The Republic of Love

The Republic of Love, Carol Shields' novel of love and isolation in the contemporary world, is entrancing, both in the depth of her characters and the elegance of her prose.  Shields was masterful in her telling of family drama and generous in her depiction of her characters.  She has offered us these gifts in this book that is joyful but never simplistic.

The two protagonists, Fay McLeod and Tom Avery, live their parallel lives as singles in their mid-30's (Fay) or even 40 (Tom) in Winnipeg.  Both have their serious, failed relationships for various reasons, and both are working desperately to be happy alone.  Though they do not meet until two-thirds of the way through the book, when they learn that they live across the street from each other, it is clear all along that they are on intersecting paths.  When they do finally meet, dear reader, fireworks, smoke, explosions, and peace on earth result.  Such a love story!

But you know the course of true love, and Carol Shields does, too.  She details the kind of complication that is both inevitable and vivifying, and she introduces a means of resolution that never breaches reality, though its event verges on the miraculous.  Given the size of the relationships detailed in this book, the event is suitably proportioned.

In addition to the satisfactions of the plot, Shields gives us an informed sense of Winnipeg as our setting. The bitterness of the winters and the attempts to carry on a normal life within the extended season relate to our characters and their attempts to identify some sort of warmth in their own loneliness.  The interconnections of characters, the way everyone sort of knows everyone else, or at least knows someone who does know them, is befitting a city of that size.  So it goes with love; through our experience with authentic love a world is made a community.

Another layer of reality Shields provides includes the jobs of our two protagonists.  Fay is a folklorist specializing in mermaids.  Shields is savvy enough as a writer to recognize that the metaphor may be a bit heavy-handed and addresses that within the story.  The character acknowledges her identification with the icon and her confusion in coming to terms with mermaids and their meaning in culture.  Tom Avery is a radio DJ with the overnight shift, midnight to four a.m.  His low-key approach to music and on-air conversation, his quirky taste in music, make him easy to like but hard to get to know.  Fay and Tom cross all those distances in the strength of their love.

Shields' prose reflects her underpinnings as a poet, and she knows love with an intimate eloquence.  Here is the first paragraph of a gorgeous passage about what they say about love:

"They say love makes angels of the wicked.  That people in love are kinder in their ways, stronger in their resolve and lit from within by an incandescence so generous, impulsive, and willing, so mild, too, and almost innocent, that other people, observing them, are reminded of young children--the good, stalwart, focused children of fairy tales" (230).

By the end of the book, we realize that we should not wait for something to drop out of the sky to live and love in every moment, to fold ourselves into the days and nights and seasons of the ones we love, and to rejoice in the everyday-ness of living with all fullness in the republic of love.

I have read three Carol Shields books in recent years.  She published The Republic of Love in 1992.  Stone Diaries came out the next year, winning the Pulitzer Prize.  Shields' last book was Unless, an intriguing and subtle family drama from 2002.   In 2003, Carol Shields died of breast cancer at the age of 68.

Unfinished Desires by Gail Godwin

"Unfinished," indeed.  I enjoyed reading Unfinished Desires by Godwin, but at the end I was disappointed that the characters did not offer any evidence of growth.  Even though everybody is fifty years older at the end of the story, nobody seems to have changed except in hair style and mobility. 

Godwin created a suspenseful story with sufficiently complex narrative style to keep the reader moving between 2001 and 1951-52, when the primary eventsof the plot occur.  The book is set at a prestigious Catholic girls' school, run by cranky but powerful Mother Suzanne Ravenel.  The antagonists, including students and former classmates, come from two of the town's wealthiest families.  Dead or dysfunctional mothers abound in this book, and they never really achieve any sort of redemption, nor do the snotty girls who attend the school and grow up to be snotty women.

Meanwhile, the stereotype of nuns as frustrated  lesbians gets full treatment in Godwin's depiction of life among the sisters.  The founders of the order were two "old maids" (meaning, unmarried women in their twenties,) from England who came to the United States to establish a girls' school for wealthy families in the first part of the twentieth century.  Here the reader confronts one of the many perplexing motives within this book.  If these two characters were so driven to serve God selflessly that they converted to Catholicism and sought opportunities to serve, wouldn't a poorer community have been a better choice?  Instead, the two founders seem to be motivated by their desire to live out their lives as a couple in mutual satsfaction, without anyone questioning their intimacy.  Godwin hints at his, though she never deals with the issue outright.  The unfinished desires of the title refer to Suzanne Ravenel's attempts to do the same with the love of her life, who rejects her despite their promises to take vows together. If even the title of the book refers to women who love each other and cannot fulfill the relationship, a more honest and authentic treatment of the topic seems necessary for this book to fulfill its promise to the reader.

While Godwin writes smoothly and affectionately about her chracters, she does not allow them the complexity of inner change, and, consequently, I felt empty by the book's end.   Godwin herself is a graduate of St. Genevieve's School, which seems to have served as a model for the setting of this work of fiction.  She states in her acknowledgements that the true-life setting of her school "reman[s] vivid in my memory and dreams."  Perhaps it was necessary for her to flatten out her characters to avoid offending any past mentors or classmates, and I feel disappointed that we did not get a more realistic treatment of real people in a setting that carries so much meaning for its writer. 

Godwin's prose is effortlessly graceful and her treatment of spiritual topics is natural and informed.  In that sense I always enjoy her work, and my anticipation of her next book is not diminished by my sense of disappointment in the way this one ends.

The History of Love by Nicole Krauss

                            The History of Love by Nicole Krauss (W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2005) is one of those memorable reading experiences that is so satisfying and engaging that I was drawn immediately into a re-read of the book.  Set in contemporary New York City, this novel includes two protagonists,  both struggling with their love for an inaccessible object, both seeking to establish their voices in the world.  Old Leopold Gursky had fallen in love from childhood with Alma Mereminski in Poland in the 1920’s and ‘30’s.  But then she leaves for America and he barely survives the Holocaust, eventually making his way to New York City and Alma’s door, where he is turned away.  Leo’s narrative includes his struggle to experience and reveal the love for life and for others that fills him.  He writes, and then he loses the books, even as the books find their way into the world without his awareness of their publication.  Similarly, he has a son with whom he has no relationship, though he longs for some contact.  His son grows up to be a renowned writer, but Leo can never connect personally with him.  Instead, he spends his whole life honoring a relationship that had come to define love for him, even though it means that he denies himself a life in the present moment.

            Teen-aged Alma Singer is the parallel protagonist of the book.  Her conflicts include life without her father David, who died when Alma was seven and her brother, Bird, was still a toddler.  Alma’s mother never recovers from the loss of her husband, and, like Leo, is animated primarily by a love which exists only in memory.  Alma begins a journal called How to Survive in the Wild, ostensibly as a record of her studies of wilderness survival in imitation of her father.  As it turns out, survival in her family with a dead father, absent mother, and little brother who thinks he is a promised one of Israel is the more treacherous wilderness.  Alma’s narrative voice is expressed through her journal, in which she records her attempts to find her mother a new husband as a solution to her mother’s disconnect from life.  As Alma goes on, she realizes she is searching for something for herself, and that her mother’s grip on the past cannot be the prison that keeps Alma from living in her own moment.

            The History of Love as a title comes from the book repeatedly referenced within the novel.  Alma’s father had given this book to her mother early in their relationship, a book in Spanish translated from the Yiddish, by a Polish immigrant to Chile of the same era as Leo.  The third strand of Krauss’ novel is a third-person narration of  how this book came to be written and published.  Therein lies the fulcrum for this novel, and as the reader wonders what these two narrators’ stories have to do with each other, Krauss is using this third strand as the solder that welds Alma's and Leo’s voices into a unified piece at the book’s end.   The plot structure and voices within the book are so complex that the first time I finished the book and absorbed the impact of some of the plot bombs at the end, I asked myself, “How did she do that?”  In order to answer my question, I was compelled to go back and re-read the whole book, this time voice by voice.  I read all of Leo’s chapters, then all of Alma’s chapters, then the History of Love history, and finally, the two sections leading to the climax where Bird emerges as the book’s hero.

            The author rotates among these narrative strands, interweaving memories from each narrator’s past with their current attempts to resolve their sense of loss and hopes for love’s fulfillment in some ideal form.  Each narrator has his or her supporting cast: Leo has his childhood friend and current upstairs neighbor named Bruno; Alma has her brother Bird and Russian-immigrant boyfriend, Misha.  Each character is uniquely developed with the foibles of real and exceptional individuals.  For example, lonely Leo worries that he will die on a day when nobody has noticed that he is alive, so he intentionally draws attention to himself when he goes out in public, spilling change while standing in line at the grocery store and making a production of laboriously collecting each coin.  Brother Bird has a lemonade-stand racket that allows him to collect hundreds of dollars for a plane ticket to Israel.  Grandmother Bubbe leaves a prayer at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, asking God to give her granddaughter “some nice breasts.”   Misha performs a Beatles medley on the accordian at his bar mitzvah party.  Alma’s mother, the literary translator, nominates authors for posthumous Nobel prizes when she has read a book she admires.  Alma attempts to remain close to her father by timing how fast she can set up his tent in the dark. 

The History of Love begins as a story of loss and grief, and ends as a story of hope and satisfaction.  Redemption comes from the unlikeliest of places, as redemption must.  Characters all end the story true to themselves, a great satisfaction for the reader, while also participating in the epiphanies they had longed for. Thereby, this book serves as an exemplar of fiction as the lie that is true.  Anyone who has loved or been loved can see the self in this book.  Each one of us in our lives is living our own history of love, and our history is true enough to serve as a bridge to all other histories.  Love is the most innate and beautiful of human qualities, and this book serves as a tribute to the essential beauty of every life.

Link to Nicole Krauss' website: http://nicolekrauss.com/

Dachau Song by Paul Cummins

The biography Dachau Song:  The Twentieth-Century Odyssey of Herbert Zipper by Paul Cummins has been my companion for two and half years.  I tiptoed through this book, reading it intermittently with varying levels of engagement, never actually intending to finish it, but last week that is just what I did.  Now the subject of this biography is part of my consciousness, and I have been reflecting on what it is about him that makes him such an object of fascination.

My introduction to the accomplished composer, conductor, educator, and mensch, Herbert Zipper, occurred exactly three years ago when I was accompanying a group of students from my high school on a three-week exchange to Germany.  One of our tours was of the Dachau memorial site outside of Munich.  Drew Perry, one of our students, had told us he had a great-great-uncle who had been a Dachau concentration camp survivor.  This uncle, he told us, had written a song while he was incarcerated there, with the goal of  lifting his fellow inmates’ spirits.

As we were on our self-guided tour through the museum at the camp memorial site, I saw Drew gazing at one of the wall panels.  When I joined him, he said, “This is the song my uncle wrote.”  There it was, “Dachau Lied,” words by Jura Soyfer, music by Herbert Zipper, enlarged to fill a three-foot by nine-foot panel.  “I wish I knew how it goes,” Drew added, and that is how it happened that I stood next to this descendant of the Zipper clan, sight-reading this song that uplifted and inspired so many in their darkest days.

When we returned to the States, Drew’s mother saw how taken I was with this experience and generously lent me this biography, which is now out of print.  At first, the going was slow, in part because the subject was so alien to me.  Herbert Zipper grew up part of a privileged, elite class in Vienna a hundred years ago.  He had time, leisure, and money to study classical music and explore the cutting-edge intellectual ideas of his time.  He was entitled to all good things during a time when my ancestors up the river were scrambling to survive, peasants who lived on the other side of the wall from the animals in order to stay warm in the winter.

However, Hitler’s rise to power changed everything for the Jews at that time, which included Herbert Zipper's family.  Early on, Herbert used his musical skills to produce theatre of protest against the new fascist regime in Austria.  He organized and led groups of performers in the creation of musical satire to subvert government oppression.  Thus began the transformation of a musical career that began within an expansive gift and found fruition in purposeful performance.  From this point on in his life, Zipper’s musical expression was fulfilled not only as a form of self-expression, but as a means of uplifting and strengthening the human spirit in all circumstances, no matter how bleak. 

When in Dachau concentration camp, one evening Zipper spontaneously began reciting Goethe’s Faust, and found himself surrounded by men starved not only for food and rest, but for the humanity of art.  These recitations continued night after night, with ever-enlarging audiences.  Then the conductor/composer/problem-solver/dreamer came up with the idea of a camp orchestra with instruments secretly built in the camp woodshop.  As he spent twelve hours a day pushing wagons laden with rocks, he composed, humming and harmonizing.  He organized fifteen-minute long concerts of these compositions weekly in the latrines, where twenty to thirty men at a time could be uplifted by vastness of art in the world of their shrinking humanity.

Eventually, the poet Jura Soyfer joined Herbert in his duties as camp “horse,” and they were able to talk as they went about their duties.  It was Herbert’s idea to use the ironic motto at the camp gate, “Arbeit macht frei,” as the basis for a poem.  Jura did just that, and brought his powerful words to Herbert a few days later.  Herbert memorized them, and soon returned to Jura with music, which he then taught to the camp orchestra.  Jura and Herbert both taught the lyrics, always through oral means, to other prisoners as a way of encouraging them to persevere physically and to combat the intellectually deadening experiences of the concentration camp. 

Both Herbert and Jura were transferred from Dachau concentration camp to the camp at Buchenwald within weeks of their song’s creation.  Herbert was released from Buchenwald a few months later, ransomed by his family.  Jura died at Buchenwald of typhus.  Yet the song lived on, becoming an iconic element of resistance within the camps.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7UqeeRCGr8&feature=related

Herbert’s life after the camps continued its eventful plot, including a stint as the conductor of the Manila Symphony Orchestra during the final days of WWII when the Japanese invaded and destroyed the city, resulting in Herbert’s incarceration as their prisoner.  As an unmitigated survivor, Herbert not only was released, but was instrumental in the reconstruction of the human spirit here as well, conducting concert performances for war-weary GI’s and Filipinos. 

Herbert and his wife, his lifelong love and partner, Trudl, immigrated to the United States in 1946, where their efforts enlarged from performance to education.  Here Herbert’s influence expanded to promoting the arts through schools and general education, from earliest childhood to adulthood.  He died in California in 1997, three days shy of his ninety-third birthday.  Herbert Zipper was able to see the documentary about his life nominated for an Academy Award.  http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113963/combined

Cummins’ book gives us copious details of Herbert’s complicated life, including the dates, locations, and names involved in many, many events.  This may be the reason I could not read this book straight through, and yet I may have struck on an even more rewarding experience of the book than a conventional reading of it would have allowed.  By spreading out my reading encounters with Herbert’s life story, I was able to absorb the man Herbert Zipper much more as I might have had I known him directly.  When we meet a person, we take in small bits of their personality and life story with each encounter, and so I did with Herbert.  And I have come to love and admire this old Austrian over time.

I share with Herbert this belief in the expansiveness of the human spirit that flourishes through the arts.  When our humanity is attacked, as the concentration camps certainly exemplified, the arts are essential for healing and restoration.  Through the promotion of music and the arts, we are all connected to a larger identity of human community that is peaceful, affirming, and joyful.  These are the lessons of Herbert Zipper’s life, and the mission that brought him purpose as long as he lived.

By taking on the persistent hopefulness that Herbert's life expressed, I have experienced solace in many sleepless nights when I picked up this book from my bedside book stack.  When I lay awake, worried over my personal failings and limitations, or terrified about the vulnerabilities of my dear ones, or obsessed over the threats of my daily existence, Herbert Zipper's quiet commitment to goodness--expressed through music and the arts--consoled me.  It is simply music, after all, music that I can lie awake on my pillow in the dark and imagine in my mind, that awakens all that is good and possible within life.  My music is words, poetry and prose, which are as simple and infinite as the language of music.  These three years of turning the pages of Dachau Song while all the world slept around me have given me a new source of hope and grace within my simpler challenges of living. 

The Stranger by Albert Camus

Nobody likes Meursault. He works as a clerk in a nondescript job. His mother dies at a home for the indigent, and he complains that he never went to see her because it was a waste of his Sunday if he did. He sent her away because he didn't have anything to say to her, anyway. Plus, he didn't like the way she looked at him. This year I asked students to create a timeline for the way Meursault did spend his Sunday. It went something like this:

10 a.m. - Wake up and notice the girl from the night before is gone. Stay in bed and smoke until noon.

Noon - Get up and wander around the apartment. Cut out an advertisement and put it in a scrapbook of meaningless, random things.

2 p.m. or so - Sit on the balcony. Smoke and watch other people doing stuff and going places.

4 p.m. or so - Reverse the direction of the chair and sit on it backwards for a change. Smoke.

...and so on.

No wonder nobody likes Meursault. He is a boring guy. However, the hostility comes from my students' recognition that Meursault is so much less of a human being than he could be/should be/ought to be. They insist there is some level of emotion present which Meursault is suppressing, or they imagine there is some [fictional] trauma in his past that leads to his [subconscious] rejection of Maman. And, as the trial demonstrates, you can kill an Arab in cold blood, but the crime for which society is going to make you pay the ultimate price is the crime of not loving your mother! (Next year I will suggest students create a Mother's Day card from Meursault to his mother: To Mother. Today is Mother's Day. You are my mother. It doesn't matter to me one way or the other. Sincerely, your son.)

Half of the students hate the concepts of Existentialism, and half of them think Existentialism is the truest explanation of the (non)meaning of life they have ever heard. They feel this especially when Meursault wakes up in his prison cell, where he is waiting to die, trying to bargain with the universe for his life, yet still standing up to society's institutions of authority and convention. Meursault has a shouting match with the priest who visits in an attempt to save Meursault's soul, and even though about half the students think he is bonkers at this point, they all respect his decision--finally, a decision!--to stand up for something in his life, even if it is the right to stand up for believing in nothing.

Something about my life this year has allowed me to relax into the "gentle indifference of the universe," as Meursault puts it, in a new way, and I am grateful that Camus' Meursault woke up to life in time for me to receive his wisdom. I believe in so much and have so many chances to send my voice out into the stars, not the least through my students. Thank you to Camus and to the tenth-graders in room 216.

That Old Cape Magic by Richard Russo

My first Russo book was Straight Man, which included memorable scenes such as the protagonist's fall through the ceiling onto the conference table around which his colleagues are gathered for a tenure meeting. This week I finished That Old Cape Magic, also by Richard Russo, which is not as funny nor as engaging. However, it provides another visit with his stock characters, all of whom mean well and are doing their best to impress the rest of us, or maybe just themselves. The protagonist is another English professor who would rather be a writer, but somehow the writing just doesn't flow. The wife is tolerant, wise, waiting for the truth to set in with her husband. Our protagonist, named Jack Griffin but thinking of himself as simply "Griffin," is trying to avoid his parents' failures at work, home, and play. Instead, what he is so fiercely dreading is exactly what he most avidly expresses. His parents fought, had affairs, hated their jobs (English professors,) their home, and their lives. Griffin's most earnest ambition in life is to avoid becoming his parents...so, of course, that is exactly what he must do. As always in a Russo book, however, the dear wife accepts her husband with all his neuroses. She confronts him mildly, kicks him out or leaves him, and lives a better life without him. However, this is the protagonist's world, and Russo always wakes his anti-hero up before it's too late. Jonathan Franzen he's not, but Richard Russo effectivly and entertainingly engages my sympathy for his world-weary fellows. Maybe it's my middle-aged anti-hero husband I am really falling for, but Russo's protagonist always seems to be my kind of guy.

A Dog's Purpose by W. Bruce Cameron

My dog is a chocolate Lab named Ruby. We adopted her into our family when she was four years old. Now she is eight and a half years old, and she has changed every one of us in the family in ways we could not have imagined. She is the first dog for all five of the human members of our family and taught us everything we know about dogs. Before my relationship with Ruby, I would have found Cameron's book about dogs overly sentimental and exaggerated in its depictions of dog psychology. Now, thanks to Ruby's wisdom and depth, I can accept the protagonist of this book and the premise that dogs understand us in many ways better than we understand ourselves. The protagonist/narrator of this book is a dog who lives several lives, each time finding a new purpose and accomplishing some notable achievement. Each time the dear dog dies, I cried, because I am not a heartless scoundrel, and because it seemed that each life represented a worthy endeavor to live with authenticity and love. Each new life, then, had me wondering how the dog could possibly do any better or feel any more fulfilled, and each go-round the author brings another component into play. By the end, when this dog has realized canine nirvana, I knew that I was right about my own dog: Ruby loves me completely, she wants nothing more from life than playing, eating, and walking...all at my side. Every minute we are together she is satisfied, and every minute we are apart, she is waiting for us to be together. Cat lovers may scoff, but our dogs recognize that part of our humanity which we may sometimes doubt or lose. This is the protagonist Cameron writes, one unafraid to love, unabashed in devotion, better than husband, Mom, or best friend. Only a dog-lover could get it...and, evidently, many of them have. I know bandwagons aren't cool, but neither am I. And my dog loves me anyhow.

A Mercy by Toni Morrison

The book opens with Florens telling her story from the beginning of her memory: "A confession, if you like." It ends with the answers to her longing, the full explanation for her life. Toni Morrison writes again about slavery and motherhood, about those events that call us into life and force us into death. She creates distinctive voices for each of the three enslaved girls, Florens, Lina, and Sorrow, that express the depth of humanity within each. The unconventional usage she chooses for Florens, especially, compels us to hear her story as urgently as she tells it. Florens is haunted by her story, and by bringing it to us, she is haunting us with it as well.

Florens is African, Lina is American Indian, and Sorrow is Caucasian. Each has her story, each her past, each a longing for friendship, motherhood, or daughterhood that drives her more deeply into herself. Only as others come into their lives are these longings known and fulfilled. Toni Morrison writes about the institution of slavery in the 1600's in North America, but by her choice of ethnicity for her characters and by the extension of their suffering, we recognize that slavery is more than a problem relating to a single race. We see that slavery binds a spirit, and freedom transcends bondage.

In theme and style, this book feels more like Paradise than Beloved, but in A Mercy Morrison's depictions of violations of humanity are not so detailed nor so soul-ripping. When I read Beloved, I thought my shredded heart would never be the same, and I was right. Paradise moved such horrors into other settings, making them more ordinary and therefore more terrifying. A Mercy brings us more gently into the story, and allows us to read ourselves there.