TO BREAK THE FROZEN SEA

This piece from January, 2005 is one in the ongoing "My Reading Life" column by Elinore Standard in the Record Review.

Works mentioned: "The Lost Garden" by Josephine Humphreys, "The Amateur Marriage" by Anne Tyler, "Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time," by Mark Haddon, "Brick Lane," by Monica Ali, "The Sleeping Father," by Matthew Sharp, "Anna Karenina" by Leo Tolstoy, "The Guards," by Ken Bruen, "The Great Fire" and "The Transit of Venus" by Shirley Hazzard, "How Reading Changed My Life" by Anna Quindlen, "Aurora Leigh" by Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

TO BREAK THE FROZEN SEA INSIDE US


If the book we are reading does not wake us,
as with a fist hammering on our skull, why
then do we read it? Good God, we would
also be happy if we had no books, and such
books as make us happy we could, if need
be, write ourselves. But what we must have
are those books which come upon us like
ill-fortune, and distress us deeply, like the
death of one we love better than ourselves,
like suicide. A book must be an ice-axe to break
the frozen sea inside us.
Franz Kafka

Josephine Humphreys, author of “The Lost Garden”, (Norton, 2002) says “…the author is at one end of the experience of writing and the reader is at the other, and the book is the contract between you.” Humphreys also says, “Every story is a story about death. But perhaps if we are lucky, our story about death is also a story about love.”

Anne Tyler was interviewed by Mel Gussow of the New York Times on the occasion of the publication of “The Amateur Marriage” (Knopf, 2004), in which she talks about the way she approaches her subjects and settings, and about her cultural interests.

Tyler says, “I read contemporary fiction nonstop—particularly the newer writers, who seem to me to be starting out at a higher and higher level.” She lists Mark Haddon’s “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time”, Monica Ali’s “Brick Lane”, and one she describes as a “fresh, funny, quirky book”: “The Sleeping Father” by Matthew Sharp.

She cites as an influence the literary and personal interest of Reynolds Price, her first teacher, and adds, “I’m sure that my years of faithfully rereading ‘Anna Karenina’ must have been for some purpose. Really,” she concludes, “we’re all standing on other writers’ shoulders.”

Ken Bruen is the author of noir thrillers usually set in the west of Ireland or in the rawest sections of South London. His characters have been described as hard and bitter and their actions are often borderline psychotic and usually shocking. “The Guards” (St. Martin’s, 2001) features a falling-down drunk ex-cop who reads and solves mysteries when he is not wiped.
He is explaining to a mocking friend what he sees in books:

As I’ve said, my father worked on the railways. He loved cowboy books. There was always a battered Zane Grey in his jacket. He began to pass them on to me. My mother would say,
“You’ll make a sissy out of him.”
When she wasn’t within earshot, he’d whisper,“Don’t mind your mother. She means well. But you keep reading.”
“Why, Dad?” Not that I was going to stop, I was already hooked.
“They’ll give you options.”
“What’s options?”
A faraway look would come into his eyes and then,
“Freedom, son.”

In Shirley Hazzard’s remarkable novel, “The Great Fire” (Farrar, 2003), the main character describes two young people who have managed to be different from their awful parents: “They are wonderfully well-read, a poetic pair who live in literature and make free with it. They are right to cling to it: it has delivered them.”

Reading has delivered many young people who later go on to write about it as lifesaving and, as it was for the Bruen character, liberating.

Another of Hazzard’s characters, a woman who is emerging from an uneventful life at the age of 40, talks about reading in “The Transit of Venus” a novel from 1980 (Viking): “It occurred to her, in her isolation, that books might have helped. It was the first time she had reckoned with the fact she did not read, that neither she nor Christian (her husband) read – and here was the true discovery, for she had relied on him to maintain a literary household.” Although they had books in the house, these are people who are always meaning to read but never quite get around to it.

The American novelist and essayist, Anna Quindlen, has written a short tribute to reading, “How Reading Changed My Life” (Ballantine, 1998), in which she describes her own Reading Life. “In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own. I learned who I was and who I wanted to be, what I might aspire to, and what I might dare to dream about my world and myself. More powerfully and persuasively than from the ‘shalt nots’ of the Ten Commandments, I learned the difference between good and evil, right and wrong.” At the end of her book, Quindlen includes several pages of reading lists, about which she says, “Reading lists are arbitrary and capricious, but most people like them, and so do I.” And you, as a reader of this column, know that I do, too!

For an epigram to this gem, Quindlen uses an excerpt from “Aurora Leigh” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning:
Books, books, books!
I had found the secret of a garret-room
Piled high, packed large, -- where, creeping in
And out
Among the giant fossils of my past,
Like some small nimble mouse between
The ribs
Of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there
At this or that box, pulling through the gap,
In heats of terror, haste, victorious joy,
The first book first. And how I felt it beat
Under my pillow, in the morning’s dark,
An hour before the sun would let me read!
My books!
* * *

Elinore Standard is the co-editor, along with Laura Furman, of “Bookworms: Great Writers and Readers Celebrate Reading” (Carroll & Graf, 1997).