It’s Sunny, It’s Happy, It’s Monday, ARGH!
One of the best things about not working retail or office space is missing the “blue Mondays”. Mondays are still an adjustment, since it’s back to just me and the usual complement of kids, all guests and the Muffin gone for the first time in a couple days. Plus I never get even half of the cleaning I want done, done.
Mondays aren’t bad days. They’re just changeful, like the moon they’re named for. Of course, change is the way you know you’re still breathing, and breathing is good.
Breathing is very, very good.
It was over ninety degrees (to the tune of 100 on Saturday) this past weekend, and sticky-sultry-hot. I live up here in the grand Pacific Northwest because the weather doesn’t often make me want to peel off my skin and sit around in my bones, like in that Shel Silverstein poem. But we did have thunder yesterday evening. Ever since we lived for a little while in Wyoming I’ve loved thunderstorms.
So when the heat broke late last night it felt like a blessing, and it’s going to be a warm but not unlivable day today.
Look at that, I’ve just chatted about the weather. How banal can I get? Let’s go a little deeper.
This weekend I finished Absolute War by Chris Bellamy, a study of Soviet Russia in WWII. And I also finished Vircondelet’s Duras, a bio of Marguerite Duras, one of my favorite authors.
I like Duras’s work, for some ungodly reason. I don’t know why. Everyone always reads The Lover first, because of the movie, but I actually read Summer Rain back when I was living up in Seattle and working for yet another bookstore. After that I started reading every Duras I could get my hands on. The Sailor From Gibraltar and The Ravishing of Lol Stein are also perennial favorites. But I rarely recommend her to people for a number of reasons.
One is because of the translation. She wrote in French, and any time you get a translation of ANYTHING it’s hit or miss. (Like the *flinch* Fagles translation of the Odyssey. I really, really prefer the Fitzgerald.) For some languages, like French, translations are easier for me to read because I can make a shoddy guess at the turn of phrase the writer is originally going for. On others…well, I’m at the mercy of the translator in a way I don’t exactly enjoy as a reader.
Another reason I don’t recommend Duras to people is because she feels so excruciatingly personal to me. There’s a certain hypersensitive, doomed fraught-ness (that’s not even a word, but you get the idea) running through her work I can, if not identify with, then at least imagine. For some reason she’s very successful at putting me in her character’s shoes, even over a language barrier.
The last reason is because her books deal with a sort of interior motion a lot of American readers don’t traditionally like. They break a lot of fictional “rules” in ways the vast majority of the reading public I’ve waited on and recommended to (as a bookstore employee) just don’t enjoy or understand. It’s like my taste for peanut butter curry, or peanut butter and dill pickles. I know there are other people who enjoy this sort of thing, but it’s not something I can recommend without knowing you.
Vircondelet’s bio of her was…interesting. I much prefer Adler’s, but I understand that Vircondelet was trying to take a bath in the experience of this woman, this author. I can respect that. It was a bit of a slog in places, just because I don’t like that style of biography. But all in all, well done.
Bellamy’s book was incredibly enjoyable. No, it’s never enjoyable to read about war, but when you’ve read about a subject like the Eastern Front in either World War, where there’s not a terrible lot of archival sources for one side available to researchers, you get a kind of static picture of the whole thing. You know pieces are missing. But then, when someone gets access to the closed archives (as Bellamy did before Putin re-closed them, plus ca change…) and has a fair degree of talent for writing coherent, clear text…Well. Things become very interesting, and the picture becomes dynamic. One begins to see the interplay of moving forces instead of just a picture of rubble.
So it’s been a good book week, all things considered. Next I have a couple things I have to read for possible cover quotes, which is an enjoyable part of an author’s job. I’m always stunned to be asked for cover quotes. I rarely think anyone will care about my opinion of such-and-such.
Which partly accounts for the weird tone of my blog some days, dear Reader. Part of writing daily in this space is a certain feeling of shouting into the wind, in a good way. It feels very intimate, as if I’m writing this just for myself. The tension between that and the fact that it’s public space and there are boundaries between it and my private life, is a source of creative fuel some days.
Other days I just ramble on about nothing, and close with a civil adieu. Which is, I suspect, what this Monday post has turned out to be.
So. Happy Monday, dear Reader. May it be breathable. Because, you know, the alternative really doesn’t bear thinking about.
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