Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon

People recommend books to me a lot. It's hard to know when or how to fit them all in! And then there's the worry I won't like a book that is very dear to a dear friend's heart. For a long time, I just avoided reading books that had been recommended to me, unless someone pushed a physical copy into my hot little hands. (This is still the fastest way to get a book to the top of my list.) So I started a new list from which to pick, of books friends recommended. If you want to get in on this, you can recommend a book on this post.

This book was recommended to me by Amie.

After I was lamenting, a month or so into reading this book, how long it was taking me to read it, Amie, who had recommended it to me in the first place, replied saying she hadn't managed to finish it. This made me cock an eyebrow. On the other hand, I am a damnably stubborn woman, and books that are difficult to read but not actively unpleasant stimulate my competitive impulses.

So I changed how I was reading it. Instead of trying to read it in 100-page chunks, as soon as I got up in the morning, while the oatmeal was simmering and the water for coffee and tea was boiling, I'd try to read two chapters. And that's it. That's all I would read in a day. So it took me months, wore out the entire number of renewals I had on the book at the library, and still got taken back a day late, but I finished!

I feel like I've conquered something.

So, on the other end of this bizarre meditation on trying to structure space and time in systematized manners, without regard for natural landscape or desire, what do I think? I think I'm still puzzled. It's hard to call this book enjoyable, exactly, but I don't resent having read it. (I do, however, feel an immense amount of freedom, like I've put down a heavy pack, that I don't have to start the day trying to read another 20 pages.)

There is so much strangeness in this book, and so much language that is obfuscatory and meta, that I frequently felt entirely lost, and that's not particularly usual for me.

On this other hand, this book has invisible mechanical ducks in love with French chefs, werebeavers, a descent into the Hollow Earth, Chinese Feng Shui experts fallen in with debauched Jesuits straight from an anti-Catholicism novel, and a whole host of other oddities. Every time one of these sections came up, with their exceedingly strange and yet somehow appropriate stories, I was enthralled.

I think the problem is maybe the stuff in between. Problem is perhaps too strong a word, but between these incidents of oddness, we get Mason & Dixon, travelling, surveying, astronomizing, quarrelling, and drinking. They maybe have feelings for each other, but it's buried under prose so deep it's hard to breathe in.

There are also layers of meta that I'm sure I'm just not getting. There's an incident at the start of the book including a sailor named Patrick O'Brien, who knows everything about boats, that felt like it was clearly a reference to the author of the same name, which warned me to be on the lookout for similarly meta references, but if there were any, they went right over my head.

It's the kind of book I'd like to come back to in, oh, say 10 years, and see what it says to me now. There's an underlying theme about how we divide, catalogue, and structure reality that I'm still grappling with. I'll let it sit for a while, and see where it goes. Also, other people should read this now, so I can discuss it with them.

When The Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka

How do you write about trauma? Are you verbose and expansive? Terse and straighforward? In this case, you use elegant and spare prose that brings home the extent of the wrong by never quite stating it in so many words.

When The Emperor Was Divine is a short book, but exactly as long as it needs to be. It is not stridently angry, it is quiet and sorrowful, and I think, anger simmers slowly below the surface, but is not and cannot be let out.

Julie Otsuka has told the story of the Japanese internment in the United States during the Second World War through an unnamed Japanese family. The unnaming, which I only noticed near the end, is deliberate and powerful. The main characters are the son and the daughter, the mother and the father. Mirroring how much was stripped away from them during the war, this one family exists without names. This both universalizes their experience while allowing it to remain particular. I can imagine many ways in which this particular narrative trick could backfire, but it works here.

As the book starts, the mother sees the posters announcing the upcoming internment, the preparations she is required to make, what she is allowed to bring. The father has already been taken away, months earlier. They are not to be sent to the same place. She makes her preparations calmly, methodically, and they depart.

And spend years in an internment camp, where the days go by, and they try to keep a sense of self in a world where most markers of identity have been stripped away. They are not harmed, they are not physically injured, but the writing style emphasizes the dehumanizing nature of such an action, and perils of monotony and captivity.

The world outside is not let off the hook, either. They return, eventually, and had created stories of how they would be welcomed back, but the hates the war fostered have not dissipated, and nationalistic anger still simmers under the surface. But the violence that takes place in this book is never overt, never physical. It is nonetheless present.

Will they be able to find a sense of self again? Or who will? When fear surrounds you, when the government can cut you out of a crowd, divorce you from your life, and hold you apart from the rest, what else could they do?

Cane River by Lalita Tademy

Cane River is an odd mix of fiction and non-fiction, and I'm not sure it entirely works. It feels like trying to find the balance between the two constrains the narrative in ways that either one by itself would not. As non-fiction, it is limited by the availability of sources, and it truly seems like there is much that has to be speculative. As fiction, it is equally limited by the sources - the author is hemmed in by what she does know, and that structure seems binding.

Is there a fix for this? Would it have been more skilful in a more experienced author's hands? But then again, would an experienced author have gotten anywhere near this. For what this book does have is a sense of searching, of trying to make sense of the past, of family stories. What emerges is a book that is not bad, but doesn't transcend its awkward origins to become something great.

It's not to say that first-time authors can't write something spectacular. But in this case, I wish she'd written a few more books, gotten some more work on narrative structure and prose out of the way, before tackling such an ambitious project.

This is the story of Lalita Tademy's family, in particular, one female line. From scanty documentary evidence (some of which appears in the book, creating more of that uneasiness between fiction and nonfiction), she reconstructs the line of her mother, grandfather, great-grandmother, great-great grandmother, and great-great-great grandmother through slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction and the emergence of Jim Crow laws. The story is important, but it's perhaps not an accident that the narrative is strongest for the time period she knows least about.

The early parts of the books, the ones furthest away in time, are the ones that Tademy is most free to do with as she wills, and they are definitely the strongest. As the book moves further forward in time, there becomes the feeling that she is trying to fit in everything she does know, to make it all fit the narrative she's telling. Without those nonfiction constraints of documentary evidence and family stories, she weaves a difficult tale of women enslaved, of desire, of families being torn apart, of power abused and misunderstood.

Later, as we get to her great-grandmother and father, another narrative takes over, one that might better be its own book, given the strengths of the earlier part of the book rather than the latter, taken out of the family context and the desire to get it all on paper, and fictionalized more heavily to get at the narrative core. For that story, the story of her great-grandmother who loved and was loved by a white man and who defined convention for a while, but then found their relationship strained under the burdens placed on them by hate, by history, and by violence. This should have been more powerful, but instead, it felt like the book was running out of steam. 

Tademy is not a bad writer, but this book is uneven, and the mix of fiction and nonfiction seems to limit rather than set free. I would be interested to read further works, and I hope she eventually gives herself the freedom that not being too beholden to your sources when writing fiction would provide.