Review: The Coast of Good Intentions, by Michael Byers

Michael Byers writes the kind of stories that will appear to you over night and leave you wondering in the morning, which parts were fiction and which parts were dream. Because each of his stories is driven by feelings pure and universal: a husband strengthening his attachment to his children as he looses touch with his wife, a young widow struggling to stifle his physical desires, a content old couple learning to admit their inclinations for novelty – it is impossible not to find yourself in one of his stories. On a personal note, what resounded within me most was the relief a character feels when he is finally able to say out loud the things he’s always wanted to apologize for, and Byers’ remarkable mastery at capturing relationships between young children and adults. Byers’ stories are moving, but not entertaining; I wouldn’t recommend them to everyone. For a similar spirit, I would suggest Olive Kitteridge, whose stories interlace and move at a faster pace. Byers’ stories feel like they should be read one at a time, with ones own life happening in between them, in order to be fully appreciated.

Review: The Transit of Venus, by Shirley Hazzard

Published in the eighties, this novel feels like it was born in the 19th century – a classic we are asked to read too young to appreciate in school. I couldn’t remember the last book I read (maybe La Dame aux Camelias) that boldly followed its characters over more than half of their lifetime. And while the structure of Hazzard’s prose has the fineness of the outdated, the deftness with which the characters’ interiorities are revealed (comparable to Henry James’) will capture the empathy of the modern reader. Simply told, The Transit of Venus is a story about two sisters, Caroline and Grace Bell, from Australia who move to England to start their lives as women, independent of their mother figure and half-sister Dora. We watch their lives progress through the men they meet. They fall in love, meet their husbands, their lovers, almost effortlessly. Until the final chapter Hazzard will have you hoping for a love story. Despite the relationship driven plot, this story is not that. It manages to be hopelessly romantic and yet blatantly realistic. At times, Hazzard breaks from her plot to describe the actions of the general population, like an overture, like the ominous force of weather with which she opens the novel, suggesting to the reader that under the inexplicable forces that govern our lives, Caro and Grace Bell are as vulnerable, perhaps even as inconsequential, as the undeveloped masses. The ingenuity and complexity of this novel is beautifully irradiated from the first page to the last.

good mornings

I didn’t expect to wake up feeling like this: completely relaxed; my eyes lulling over the familiar scene of my bedroom in the morning light, as if I had been looking at it the entire time only dormant; no magnetic pull towards a clock; no sobering moment when the images of the forthcoming day fast-forward behind my lids; just calm. After having gone to bed at five thirty a.m. and all the things that go hand in hand with that sort of night. I felt good. I was thankful for the gray weather; nature’s clouds providing me with blinds I don’t other wise have, the sound of raindrops soothing. Sometimes, I find that I take in bad weather like a breath of fresh air, and not just because it’s the only way I can - usually - sleep in, but also because, unlike the hype and bright prospects that are attributed to a sunny day, bad weather demands nothing, expects nothing, and most of all, doesn’t presume you to be in a good mood. Sometimes, there is just too much expectation in a sunny day. There is something oddly soothing and comforting in the enveloping cool hues of an overcast sky.

past the point

I was told that I had done a number on him. Months after, past the point where he was only loose tobacco from a broken cigarette at the bottom of the most obscure pockets of my memory. I felt bad, but no, no not really. The tobacco was so sparse that when I put my hand down that pocket and found them, my reaction was more of an “oh, oops” then a heart felt “fuck”. If someone were to analyze my love-life trajectory since him, one could say that I too had had a number done on me. But no, it wasn’t like that. When I broke up with him, I knew exactly what I wanted. Not this. And since, I haven’t found what I want. I don’t even know what I want. But I only have myself to blame… Not blame. It’s too pejorative of a word – I only have myself to hold accountable. And I embrace, in my single life, the freedom of answering only to myself. I sincerely hope though, that soon enough, he will loose the communal, possessive adjective "our", that so easily precedes the word "past" – the one we shared – and replace with its independent version: “my”.

this is not a self-reflexive post

People keep saying that print will disappear. And I guess this blog as well as others, is just a testament to other forms of written expression taking its place.

BUT!

Being a rather optimistic person (or maybe nostalgic is a better word? or idealistic?), I think that there is something great about being able to share the things you like so easily on the net. Before, all the underlined passages, sentences, expressions in my books would stay closeted between their covers. Now: I have somewhere to show them, and share them.

I recently fell in love with a book that appeared as a prop in my previous post: Turtle Diaries.

Here is one of my favorite passages:

"I think of [the turtles] swimming through all that golden-green water over the dark, over the chill of the deeps and the jaws of the dark. And I think of the sun over the water, the sun though the water, the eye holding the sun, being held by it with no thought and only the rhythm of the going, the steady wing-strokes of the flippers in the water. Then it doesn't seem hard to believe. It seems the only way to do it, the only way in fact to be: swimming, swimming, the eye held by the sun, no sharks in mind, nothing in mind..."

There's a part later on that mentions how sharks don't float or something; that they must always be restless, continuously moving.

I personally have never been interested in sharks – tangible or metaphorical – but to swim without any on my mind... now that'd be nice.

Moments in memory

Up on the 19th floor rooftop of my brother's building, a tiny insect positioned itself near my left collarbone. It was tiny. Much smaller than a fly, more subtle than a grain of rice. Except its grasshopper green was vibrant against my white t-shirt, like those imaginary crystals in snow.

I hate bugs, so I reached for my copy of the Turtle Diaries to flick it off, keeping my eyes on it during the entire arm-reach-motion less it moves and I accidentally squish it and stain my shirt with bright green goop. I must have blinked at some point with the book in my hand, because the moment I was armed and ready for launch - ZAP - it was gone. Just like that. And I had been watching it the entire time.

This reminded me of the time when I was around seven or eight, at my grand parents' summer house. I was walking up the outside stairs from my grandfather's office to the kitchen, when I came across an iguana -- or what I assumed to be an iguana, I'm still not sure what it was -- whose size took up an entire step. I had a Bichon at the time, a pretty plump one too. And this pseudo iguana was definitely bigger than my dog.

I surrendered to what my child-mind portrayed as a baby dragon guarding the path that led to the kitchen, and took a detour through the inside of the house.

No one else ever saw it. I wish I had a picture of it but I don't. And now, years later, my mental image of this iguana seems to have strongly bound itself up with my mental projection of a dragon. If I had seen this iguana today, would I still find its size spectacular? Or maybe it was in fact a spectacular sight, but I'm left with no credentials to back it up.

It's become a very eerie memory.

About these boots

I was sitting at my desk the other day, reading the manuscript on it with my back to the door. My eyes kept navigating to the back of the room though -- I still don't know if it's acceptable yet to have my feet up on the desk while I read. But having your legs up is good for your circulation. I have terrible circulation, and my hands are always cold. And people at the office leave their doors open so I feel I should do the same (I've only been interning there for a week now). I was definitely more comfortable with my feet up, although the straining of my ears to catch the onset of incoming footsteps, I think, made me lose more time in the end.

I had my feet crossed on the desk when I noticed the gap in the seam on the heel of my left boot. I knew it was there; I hadn't forgotten it, I just simply took note of it now that it was in the context of this new surrounding. I've had these boots for about five years now, and I wear them almost everyday. They are brown leather cow-boy boots. They aren't the stubborn kind; the top part is malleable. I can wear them taught right up to my knees, or scrunched around the lower part of my shins. The leather that covers the feet is now a much darker shade than the rest due to rain, mud, sticky juice, alcohol and whatever else I've walked into. People have often asked me if they are Gucci because of the green and red tag-thing that sticks out of their tops. They are not. But they aren't real cowboy boots either. It is clear that they were designed as a fashion article but they have still proved to be the most useful item I own. I can wear them with almost anything and they are comfortable. They are also in a pretty shitty condition right now. After the second year I started to periodically bring them in for mending and polishing, refusing to ever throw them out. But I haven't done it in a while, I realized.

Why? I have been meaning to. But I mean to do a lot of things, as I'm sure many people do. But the fact that I was sitting there in an office without having done it worried me, because I must have at some previous point, subconsciously and precisely, decided that it shouldn't! And I could no longer be assuaged by the convention that, often times, people put things off. I started to catalog my clothing in my mind. I know that I have shirts with tiny stains, skirts with fleeing threads, missing buttons, holes, rips, burns. I know that I wear them too. Why. Why do I do this? Do people notice??? Do I perpetually wear injured things, and people notice and no one says anything, and everyone thinks that it's a product of an abiding negligence? And when exactly did I decide that this was OK? My style is anything but put-together-primp. It's more of an attempt at coordinated-chaos. I never buy anything that matches. I never buy anything I need, only what screams out to me. Only things I love, which more often than not, are things that look best on their own. But that is not an excuse.

I made a plan to fix my boots, and mend my clothes or at least put those that needed mending aside.

Today I wore a skirt that has a tear in it and loose strings, because I didn't know what condition it was in when I decided I wanted to wear it.

At least I wasn't in the office.