I both enjoyed and cringed at Lisa Halliday's Asymmetry, her thinly-disguised autobiographical account of a young woman's affair with an aging writer who resembles Philip Roth, and very much liked Scorpionfish, by Natalie Bakopoulos, a novel about relationships and choices set in modern-day Athens and on one of the Greek islands. But though I've admired some other books by Rachel Cusk, I lost patience with her perturbed, blaming voice in Coventry.

My interest in Japanese literature has continued with contemporary works by Banana Yoshimoto and Yoko Tawada, tense re-readings of The Frolic of the Beasts by Yukio Mishima and Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata, and then Kawabata's new-to-me The Master of Go, which is actually non-fiction literary reportage of the highest order, about an epic, months-long final match between an elderly Go master and his young challenger who represents a new generation of players as well as customs. (If you enjoyed watching The Queen's Gambit, as I did, this book would make a very interesting counterpoint.)

Toni Morrison's Beloved, of course, is a work that ranks with the highest, and one that I was grateful to read even before Black Lives Matter became the major movement it did in 2020. I think I wrote admiringly in a previous year about Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Later this year I read James Baldwin's searing novel Giovanni's Room, and several non-fiction books about racism, all of which I recommend. I'm ashamed that I hadn't read Beloved or The Fire Next Time before now.

Three non-fiction books rise to the top of the list. One was Gathering Moss by Robin Wall Kimmerer, who brings both a botanist's and Native American's knowledge to one of the most fascinating natural history books I've ever read, and inspired me to rekindle my own interest in primitive plants, gather some moss and lichens of my own in the fall, and make two terrariums that are still doing very well in mid-winter here in my apartment. The other two are books about Greece by the great travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor, that were particularly meaningful to me because of having traveled in the same areas many decades after the books were written. Roumeli (1966) is about the disappearing tribes, villages, customs and linguistic complexities Fermor encountered in the north-central mainland, and Mani (1958) is about the fierce and independent people of the remote peninsula of the southern Peloponnese where Fermor eventually made his home, and where Jonathan and I traveled to consign the ashes of his mother to her beloved Mediterranean. Late in the year, I also read Fermor's memoir about three writing retreats in Orthodox monasteries, A Time for Silence.

In the Mani near Anatoliki. Pen-and-ink in my Greek sketchbook, 2019.

To my surprise, I felt lukewarm about Virginia Wolff's To the Lighthouse, and never finished The Voyage Out: I'm sorry but while appreciating her modernist approach to point-of-view and female perspective, I found them both tiresome, although I love her non-fiction and essays, and liked Mrs. Dalloway more than either of these novels. Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera was just as good as it had been the first time around.

I was impressed and riveted by David Foster Wallace's essay This is Water, and his long essay on Dostoevsky and his biographer Joseph Frank, and it made me think perhaps 2021 is the year to attempt Infinite Jest, and certainly to read his essays in Consider the Lobster, which concludes with the piece on Dostoevsky. I will leave you with a quote from Wallace's essay, with which Bolaño would almost certainly have agreed:

“The big thing that makes Dostoevsky invaluable for American readers and writers is that he appears to possess degrees of passion, conviction, and engagement with deep moral issues that we here, today, cannot or do not permit ourselves...

“It’s actually not true that our literary culture is nihilistic… For there are certain tendencies we believe are bad, qualities we hate and fear. Among these are sentimentality, naïveté, archaism, fanaticism. It would probably be better to call our own art’s culture now one of congenital skepticism. Our intelligentsia distrust strong belief, open conviction. Material possession is one thing, but ideological passion disgusts us on some deep level.”

Will the pandemic and the paroxysms of political tensions and change finally alter this fact about modern American literature? Perhaps 2021 will be too soon to tell, but I eagerly wait to see.

And, last but not least: what have you read in 2020, and has it been easier or harder than usual? Please send me your lists! Here's mine:

** are this year's standouts; *books I liked a lot but not in the top tier; # books read with my book club

 A Legacy of Spies, John le Carré (in process)

**Gathering Moss, Robin Wall Kimmerer

**The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky # (in process)

A Time for Silence, Patrick Leigh Fermor

Make Ink, Jason Logan

The Road to Santiago, Cees Nooteboom (in process)

Inés of My Soul, Isabel Allende (dnf)

Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez # (rereading)

*Scorpionfish, Natalie Bakopoulos

The Voyage Out, Virginia Woolf (dnf)

To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf #

Asymmetry, Lisa Halliday

The Emissary, Yoko Tawada

This is Water, David Foster Wallace

**2666, Roberto Bolaño #

The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin

The Four, Scott Galloway

False Spring, Darren Bifford

How to be an Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi

Moonlight Shadow, Banana Yoshimoto

Kitchen, Banana Yoshimoto

The Frolic of the Beasts, Yukio Mishima (rereading)

When Things Fall Apart, Pema Chodron (rereading)

*Snow Country, Yasunari Kawabata

**The Master of Go, Yasunari Kawabata

The Woman of Porto Pim, Antonio Tabucchi

*1Q84, Haruki Murakami (rereading) #

Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Stout

*Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie # (rereading)

Coventry, Rachel Cusk

**Roumeli, Patrick Leigh Fermor

The Writer and the World, V.S. Naipaul

*Giovanni's Room, James Baldwin

**Mani, Patrick Leigh Fermor

**Beloved, Toni Morrison #

Flights, Olga Tokarczuk

Normal People, Sally Rooney

Pond, Claire Louise Bennett

 

Hermit Diary 50. Christmas music from our choir

Here are two musical offerings for this Christmas season by the Cathedral Singers of Christ Church Cathedral Montreal -- a lullaby written by our director of music, Jonathan White, and a lively carol. As always, I'm delighted to be part of this group and glad we've managed to maintain some enthusiasm even though it's painful to all of us not to be able to make music together or present it in the usual way. (Both of these videos sound better with headphones and look better full screen, but do watch however you want!)

Merry Christmas!

 

Hermit Diary 49. Star

Christmas in my house would hardly be Christmas without a paper project or some sort of ornament-making, and this bizarre year is no exception. A while back, I became fascinated by mathematical origami models which are constructed using identical folded units that then are assembled into a shape, and over the years I've made a number of stellated octahedrons using Japanese papers in various combination of prints and solids.

This year, though, seemed like a good time to tackle the Bascetta Star, a model created by an Italian mathematician, Paolo Bascetta. The repetitive folding and concentration of origami are calming and meditative for me, and the process of making this star was a perfect antidote to the news.

Although each star requires 30 modular units, compared to the octahedron's 12, the folding goes fast once you understand how to do it and memorize the steps. And the assembly was actually easier than the octahedron, and way easier than the finished product would indicate. If you want to try, it's fun, and you'll end up with a pretty spectacular object that could even be hung with a small bulb inside. I made two -- this larger white and blue one, from 6 3/4" square sheets in different shades of blue and green with white on the reverse side, and a smaller red and gold star ornament from double-sided 3" squares.

 

This is the basic unit, folded from one square of paper. You can download a .pdf with instructions from Paolo Bascetta's website, and see other 2- and 3-dimensional origami pieces he's designed.

Three units joined together to make one "point". At first I thought you needed to make a bunch of three-unit modules, but that's wrong; in the final assembly, you make only one of these, then add one unit at a time in the same way, and in a particular order, until you've added all thirty. There are a number of videos out there, but I found this one on YouTube the best; it explains the assembly process very clearly, including how to hold the growing star and count the points so that you don't get confused!

Let me know if you try it -- I'd love to see what you make.

Hermit Diary 48. Color to the Rescue

There is nothing greyer than a northern November, before it snows. And then, when the dark days and long nights of November stretch into December, and the sun feels like it's on permanent holiday in Patagonia, so far away that it's forgotten us entirely, I'm not the only one who has trouble. I don't suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder in a clinical way, but it's a rare person living this far north who isn't affected at all by the lack of light, the wan sky, and the monochromatic dullness of the city and the bare trees. And that's in  a "normal" year: in 2020, these factors are combined with the isolation and fatigue of the pandemic, dread rather than anticipation of the holidays, and the knowledge that we're only at the beginning of what's sure to be a long winter.

While it's still relatively easy to walk, I'm trying to get outside every day, and I'm also doing a daily online program of stretching workouts, because I know that moving my body helps my mental as well as physical health. We cook a lot and eat well, and although we're often awake for hours in the night, we eventually go back to sleep, so I don't feel physically tired. Our feline companion is a delight and a comfort. I'm quite busy. But I admit: I'm very sick of living this way. 

As I wrote a while ago, color helps. I'm trying to wear brighter colors, and to get out our most colorful ceramics and textiles for our home. We don't plan to put up a Christmas tree, because our houseplants have taken up all the room we've got, but there are little lights and a few ornaments on the rubber plant-that-is-now-a-tree, lights outside our terrace, lights on an evergreen garland above the bookshelves.

And I've been drawing and painting. I was one of those kids who could happily spend hours arranging her giant box of crayons, and even now, just opening my box of watercolors gives me a little rush of delight. I hope I never lose that pleasure at the sight of an array of colors, and the endless possibilities they represent. The other day I got a delivery of a set of colored tissue papers, maybe for gift wrapping, maybe for collage: it cost something like $7, and looks to me like a world of pleasure. I also sorted through a bunch of old origami paper, pulling out a whole set of blue shades to make a ten-pointed folded star (more on that in a subsequent post). You don't have to be an artist to incorporate some "color therapy" into your day: it can be as simple as spending a half hour scribbling with colored pencils, making abstract patterns with watercolors, sorting your lipsticks or eyeshadows by shade, or your neckties; organizing your closet, your yarn, your table linens or towels. You have my solemn guarantee that it will make you feel better.

We're all having to dig deep right now, and many of us are struggling with loss as well as anxiety and uncertainty. The holidays are going to be a mixed bag -- a break in the usual routine, perhaps, but nothing like the holidays we normally share with family and friends. What's the hardest for you, and what's helping? Let's tell each other.

 

 

 

Hermit Diary 47. Talismans

 

 

I made this little video in response to a prompt: What are the talismans that have gotten you through these months? What will you be taking with you into the New Year? (Thank you, wmc.)