To weigh, to sift and winnow — the pleasure of essays and other assorted reading

It’s been nearly two months since my last bookconscious post. I haven’t stopped reading. Other parts of my life have been so busy that I haven’t taken time to reflect on my reading here, but I plan to remedy that and get back to monthly bookconscious musings. When life is hectic, I enjoy the closure I get from reading essays, and I’ve enjoyed some terrific collections lately . The bookconscious family has been reading some fun things, too, so I’ll begin with them.

My son recently finished Life of Pi by Yann Martel. I admit to nudging him in that direction, after I found it on the library sale shelf (paperback, only $ .50), and also after reading aloud a sermon by Barbara Talcott on discerning “Big T” versus “little t” truths from literature, in which she mentioned the book among other great stories that challenge the reader to grapple with Truth versus truth.

He was somewhat suspicious of reading a book that I clearly felt would be good for him, but admitted cheerfully that it was a great story, and that he enjoyed it very much. He did ask why some people have to ruin good books by making other people discuss what they are about, instead of just enjoying them. Hint taken.

He’s moved on to a nonfiction book, also a library sale find: Ends of the Earth: Voyages to Antarctica, by Peter Matthiesen. I’m thrilled to report that this even cheaper purchase ($.25) from a nearby town’s annual library book sale has my skeptical teenager fascinated, and that the other day, said son told me he’d really like to go to Antarctica one day.

Speaking of places across the seas, my daughter recently sampled Mermaid Tales from Around the World, retold by Mary Pope Osborne. Osborne has published several excellent collections of stories — Favorite Norse Myths and Tales from the Odyssey are others my children have enjoyed. My daughter recently took an art class with a mermaid theme, and the artist who led the classes read aloud excerpts from this book. The stories are from many places (some “stories from around the world” collections turn out to be mostly from Europe and North America) and both Osborne and Troy Howell, the illustrator, give information about the sources they consulted. As a reference geek, I love this.

My daughter has also been reading the Kit series from American Girl. She’s read many of their historical books, as well as contemporary stories published as part of the marketing of their “girl of the year” dolls. Yes, I am aware it’s all a ploy to part us from our money. But she enjoys them, and the historical books are the kind of thing I liked as a child. And I admit an ulterior motive in bringing the Kit titles home from the library: I know there is a movie coming out, and my kids are not big movie fans. We are back to living where there is very little air conditioning (and so far, none in our house). When the next heat wave hits, I am hoping to entice them into a nice cool movie theater!

While we’re on the topic of movie adaptations, we also recently read aloud Blue Balliet’s The Wright Three and are currently reading The Calder Game. Balliet’s books, including Chasing Vermeer (her first book, already being made into a movie), are all about a trio of friends, two boys and a girl, in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood. Each book’s plot centers on a famous piece of art. Katherine asked me to find The Wright Three at the library and got interested in Frank Lloyd Wright, so I got a copy of Frank Lloyd Wright for Kids, which is a biography with activities to bring some of Wright’s ideas to life. We’ve been having fun with that and plan to visit Wright’s Zimmerman House in Manchester, which is part of the Currier Museum of Art.

One cool thing about reading The Calder Game is that we saw a Calder sculpture in May when we visited the Currier with Grandpa and Jan. Jan told the kids that it really was meant to be displayed in such a way that it moved, and she set it in motion (carefully, and after we all looked around for sharp-eyed guards). In the book, Balliet describes a Calder exhibit which incorporates “wind” with strategically placed fans, so the museum visitors can see the sculptures in action. I’d love to visit such an exhibit!

I didn’t really get into Chasing Vermeer, and I think there are parts of all three books are a bit forced, but I am enjoying The Calder Game and I love the way Balliet draws readers into her stories and the artists’ work. In each case, we’ve felt compelled to book down and look up the art — a picture of the Vermeer painting A Lady Writing in Chasing Vermeer, Wright’s Robie House in The Wright Three, and Calder’s sculptures — because we wanted to see what the characters were seeing.

The illustrator of all of the books, Brett Helquist, works coded clues into his pictures. One of the main characters, Calder, carries pentominoes everywhere, and as a result, my daughter made a flat set to play with after Chasing Vermeer and I recently bought a wooden set of 3-D pentominoes like the ones Calder uses to make a model of the Robie house in The Wright Three. Readers of bookconscious know I am a big fan of making connections, and Balliet’s books connect readers with art, math, history, humanity — ideas, human nature, the way people interact.

Plus, I’ve yet to meet a person who doesn’t love a good mystery every once in awhile. My grandmother, who is about to turn 95, always recommends a mystery as a calming antidote to the world’s upsets. My daughter asked me to stop reading tonight with only a couple of chapters left. I suspect she doesn’t want it to end.

Another read aloud we’re all enjoying is Rainbows, Snowflakes, and Quarks: Physics and the World Around Us by Hans Christian Van Baeyer. Yes, another library book sale find, from a few years ago. My son has been learning about physics for about a year, ever since he first started watching F1 racing and wanted to know more about the forces involved in race cars hurtling around a course (for car related physics, he likes The Isaac Newton School of Physics, by Barry Parker).

I pulled Rainbows, Snowflakes, and Quarks from the shelf before a long ride to a soccer field clear across NH (only about an hour away) and in no time all four of us were intrigued. The first chapter was about Galileo’s proofs of the path of a trajectory, and Steve reports that the illustrations were the clearest he’s ever seen on this topic. He’s a former Marine Corps artillery officer and gunnery instructor, and in the artillery, lives depend on accurately plotted paths of trajectories.

Today we were reading about gravity, and Van Baeyer described the many ways humans are “victorious” over it, starting with lifting our heads as babies, standing, walking, even getting out of bed in the morning. It may sound like an odd read aloud, but the chapters could easily stand alone as essays about a particular facet of physics, and together, they form a clear, concise, and beautifully written overview of the physics at work in the world all around, for us to notice and understand.

Essay, you ask? Is she finally going to get around to telling us about the essays she’s been reading? Yes, finally. First, I should acknowledge the man I quote in this blog entry’s title: Milton J. Rosenberg, host of a radio program called Extension 720. I found the reference to a transcript of his 1999 program, “Roundtable: The History of the Essay,” in the back of Anne Fadiman’s highly enjoyable collection, At Large and At Small.

As the program begins, Rosenberg asks his guests about the origins of the word “essay.” He then adds his own take, tracing the word from the French “essayer,” which means to try or attempt, to the Latin exagare, which he tells his panel and listeners, “means to weigh, to sift and winnow.” I immediately nodded (like many bibliophiles, I interact with my reading materials all the time, occasionally alarming those around me when I forget myself and vocalize my outburst). Rosenberg hit on precisely what I love about essays: I cannot get enough of watching a writer weigh, sift, and winnow. It’s what I try to do as a writer, too, although this sprawling blog entry may lead you to believe otherwise.

This month I’ve read Fadiman’s excellent Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader, which I plan to buy and wait in line for her to sign when she reads next month at Southern New Hampshire University in Manchester. It’s fortunate the rest of my family is usually in bed by the time I settle down with a book, because I chuckled, nodded, and called out “yes!” like a Baptist amening the pastor throughout this slim volume. Ex Libris is a delicious collection of essays on book-love and reading, many of which appeared first in Fadiman’s column “The Common Reader” in the Library of Congress’s magazine, Civilization, in the 1990’s.

When it’s 99 degrees and you live in a place where there is, (did I mention? ) NO AIR CONDITIONING, it is hard to concentrate on a novel, or on a nonfiction book on a subject unfamiliar to the reader, or anything else requiring serious mental effort. So when the temperature rose a couple of weeks ago, I trolled my “to read” list and checked out Fadiman’s essays from the library , thinking they would be easy for my heat-addled brain to digest. They are so delightful that I concentrated happily and forgot the heat.

Ex Libris is about reading, but it’s also about life. Fadiman’s essays twine her reading life with her childhood, her marriage, motherhood, caring for an ailing parent, and other universal experiences told from her unique experience. She is both reflective and informative; you sense her intelligence, yet she never takes an authoritative tone, despite being very well read and able to write absolutely lovely prose. Her light touch makes you grateful she’s sharing what she’s learned.

Fadiman is also quite funny. Whether she is writing about melding her books with her husband’s, the urge to proofread, gender bias in language, or the different styles of book love, her erudite observations and literary references are interspersed with personal anecdotes that are either tender or amusing or both. By the end of the book, you’ll want to go used book store trolling with Fadiman. She makes it easy to imagine doing so by including a few pages of “Recommended Reading” at the end of the book.

Having enjoyed Ex Libris so much, I immediately read At Large and At Small, which is a book devoted to the familiar essay. Most of these pieces appeared in The American Scholar during Fadiman’s tenure as editor. This collection is wider ranging than Ex Libris. For example, Fadiman devotes one essay to Charles Lamb, master of the familiar essay, and his family and friends, who included Wordsworth and Coleridge, and a later chapter is an armchair tour of her reading of a two volume biography of Colerdige. Yet Fadiman writes just as thoughtfully about ice cream. She cares about her subjects and her essays are thorough and observant, but she’s humble, telling readers in the notes that she is “an enthusiastic amatuer, not a scholar,” before listing copious sources.

Some of the essays in At Large and At Small have a more personal subject, like “Moving,” “A Piece of Cotton,” and “Under Water.” Even though these are, respectively, about her family’s move, Fadiman’s thoughts on the flag after 9-11, and her experience at a wilderness program, Fadiman never dwells on herself. Instead she illuminates the world around her with her own light, and offers the reader a well-lit path towards further understanding of the topic at hand. It isn’t just her perceptive, clear, graceful prose that appeals, it’s the sense you have that this is a person who is deeply curious and finds delving into a subject to satisfy her curiosity a pleasurable and valuable use of time.

Fadiman is a life learner, and she’s made a life and a living through her pursuit of knowledge about that which intrigues her. Her curiosity spoke to my own, and I am now the owner of a 1947 edition of The Essays of Elia, With the Last Essays by Charles Lamb. I also dug out my college copy of The Norton Anthology of Poetry (3rd edition) and re-read Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight,” which Fadiman does at the end of her essay “Coleridge the Runaway.” I know I have many future hours of discovery to look forward to, thanks to her enthusiastic suggestions, and I can’t wait to attend her reading.

In the last several months I’ve read two other essay collections I’d recommend enthusiastically: The Braindead Megaphone by George Saunders, and Through the Children’s Gate: A Home in New York, by Adam Gopnik. Both men write regularly for magazines, Saunders for GQ, Harper’s and The New Yorker and Gopnik for The New Yorker, and these books are collections of their work that mostly appeared in periodicals first. Gopnik’s book is a nice sequel to Paris to the Moon, one of my favorite expatriate books and also a tender book about fatherhood, and Saunders’ is his first nonfiction book after a handful of books of satirical fiction.

Saunders’ point of view, no matter the subject, is delightful — he pokes fun at himself in a Bill Bryson-ish way, and he is quick to point out his own conflicted views on some of the subjects he covers. The piece on visiting border vigilantes is a good example. He goes there thinking they are obnoxious nuts and he, an east coast liberal, will have nothing to say to them and vice versa. But he leaves having seen their humanity and come to an understanding of why they feel the need to patrol the border. He helps the reader see beyond the obvious, and his adventures are hilarious.

You don’t necessarily want to be Saunders, though you admire both his humanity and his intelligent writing. He’s living a little too much on the edge for me, and I’m glad he’s written about it so I don’t have to go there. Despite the humor and adventure, Saunders also writes about his love for his family, and those bits are a sweet, but never sappy, departure from the wackiness.

On the other hand, like Fadiman, Gopnik seems to live a charmed life that I can’t help envying a bit. Through the Children’s Gate is as much a tribute to New York as a collection of essays about family life and the experience of raising children pre and post 9-11. Just as Paris to the Moon made me wish to be an expatriate writer in Paris, Through the Children’s Gate makes New York life sound charming. Gopnik is funny in much the same way Fadiman is — a gentle, intellectual humor that makes you laugh but also awes you a little, in a “gee, I wish I’d thought of looking at it that way” sense.

I was thinking to myself on Saturday morning, as I made pancakes before another soccer game, that I’d have trouble finding something to read next that I’d enjoy as much as recent books I’d finished. Earlier in May I read Three Cups of Tea, which I also enjoyed very much, not necessarily from a literary standpoint (I found the writing style somewhat awkward) but because the story is so compelling. Lately I haven’t enjoyed the novels I’ve picked up (Inheritance of Loss, which seemed to be only partially developed, Suite Francaise, which I re-read for a book club and didn’t care for as much this time, and The Echo Maker, which I don’t think I’ll even finish).

Scott Simon was on the radio. As I pondered my reading options, I heard him interview an Iranian American author, Firoozeh Dumas. They discussed the fact that her books are unique because she’s funny, and it’s rare that someone writes about the Middle East with a sense of humor. As bookconscious regulars know, I recently read some other Iranian memoirs. I’ve read bitter criticism and earnest defense of Iran, as well as a visitor’s perspective. I can’t wait to read Dumas’ first book, Funny In Farsi:A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian In America, which I had checked out by the end of the day, and I am going to reserve her newer book, Laughing Without An Accent: Adventures of an Iranian American, At Home and Abroad.

So if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to read.

A plethora of poetry

Since April is National Poetry Month (as well as International Guitar Month, National Frog Month, and Stress Awareness Month — and speaking for myself, I am right on target, April holiday wise: I eyed my guitar when I put away my winter clothes and thought “I should practice;” wondered if the warm, pleasant weather brought out tadpoles in the local ponds; and was plenty aware of my own stress this month) I thought I’d share some of the bookconscious household’s favorite poets and recent poetry books I’ve read.

In the bookconscious house, we put up a poem every week for the family’s literary enjoyment. This used to go on a big laminated piece of poster board on the fridge, and we rotated turns choosing poems. Eventually, the rest of the family lost interest in selecting; I took over, because I love choosing a poem, and I would rather people enjoy reading one than get hung up on choosing.

When they were taking regular turns at choosing poems, the kids often turned to Jack Prelutsky, who we were fortunate enough to hear in person in Kirkland, Washington, several years ago. His rousing version of “Rat for Lunch,” which he sang to his own guitar accompaniment, is among the funniest, most enjoyable live performances I’ve ever experienced — mainly because he had the room of young children and their parents nearly crying with laughter.

One of my daughter’s favorites, and an author whose contribution to the long, cozy read alouds of both of my children’s early years is immeasurable, is Shirley Hughes. Out and About, one of our favorites, is a book of poems that follows a young girl and her baby brother through the seasons. As an aside, if you have a young child in your life, get your hands on Hughes picture books — the Alfie and Annie Rose stories and Dogger are sweet, funny, wise little books that your whole family will treasure.

Another favorite poet in the bookconscious household, popular with everyone from the Computer Scientist (a poetry aficionado in his spare time) to the younger child, is Billy Collins. I have a fantastic live recording I received as a birthday gift, and was disappointed to realize too late that he was reading at Jazzmouth in Portsmouth last night. A previous bookconscious blog post delves into Collins’ unique collection of haiku. iI you’re intimidated by poetry, read Collins’ Introduction to Poetry and you’ll feel much better.

In our new home in NH, the big poster board doesn’t fit on our side by side fridge, but I still post a poem every week on a small white board beside the kitchen sink. I sometimes choose a poem from a book I’m reading, but often I copy a piece I’ve enjoyed from The Writer’s Almanac. Our Sunday paper also prints Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry, which is an excellent source. And I read Poetry Daily, and check out its news column on Mondays, which features other regular poetry columns, like the Washington Post’s syndicated “Poet’s Choice.”

Most of these columns have been anthologized — if you prefer a nice thick book to a weekly or daily poem, check out Garrison Keillor’s Good Poems and Good Poems for Hard Times, various collections of the Poet’s Choice columns (including one I’ll talk more about in a moment), and a couple of collections from Poetry Daily.

In April, I also get a poem of the day in my email box from Poetry Daily (the rest of the year, the poem of the day is on the website), and another from Alfred A. Knopf’s Borzoi Reader. It’s interesting to read poems, some new to me, some familiar, in light of the comments of the various editors who select them. These brief editorial additions may clarify or expand upon my understanding of the poem itself, or may provide interesting insights into the poet’s life and work, or the background behind the poem at hand. I appreciate these reflections, which may also help me to better understand the poet who selected and commented on the poem as well, and to see the many ways writers’ own reading influences their work.

I’m currently reading Poet’s Choice, an anthology edited by Edward Hirsch and compiled in two sections: international poets and American poets. In both sections, I am enjoying Hirsch’s brief essays, which manage to be both erudite and conversational. I feel as if I am chatting with Hirsch over tea and poems as I read. The book is a collection of Hirsch’s columns as I mentioned above. Poet’s Choice is a long running column, which began under then poet laureate Robert Hass in 1997; Rita Dove wrote the column for two years, then Hirsch took over, and Robert Pinsky just recently handed Poet’s Choice over to Mary Karr. You can read it online if your paper doesn’t print it.

Unlike Poetry Daily, which has a different poet commentator in its April emails, and The Writer’s Almanac, which is always Garrison Keillor’s selection (and may or may not include commentary on that day’s poet), Poet’s Choice is interesting because over the years these poets have each spent a long time writing the column, so readers can develop a sense of the aesthetic tastes and critical perspectives of each columnist, all poets themselves.

If you enjoy that kind of commentary, you might also like some other anthologies I’ve recently read. Robert Bly’s News of the Universe: Poems of Twofold Consciousness is a collection he edited for the Sierra Club, with annotations and essays Bly wrote on the development of mankind’s relationship with nature through poetry. Many of the translations are his own, and if you enjoy those, you’d like The Winged Energy of Delight, which is an entire anthology of Bly’s translations. Reading about his process and philosophy of translation is fascinating, and I was left wanting to read more of many of the poets in this collection.

Another collection I haven’t read yet but will check out of the library as soon as I’ve finished Poet’s Choice is Jane Hirshfield’s Women In Praise of the Sacred: Forty-Three Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women. In the companion book to Bill Moyers’ documentary about the Dodge Poetry Festival, Fooling With Words, the interview with Hirshfield led me to read her most recent book, After. Hirshfield studied Zen for several years, and her poems have a clear, clean style that makes me think of them as open doors waiting for me to enter. Yet while simple to enter, her work is also full of sensory detail and rich beauty. I look forward to reading her collection of translations.

An earlier bookconscious post reviewed the excellent local poetry event Poet’s Three, featuring Charles Simic, Maxine Kumin, and Donald Hall. One reason I’ve sought out more poetry in translation is that Simic, who is a prolific translator himself, is an advocate for poetry in translation. I’ve usually tried to find poetry from the countries my family is learning about, but I realized there are many more poets out there that I would like to know better. For a person fascinated with interconnectedness, poetry offers endless links between cultures and communities, through time and history; people have been drawn to poetic forms to tell their stories and express their feelings and thoughts through oral and written poetry for thousands of years.

And speaking of making connections, when the kids choose a country for our family to explore as part of our life learning, I always try to seek out literature from that country, as bookconscious readers know from my earlier post about Indonesian novelist Praemodya’s Girl from the Coast. We’re currently learning about Portugal, and a few weeks ago I read Fernando Pessoa & Co.: Selected Poems. Pessoa is probably Portugal’s best known poet; his popularity is aided by the fact that he is known by several names, because he wrote in several personas.

I enjoyed the collection of his work, which is divided into sections by pseudonym. The various personas have distinctive voices and styles, but I thought the poems in this collection shared a sense of philosophical seeking, and many had a lyrical quality that made them roll along the page — or off the tongue. Many fado artists in Portugal seem to agree, because Pessoa’s work has remained popular in part through this musical tradition, which travel guru Rick Steves compares to blues music.

Reading in other genres, especially nonfiction, often leads me to new poetic explorations. In my last bookconscious entry, I discussed some Iranian memoirs. Since then, I’ve read Jasmine and Stars: Reading More than Lolita in Tehran, by Fatemeh Keshavarz. Besides being a very thorough rebuttal of the New Orientalist literature represented by Reading Lolita in Tehran, and a fascinating look at the “whole” Iran Keshavarz knows and loves, Jasmine and Stars has ignited my curiosity about Persian poetry. Like many Americans, I’ve read a little bit of Rumi; Keshavarz writes passionately of the prominence of poetry in Iranian culture and recommends the work of Hafez and Saadi among many others. So far I haven’t had a chance to look for these poets’ works, but they’re on my “to read” list.

As I embarked on my “Independent MFA” in January, I made it a goal to read poetry widely — as I can do via the sources I’ve listed so far — and also deeply, choosing some poets and reading their collections more thoroughly and thoughtfully. I’ve also made it a goal to attend as many literary events as possible. At Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord, I have try to get to the monthly book group discussion, and this month we read Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf. I can’t remember ever reading Beowulf before, so it was interesting hearing what other readers had to say, and also reading reviews of the Heaney translation online, and historical background about the work itself.

It’s remarkable that the poem survived for centuries before it was transcribed and translated into English. As a piece of literary history, it’s amazing. Heaney’s translation is very beautiful — read some of it aloud and you’ll feel the mists of time envelop you. Don’t skip the fine introduction, which includes Heaney’s remembrance of studying Anglo Saxon in college and realizing his own Irish Gaelic was historically and linguistically linked with the origins of English, and that setting aside the identity issues of political, cultural, and ethnic divisions, language could be “an entry into further language.”

Also at Gibson’s I had the pleasure of hearing Alice Fogel read a couple of weeks ago. Besides writing, Ms. Fogel also creates one of a kind clothing from recycled fabrics. Her poetry is multi-dimensional - with each subsequent reading, you notice some detail you didn’t see before, and the way she shapes meaning with words adds to the layered feeling of her lush pieces, like elaborately pieced, intricately stitched quilts. Listening to her read, I learned more about her method of honing in on certain sounds or types of words as she crafts a poem. One discouraging note: she told the audience that her current book, Be That Empty, took ten years to publish. That’s after she wrote the poems, revised, selected, and put together the collection - ten years of rejection notices. It takes perseverance to be a poet.

Another part of my writing life is connecting with other writers, and last weekend I had a fantastic time doing just that at Writers’ Day, the New Hampshire Writers’ Project spring conference. I was able to hear Wesley McNair, the keynote, read his poems and discuss his writing process in my first workshop session of the day. McNair’s method of exploratory note taking, questioning, associating, and marking up his thoughts and ideas before he begins a poem is intriguing, and I intend to try to do more of this preparatory writing, which I’ve often done in my head. In both his keynote address and the question and answer period of the workshop, he discussed his longtime friendship and correspondence with Donald Hall, as well as other notable poets.

McNair’s work is a verbal snapshot of American life, particularly of rural New England, and of ordinary people. It’s also very personal; his work is a narrative of his life and his family history, as well as the cultural history of our country, and he spoke to us about tapping our own wells of experience in our poems. I bought and am reading The Town of No & My Brother Running, as well as his essays on poetry and place, Mapping the Heart. He signed my books and offered encouragement — he is a very warm, personable guy, who doesn’t lord his brilliance over his audience nor put on academic airs.

I had a visiting professor during my sophomore year at Goucher College, who taught an advanced poetry seminar, turn me off to that kind of writer (the kind with a self-important attitude, especially towards those less published than themselves) for good; I still can’t read that man’s work without thinking of his condescension towards we poor peon undergrads. McNair, in pleasant contrast, was delightful: generous with his time and his ideas, thoughtful and gracious.

My third workshop at Writers’ Day was with Maggie Dietz, whose session was titled, “The Art of Evocation in the Single Image Poem.” We looked at poems by Denise Levertov and William Carlos Williams and tried an imagery exercise. She signed a copy of her book Perennial Fall, which won the Jane Kenyon award from New Hampshire Writers’ Project in the fall. We also chatted briefly about the fact that she has nine month old twins — a boy and a girl, like my niece and nephew. I admit to wondering how she manages to be an accomplished, critically acclaimed poet, lecturer at Boston University, assistant poetry editor at Slate, and co-editor of the popular Favorite Poem Project books, as well as mother of infant twins, but I pushed these thoughts out of my mind and vowed to use what I learned in her workshop in future poems.

So that’s the whirlwind of words that is going on in the bookconscious house lately. We’re also reading many other things — Katherine is re-reading all the Harry Potter books, she and I are enjoying Caddie Woodlawn together, Gregory is reading Sneaker Wars, and I’m reading a memoir called Stuffed by Patricia Volk, which is part of the Concord Public library’s spring series of book discussions on food and family. Steve recently read The Gunslinger Born, a graphic novel based on Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, and he’s reading a collection of Donald Hall’s essays, Here at Eagle Pond. Since we’re learning about Portugal, I am also reading a novel by Jose Saramago, All the Names.

Here’s to late spring nights with a book, a bowl of popcorn, and the Red Sox game on low. Happy National Poetry Month — and don’t forget to look for frogs and be aware of your stress.

Misunderstandings, musings, and selective memory: memoirs of Iran

Say or read the word Iran and immediately images come to mind. What do you see? Bearded men? Chador clad women? Mosques? Do you imagine plates of aromatic Persian food, boisterous parties, or a Ford Explorer driven by a woman with “big hair,” blasting U2 music near the shrine of Imam Khomeini?

Readers of Honeymoon in Purdah by Alison Wearing are left with these new images of Iran. Wearing, a Canadian travel writer, went to Iran with her gay roommate. They posed as a husband and wife on their honeymoon, complete with forged marriage certificate, and although the book doesn’t say how long they spent in Iran, they traveled all over the country (Iran is nearly as large as Alaska in area), and only one person in the book suspects they are not really married.

So much for the honeymoon, but where is Purdah, you ask? Purdah is not a place but a condition: it is the separation of women from men, symbolized so vividly for us in the west by the head to toe cloak, which you may know from media reports on Afghanistan or other Muslim countries as a burqa. in Honeymoon, we get to go along as Wearing shops for her cloak, called a chador in Iran, that the strictist interpretation of purdah requires. As she journeys, the experience of being covered is a big part of Wearing’s unfolding revelations about Iran, and she also tends to describe places and situations in part based on how much women are covered up or when they feel comfortable unwrapping the layers.

Honeymoon in Purdah is a travel memoir, but also, as Wearing herself writes in the author’s note at the beginning of the book, “a sketchbook, a collection of my impressions of Iran and its people.” She says a few sentences later, “As is the case with many portraits, their truth is not in their detail, but their spirit.” This last statement references her confession to the reader that some of the Iranians in the book are “collages” — “painted,” she explains, from many Iranians’ stories in order to protect the identities of the people Wearing met.

We have all heard, of course, that Iran is a dangerous place, especially for women — this is accepted fact in the west. Two other books I read in the past couple of years, Reading Lolita In Tehran and Persepolis, are both by Iranians who have settled abroad to avoid the persecution going on in their country. But do we know, or do we use the image we’ve learned, through books like these and the media coverage of Iran, to form a misunderstanding of the nation and its people?

Of course Americans also have the images of Iran from the hostage crisis permanently in our national memory. Iran then appeared to be a place to fanatical America-haters, radical students, violent men whipped into action by fanatical ayatollahs larger than life. I’ve been thinking a lot about the way we form ideas about other countries, and how other countries see America, and I think much of what we think we know is predicated on misunderstandings.

Honeymoon is full of anecdotes about the author meeting people who want to leave Iran, who want to go to Canada, who talk about friends and relatives abroad. Wearing repeatedly meets Iranians who practically beg her to judge their culture for herself and tell others about Iran’s positive qualities. She even comes across Iranians who are tolerant of (and in some cases are adherents of) non-Muslim faiths. Many of these same Iranians also have unfair or inaccurate views of the west, especially of America. When the possibility of military action against Iran is a regular topic in the press, I find it worrying that our two countries’ perceptions are so heavily predicated on misunderstandings, myths, manipulated images, and outright propaganda on the part of both sides.

As the title suggests, purdah is one of the most culturally charged images for both westerners and Iranians. Although she is traveling pre-9/11, Wearing is also in Iran in the late 1990’s and has to remain covered in pubic. In one telling incident, while in Qom, the city where Ayatollah Khomeini is buried, she is covered head to toe, in long jacket called a manteau, scarf, over her hair, her black shoes barely show, and a man comments on her “nakedness” — their Iranian host tells her she looks western, even with her modest dress, because she isn’t wearing her chador. Wearing feels she’s being conservative and respectful, the man who comments thinks she’s practically naked; their perceptions, colored by their cultural perspectives, are striking.

Given the pervasive preconceptions, how can there ever be real understanding? Travel certainly seems to open Wearing’s eyes. She meets plenty of Iranians, both men and women, who have a more nuanced view of purdah, or who explain why they value it gently and kindly, and who help her, compliment her, or even just ask her how she likes being covered. I was impressed reading about these experiences; I wondered how many Americans would be so reasonable about discussing something controversial with strangers. I confess I also wondered how kindly she would have been treated if she was American and not Canadian. Paranoia or misunderstanding? I can’t say for sure, but probably some of both.

One thing is certain: Wearing finds plenty of warmth in Iran. Total strangers take her and her “husband” home for dinner, pay for their meals out or their cab fare, drive them to their destinations, help them find lodging, take them shopping. What struck me as I read was the lack of travel horror stories — everyone Wearing and her companion meets is anxious to feed them, entertain them, show them Iran’s sites, and open their homes and families with them. When she is overheated from wearing her black chador in hot weather, or when they find themselves in a substandard hotel, ordinary Iranians intervene to help. It’s clear she respects and admires many things about Iranian culture, especially the tenderness they openly express towards each other and towards their guests.

But Wearing knows, and openly tells readers, she cannot really understand Iran, no matter how hard she tries. And you sense that even the Iranians she meets who mock or flout some of the strict rules (no playing cards, no wine, no western music), or admit to disagreeing with the regime, are still fearful of the west, especially America, which is widely viewed, even in the mid-1990’s, as an oil hungry place with a powerful military, a nation that is a threat to Iranian security.

A man tells them that his country knows non Islamic people from the west, even Americans, are good, it’s just governments that are bad. When she meets women who are dealing with abuse or discrimination, or men who have been imprisoned or intimidated, she realizes that no matter how hard her new friends impress her with their love and openness, Iran is ruled by a regime unafraid to use terror to control its own people. There can be no generalizations on either side.

Just as Americans associate Iran with the hostage crisis, Iranians think of America as the nation that supported the Shah. Like the authors of Reading Lolita and Persepolis, Wearing explains that most Iranians were glad to see the Shah go, because pre-revolution Iran was a nation where power and money was concentrated in the ruling class, and the Shah’s secret police were as ruthless as their radical Islamic successors. Many Iranians welcomed revolution, only to be disillusioned by the rise of the Islamic rulers. Given all the political and social turmoil Iranians have lived through, the generosity towards strangers that Wearing experiences in Iran is very impressive.

In reading these books I am doing the armchair version of what Wearing set out to do: I want to try to understand Iran and its people, as best I can. Much has been made recently of memoir as a selective art form, which reflects “truth” only insofar as the author remembers, or writes, truthfully. All three books I mention here are a part of the memoir genre, and all three reflect, like any book, the authors’ viewpoints.

But some critics, especially other Iranian expatriates, felt that Reading Lolita in Tehran played into the Bush administration’s Iranian agenda. Hamid Dabashi, a professor at Columbia, went so far as to suggest that Azar Nafisi is a tool of the neocons, because her book is a “selective memory” of Iranian society that only speaks to the American mistrust and misunderstanding of Islamic ideas. Dabashi says the Iranian regime should go, he agrees that misogynist laws are wrong, but he feels that books like Reading Lolita merely perpetuate the one dimensional viewpoint westerners have of life in Iran.

I wonder what Dabashi thinks of Honeymoon in Purdah? Perhaps it is not on his radar since it was nowhere near as popular. In reviewing the reviews, I think I understand his and other Iranians’ bemusement or anger at Reading Lolita — I can see that if that book and/or Persepolis were the only things I’d ever read about Iran, I might form a view of the country only a neo-con could love. The fear that these overwhelmingly bleak views of Muslim nations will further the goals of American hawks who hint at the potential for expanding the war on terror from Iraq and Afghanistan into Iran seems legitimate. I also think it’s unlikely, given the proliferation of information available, that someone would not have heard of Iran’s rich history and culture, or the indomitable spirit of the Iranian people as they’ve advanced reforms in the past few years.

Dabashi seems to suspect that at least in the case of Reading Lolita, the effort to provide a selective view of Iran is deliberate. Iranians, interviewed for a Washington Post piece in 2004 seemed to view the book more as historical record than reality, however. In that light, all of these books are dated, since Marjane Satrapi, author of Persepolis, left Iran in her early 20’s (sometime in the early 1990’s), Wearing was in Iran during the commemoration of the 6th anniversary of Khomeini’s death, which would have been 1995, and Reading Lolita author Azar Nafizi left Iran in 1997.

In fact, a more recent book has piqued my interest: Jasmine and Stars: Reading More than Lolita in Tehran, which came out about a year ago. In an interview, the book’s author, Fatemeh Keshavarz, says she wrote her book because she felt compelled to offer a “cultural handshake” to readers. She explains, “Both Iranians and Americans have been barred from this handshake by the political perspectives that make every American a greedy imperialist and every Iranian a petty fanatic. In Jasmine and Stars I suggest we say enough is enough and talk to each other — we will be surprised at how similar we are.”

Just the insight I was grasping for. This sounds like a bookconscious must-read, and I’ve put in an ILL request for it, so stay tuned. In fairness to Wearing, I think she did her best to write such a cultural handshake with Honeymoon in Purdah, albeit from an outsider’s point of view. Admittedly, I had some misgivings about the premise of the book when I realized the author could travel in Iran only by pretending to be married. It seemed to me that faking one’s identity would color any personal interactions, and made me suspicious of her ability to be truthful, when she herself was engaged in deceit.

As I consider the ruse, however, I see that it was necessary in order for her to travel so extensively in Iran at the time, and perhaps allowed her to gain insight into life there in way she would have been unable to do if the Iranians she met were distracted by her own story. Like the scarf, her marriage allows her to travel as close to the culture as she can, and to blend into the country as well as the story she tells. I think Wearing does a good job of trying to present Iran as a culturally rich, diverse, and yes, even joyful place. She found bleakness, she described some Iranians whose lives seem hopeless or miserable, and she definitely made readers aware of the limits of purdah. But she also showed the beauty of the human spirit, and the universal balm of love, friendship, and family.

Honeymoon in Purdah accomplishes what all good travel writing hopes to do — makes the reader wish to visit the place the author describes. Even though she doesn’t gloss over the hardships and complications of travel in Iran, Wearing’s descriptions of the poetry of ordinary sights and sounds in Iran are a sensual feast. Despite my wondering which of the people she meets are real and which are composites, I was drawn into the book. The genuine curiosity on the part of Iranians about her life and her travels, and above all, the depth of the openness, caring, and concern for her happiness and well being that her many new Iranian friends showed her and her “husband,” makes Honeymoon a multi-dimensional memoir. Wearing doesn’t tell readers what to think, but she does tell us how her experiences made her feel throughout the journey. Which got me to thinking, musing, questioning, seeking — and that is the bookconscious experience I hope for when I read.

Poets Three

Last week the bookconscious family was privileged to attend a historic poetry reading. Mike Pride, editor of the Concord Monitor, brought together the three U.S. poets laureate from New Hampshire — Maxine Kumin, who served in 1981-82; Donald Hall, who served in 2006-07; and Charles Simic, the current poet laureate — for a reading at the Concord Auditorium. Here’s the article from the paper about the event, which benefited the NH Writers’ Project.

Steve and I had both heard rumors of the event and we bought our tickets the day they went on sale — imagine, hearing such literary giants in one place! When Charles Simic was named to the post in August, many reports noted the interesting fact that our small state has produced three poets laureate. Maxine Kumin speculated playfully that there’s something in the water. I sincerely hope so, and I am drinking plenty of water.

The evening began with Mike Pride explaining that he planned the reading not only in honor of having three poets laureate in NH, but also because after the heavy campaigning leading up to the presidential primary, we are all in need of poetry. Political rhetoric, Pride explained, sounds pretty but is designed to stretch the truth or distract us from it, while poetry tries to tell the truth as beautifully as possible. After hearing Mitt Romney announce to Michigan voters that he has the auto industry in his veins, Pride said, he knew the poetry event couldn’t happen at a better time. The audience responded very enthusiastically to this observation!

Next Pride announced that the poets would read in the order they’d been poet laureate, and that in honor of Simic, Kumin and Hall would each read one of his poems before reading their own.

Maxine Kumin read first. I was fortunate to meet Kumin at her reading in December at Main Street Bookends in Warner. Despite being one of the most lauded writers in American literature today, Kumin is also warm, down-to-earth, and accessible. Meeting her in a small venue like that was terrific. Many of the poems she read that day were from her newest collection, Still to Mow, but she also read some old favorites. She also took time to tell us about each poem, and to chat with the audience a bit. It felt like a discussion among neighbors in a small town.

At Poets Three, she opened with Simic’s Paradise Motel. Then she read thirteen of her own poems, spanning her career. Presence was one of my daughter’s favorites of the evening, because of the interesting animal imagery at the beginning. Anyone who has looked up at a movement seen from the corner of one’s eye and wondered what, exactly, just passed by, will chuckle over this poem’s opening lines.

Some of her newer poems, including Mulching and a villanelle called Entering Houses at Night, deal with Kumin’s distress over current events like the war and the use of torture. Although many of her poems are set in or around her New Hampshire farm and the surrounding woodlands, Kumin is not just a pastoral poet. She’s long dealt with themes of relationship, between people privately and among the larger human family.

I love Mulching, from the new book. It’s about the frustration and helplessness she feels spreading out a year’s worth of bad news in her garden, in the form of old newspapers. I learned this mulching technique from one of Kumin’s essays and I can attest to the feeling: you lay out all the papers and think, “What a mess we’re in.”

Kumin also read Jack, which is the title poem of an earlier collection. She introduced it by saying it is a sad poem — it’s a story of regret. Another emotional, yearning poem she read, The Sunday Phone Call, imagines the poet’s father calling from the beyond, asking about her near fatal accident. Both of these poems are set on her farm, as is Seven Caveats In May. The children enjoyed this far more light-hearted poem. She closed with introspective poems, Looking Back in My 81st Year, which reflects on her life decisions as a young woman, and Morning Swim, which she recited from memory.

Donald Hall is also known for his artful evoking of New Hampshire’s countryside and people; one of his most famous poems, Ox Cart Man, became a Caldecott winning picture book with illustrations by Barbara Cooney. My children were more familiar with Hall’s work; in addition to Ox Cart Man, he has written several other children’s books that bring New Hampshire’s past alive, including Lucy’s Summer and Lucy’s Christmas (which are about Hall’s mother’s childhood), Old Home Day (a NH tradition), and The Milkman’s Boy (about his family’s dairy business in the early 1900’s), The Man Who Lived Alone, and When Willard Met Babe Ruth. They also heard him read at the Monitor’s event celebrating the book The New Hampshire Century back in 2000.

Hall opened with one of Simic’s poems as well (I wrote the title down as “I’ve Had My Little Stroll”), and then told the audience he’d recently come out of a period of about two and a half years during which he couldn’t work on poems. In over sixty years of writing daily, Hall said, he’d never had such a time before. Before he read five new poems written after this time, he explained that they came out of depression, although he wasn’t sure which caused the other: the dry spell bringing on depression or vice versa.

When I heard Hall read in 2000, he shared a new poem, and I remember thinking how remarkable this is, in an era where most literature is slickly packaged and marketed, to hear an artist discuss work that hadn’t even been published yet. The five recent poems Hall read were full of his sadness and grief; as with many earlier poems, the death of his wife, poet Jane Kenyon, featured prominently.

After this very serious start, Hall turned to some poems written before his dry spell. These included Mr Wakeville on Interstate 90, (scroll down to find the poem) which Hall read because E.L. Doctorow recently published a story in The New Yorker which had its inspiration from the same Hawthorne short story that inspired this poem. It’s about a man who disappears and goes on to lead a new life as someone else in another place.

Hall also read Old Roses, a favorite of mine for its sense of the timelessness of life’s most beautiful things, and Affirmation, one of the more upbeat of his grief poems. Hall’s poetic powers are strong enough to squeeze a bit of affirmation from the most distressing human experiences: loss of friendship and love. He shakes his fist at fate and yet embraces whatever it throws at him. For his last poem, Hall told the audience that many poets have written on their birthdays, but none were like his birthday poem, On Reaching the Age of 200. My son admired this absurdist piece.

As part of our life learning, we post a “poem of the week” for the family to enjoy. Most weeks I pick a poem, but the kids have both taken turns choosing. In my experience with both younger kids and teens in workshops, children tend to respond positively to poetry that not only engages the reader with the language of comparison, but also does so in a forthright or humorous way. I think this explains why my daughter liked “The Presence,” where Kumin imagines seeing “a porcupine carrying a tennis racket,” and my son liked the Hall poem about a man’s 200th birthday.

Most kids relate to poetic language — children naturally make comparisons as they acquire language and sort out the world around them. But kids are often turned off by poems that seem too deep or impenetrable. Frankly, most adults feel that way, too. No one likes to read something and feel clueless — we want to feel we get what the poet means and it doesn’t give us a headache to figure it out.

My grandmother, a former English teacher, tells me that good poetry shows readers the poet’s way of looking at the world differently; I would add that it has to offer the reader a way of seeing for themselves. A poem doesn’t have much of an audience if it requires some kind of insider information to understand it. A really good poem is accessible from the first reading, but has more to offer beneath the surface.

Charles Simic’s work definitely fits that description. When I began sharing his work with my children, they really enjoyed Watermelons and Stone. I am partial to two others, one I read in the Monitor, In the Library, and another Simic read Tuesday night, The Clocks of the Dead. He introduced that poem by telling the audience he wrote it some time in the 80’s or 90’s when he noticed that clocks no longer tick, because they are battery operated.

Similarly, he introduced Unmade Beds by noting that if you walk along the corridor of a hotel when doors are open for cleaning, you see that unmade beds all have a unique character. You do, if you are a poet. If you are Simic, you then get this down in a poem that seems somewhat absurd at first, but ends a mere 18 lines later with an observation of the human condition.

Another poem he read on Tuesday that makes me smile every time I read it is My Turn to Confess. I’m not a fan of really in-your-face confessional poetry, for the same reason I don’t like novels that include graphically sexual or violent passages. Too much information, as the saying goes. Simic said he is sometimes asked if he’s a confessional poet, and this poem is his answer. In my view, it’s always a bonus when a brilliant writer is also able to laugh at him or herself. But Simic’s humor is unique, his imagery sometimes a bit bizarre, and his poems don’t let the reader off easily — you may find yourself smiling but also asking, “what did he say?” and reading them over. You won’t be sorry you did.

As a writer, I am interested in hearing about how other writers work. You can drive yourself crazy if you take all the various approaches to heart and try to emulate every great writer’s model, but what I’ve read of Simic’s method appeals to me. He touched on his way of working a bit when he introduced That Little Something, which he said he had for 20-30 years before he “found” the ending. He told editor Mike Pride something of his process in an interview for the Concord Monitor after he was named poet laureate.

What I find interesting is that he doesn’t worry about finishing a poem in a timely fashion; workshop leaders and writing teachers often tell students that the most important thing is to work on a piece while it’s fresh, get through the drafts and try to nail it while you’re still in the throes of the idea. Simic seems to see writing as more of a lifetime commitment, with old ideas safely set down in notebooks to return to and draw from. I like the idea of this well of images and thoughts, there to sip or dip into.

Depending on the poem, there may be some benefit to getting a draft finished and revising it while it’s new, but I think going back to revisit a poem after getting some distance can be useful, too. Maxine Kumin said something similar in an interview printed in a book called To Make a Prairie, but instead of notebooks she keeps a box of abandoned poems she calls her bone pile, and looks through it for what can be taken and used anew. Renewing a conversation with old ideas seems like a good practice, to see what might evolve, as Simic says, from this raw material. Looking over what was important at another point in one’s writing life could lead to new connections.

Simic closed with a poem I heard him read on a poetry podcast, In the Planetarium, another witty examination of modern life. He remarked before he read the poem that today, you don’t have to travel any farther than the nearest planetarium to see the stars from any earthly vantage point, and this seemed to tickle him. It’s this combination of close observation and humor, along with Simic’s spare, fresh imagery, that makes his poetry appealing even when you aren’t quite sure where it’s taking you.

Poets three, poets fascinating, poets brilliant — Kumin, Hall, and Simic, poets to read and savor, at different times and for different reasons, poets from the place that feels like home to me even though I am not “from” here. Perhaps another reason I enjoy these poets is that they each came to live in New Hampshire in adulthood, like I have. It’s a good place for writers. Now if you’ll excuse me, I am going to go drink a glass of water.

Universal aspirations from colonial Indonesia: The Girl from the Coast

After a hiatus during our move and the holidays, the bookconscious family has returned to our ongoing exploration of the countries of the world. We began enjoying a “country of the month” when the children were small, and over the years this has evolved into a regular part of our life learning together, in some variation.

Over New Year’s weekend I suggested we get back into our armchair tour of the world, (well, nearly armchair: in 2005 we took our learning on the road and visited Greece in what we billed the “Mother of All Field Trips”) and when even the teenager made signs of assent, I hurriedly consulted the world map hanging in our family room. We tag each country we’ve explored with a little arrow, and my eyes landed on unmarked territory in the Pacific: Indonesia.

When you hear that word, what comes to mind? Political unrest? Religious extremism? Natural disasters? Extreme poverty? Barack Obama as a school boy? Our impressions of the world are too often shaped by headlines and sound bites. Yet even these snippets remind us of our interconnectedness, the links that make everything relevant. My own reading of Eat, Pray, Love, as well as National Geographic’s recent feature on “volcano culture” had added to my images of Indonesia, so I was eager to dig deeper and learn more about this incredibly diverse nation.

Since the aforementioned teenager is interested in history and politics, as well as food, and his younger sister is a nature lover who wants to learn about the flora and fauna of each country we explore, both of them saw merit in my suggestion: Indonesia, to them, meant rice, current events, the Ring of Fire, and cool wildlife. Unfortunately, neither of them could remember the amazing Indonesian music we enjoyed during a family day at Benaroya Hall in Seattle several years ago (Katherine was probably only 2 or 3 at the time): a gamelan orchestra and Balinese monkey chant, with audience participation. If you ever get a chance to see or take part in either of these, do. The chant was the most fun I’ve ever had in a concert hall (ok, Sing Along Sound of Music comes close; U2 is on another plane altogether, and was in an arena).

Consensus formed, we dug out of the first snow of 2008, hit the library and the internet, and brought home appealing Indonesia materials for all: a curry cookbook, volumes on volcanoes and endangered species, “fact books” to give us an overview of the country, folktales, websites on the music and art of Indonesia, and more. For myself, I chose a book of Indonesian poetry (have I mentioned lately how much I love Concord and its library?), a history book, and a novel, The Girl from the Coast.

A quick Googling of the author, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, told me that he was Indonesia’s most prominent writer, and a member of the generation that brought Indonesia out of colonial rule (under the Dutch) and occupation (by the Japanese) through the painful transition to independence in the late 1940’s. Besides being a major literary figure, often mentioned as a Nobel contender, Pramoedya was also a political and social activist and as such, he irritated the governments of both Sukarno, Indonesia’s first president, and Suharto, who took over when the army ousted Sukarno in the sixties and remained in power until 1998. Pramoedya’s open criticism came at great personal cost.

Suharto jailed Pramoedya for 17 years; despite being beaten and mistreated, and despite having his books banned and manuscripts destroyed, Pramoedya continued to “write” in jail, telling the other prisoners the stories that would become his most famous work, a series of four novels called the “Buru Quartet,” for the prison where he wrote them. After his release in 1979, Pramoedya remained under house arrest until 1992.

During his house arrest he published The Girl from the Coast. It was meant to be the first book in a trilogy, but the other two novels were among the materials the Suharto government destroyed when he was arrested. Like many of Pramoedya’s books, The Girl from the Coast is based on real events — in this case, his own grandmother’s life. The novel deals not only with colonial power, but also with the feudalism of traditional Indonesian culture. Armed with this information, my enjoyment of the novel was even greater.

Rich in details that bring 19th century colonial Java alive even for a person safe in her armchair in New England, The Girl from the Coast is a finely written, emotionally provocative story. It resonated even more deeply with me, knowing Pramoedya’s own life story. I felt for the novel’s title character not only because her class and gender rendered her powerless but also because, were she to step from the pages of the book, our heroine would be proud of her flesh and blood grandson’s tireless struggle against oppression.

In bringing the nameless girl, plucked from her village to be the “practice wife” of an aristocrat in the city, to life in these pages, Pramoedya ensures that no one can forget the marginalized poor, who suffer at the hands of the powerful and the religiously dominant. In his writing, Pramoedya recognized that not only does government have the potential to oppress, but also that religious dogma can reinforce power structures by creating a sense of divine sanction of the actions of corrupt rulers.

In The Girl from the Coast, Indonesia is stratified along economic, religious, and cultural lines. Some of the characters take comfort in this and some struggle with their lot in life, but all of them seem to accept that they are assigned a position and must carry out their role. As my family and I read about Indonesia we’ve learned that while the newly independent nation was founded on an idealist political philosophy of unity called Pancasila, the country has always been multi-ethnic, with hundreds of languages, and many indigenous and imported cultural influences.

It is also home to four of the major religions of the world: Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity, as well as other belief systems. According to a book I’m reading aloud to the kids, Cultures of the World: Indonesia, by Gouri Mirpuri and Robert Cooper, the many cultural and religious influences, combined with “adat” — an “unwritten code of traditional behavior,” govern all aspects of Indonesian life. Belief, ritual, custom, social position, conformity to one’s family and village expectations, and allegiance to religious, family, and political leadership are as important to Indonesians as the unity and tolerance of Pancasila.

So even in modern Indonesia, complex layers of religion and custom, with importance placed on adherence to social norms and domination of certain segments of society as well as fear of spiritual retribution not only from God but also ancestors and the spirits (of the sea, the mountains, and other natural forces), make the country’s political and economic structures challenging to navigate, especially for the lower classes or minorities. Add to this the economic and political disparity of colonialism during The Girl from the Coast, and you have a setting where people’s struggle to survive and thrive can bring out the worst in human nature.

But as with anyplace where people face hardship and adversity, the Indonesia of this novel is also a place where anyone, even an illiterate girl from a fishing village, a girl whose value in society is decided entirely by men, a girl who is no more than property, can act nobly. When she realizes she is about to be cast aside by her city husband, the girl decides she will act on behalf of her child rather than herself. She becomes an exile from both her old life and her new one, but she ensures that her daughter will have a better life, even as she struggles to decide what that means.

In an epilogue that Pramoedya and his translator added to the English edition of The Girl from the Coast, readers learn that the girl’s selfless concern for her child ultimately leads her out of her lonely misery. While I regret the loss of the rest of the trilogy, I am grateful that Pramoedya had the forethought to give readers closure, because he died in 2006, never having re-written the lost books.

As we’ve studied the history and culture of many countries around the world, my family and I have been able to see how certain themes (the power of mother love, the struggle between good and evil, and the wisdom of experience, for example) and certain character types (such as an evil overlord, wise old woman, pure-hearted young woman, and fool or jester) appear in literature and folklore everywhere. The Girl from the Coast contains these folkloric elements as well, and Pramoedya uses them to cast light on colonial Indonesia’s inequality and the ways in which people adapt to deal with it.

I was particularly impressed with the empathy with which he writes his female characters, all of whom are important to the outcome of the book. Perhaps his own experience with oppression helped him to describe the lot of colonial era Indonesian women; however, he also nails the innocence and inexperience of his protagonist, and I have rarely read such a poignant description of the heart wrenching, life changing love of a mother for her infant as that which Pramoedya renders in The Girl from the Coast’s dramatic climax.

In his life and writing, this great writer fought oppression and hoped that with justice and good government (which for him meant one not influenced by the financial corruption he associated with capitalism, as well as one which upheld the human rights of all its citizens) people would finally get along and work together for a better world. When he died, he’d witnessed some of the goodness he knew was possible, in the humanitarian response to the 2004 tsunami, and he’d been able to travel and publish again. But he had also written critically of the Indonesian government in his last years, never ceasing to speak for freedom, and to defend the principles his nation’s founders codified in Pancasila.

In light of both history and current events, one can hope that transparency, tolerance, social justice, and respect for human rights will become the hallmarks of good government everywhere. It is thanks to people like Pramoedya, who are willing to speak up for what is right, that such changes can come about. Read Pramoedya for his humanity, his craft, and his social criticism — but also read his novels for a trip to another culture, right from your armchair, where the universal aspirations of people to live safe, secure, happy lives with their loved ones will remind you that despite our uniqueness and diversity, our flaws and mistakes, humans are one family.

A Christmas tradition

We decorate our house for Christmas in stages. On the first Sunday of advent, we take our homemade wreath and light the first candle at supper time. I like to get out one of our nativity sets, too, so that the kids can start moving the figures of Mary and Joseph a little bit each day, on their way to the stable and the animals. As I write, the kings and their camels are on top of a bookcase across the room from the manger, ready to start their journey.

Along with these first decorations, we take out the collection of Christmas books. This year, the kids weren’t as interested in some of their old favorites. But one book continues to be a part of our advent tradition: The Christmas Mystery by Jostein Gaarder. Throughout December, as we prepare for our holiday celebrations and try to avoid being swept up in the frenzy all around us, this book continues to delight and surprise.

Like an advent calendar, the book is divided into 24 chapters, one to read each day from December 1 to Christmas Eve. In the story, a boy is opening his own advent calendar, which contains a slip of paper for each day. As he reads the unfolding story, first alone and later with his parents, he begins to wonder if what he is reading is real or imagined. He and his parents try to find the man who made the calendar, and to unravel the mystery at the center of the story.

The story in the advent calendar leads readers back through history and across Europe to the Holy Land. It’s helpful to have an atlas and a history encyclopedia or time line handy while you read. The characters in The Christmas Mystery are life learners at heart — they ask questions, look things up, and talk about what they’ve read. And the story within the story is both entertaining and challenging, yet simple at its core: Christmas is about the birth of a baby, who came to teach all people to love one another.

The Christmas Mystery offers plenty of possibilities for “philosophy club” conversations — what our family calls the sorts of discussions that touch on Big Ideas and their meanings. The wise men of the nativity story lead the way for this kind of talk among the book’s characters, and as the boy in the book and the girl in the advent calendar story puzzle over these thoughts, so will you and your family.

Even if you are not sure what you believe yourself, or if you don’t feel equipped for a religious conversation with your children, try The Christmas Mystery. You’ll find that a book about a family reading together is a gentle, accessible way to enter into such deep and complicated ideas, and you may find yourself accessing some of the awe and simple acceptance you felt as a child, imagining a baby who came to bring peace to the world.

If you’re more confident in your own theological groundings, you will be able to talk about your own faith through the story if you wish; the book isn’t dogmatic. Either way, The Christmas Mystery will invite exploration not only of Christmas themes, history, and geography, but also of belief, imagination, truth, miracle, and mystery. Most of all, it will give you time each evening to snuggle on the couch with your family and connect with each other and with everyone else who has shared the Christmas story for more than two thousand years.

It’s almost time to pack up the holiday books and take down the decorations. For adults, this time of year is often considered a lot of fuss, with stress and effort sometimes eclipsing more pleasant aspects of the holiday. Gaarder reminds us that Christmas is at its heart mysterious, important, ancient, and hopeful, and invites us to sit quietly together with our children and ponder not only the story, but our place in it; not only the birth of Jesus, but also the historical and philosophical importance of his message; not only the religious, theological aspect of Christmas but also the sheer joy, peace, and wonder available to those who wish to seek it.

The fragility of humankind

I am a fast reader. It is rare for me to have trouble finishing a library book before it is due. Last night I stayed up reading Helen Epstein’s illuminating and troubling book, The Invisible Cure: Africa, the West, and the Fight Against AIDS. It was worth the afternoon drowsiness today.

This book required the entire two week loan period to do it justice, not only because Epstein laid bare the fragility of humankind in ways that were hard to digest, but also because I began reading with the mistaken belief that I already understood her subject matter. It is time consuming to give up preconceived notions.

In late 1999, I was the mother of a two year old and was in the throes of a long process of growing into the person I hoped my children would look up to (I am not there yet, so many years later, I am afraid). In this period of discovery and questioning, I joined the peace and justice committee at the church my family attended. Not long after, I joined others in my community to help a Kosovar refugee family move into an apartment, learn English, find jobs and schools, and start over.

Becoming involved personally, getting to know someone from another culture, and seeing firsthand what a family of limited means faced as they tried to provide for their children opened my eyes and my mind. I began to learn about social justice and human rights issues.

As the new millennium approached, the peace and justice committee presented an issue I’d never considered before: international debt. I discovered the Jubilee movement, and began to write letters asking US and world leaders to forgive the debts of the most impoverished nations of the world, so that they, like the refugee family I got to know, could provide for themselves.

When I learned about debt, and as my family became interested in the work of nonprofits working in partnership with the poor (such as Habitat for Humanity International, and Heifer Project), I started learning about the developing world. And at the turn of the century, one of the developing world’s greatest challenges, and among the topics most frequently in the news here in the West, was AIDS.

While I was learning and growing with my young family, Helen Epstein was on the front lines of the fight against AIDS. She worked as a research biologist in Uganda, and later returned to Africa many times to observe and report on the AIDS epidemic, and to answer her own questions about how and why the epidemic occurred, why AIDS impacts countries differently, and in what ways the response on the part of both African and Western governments and aid organizations has sometimes succeeded and sometimes failed. In many cases she was asking things other people weren’t, discovering things for herself, searching for her own answers. I recognize this curiosity — Epstein is a fellow life learner.

The Invisible Cure is a challenging read, in large part because Epstein is such an unbiased observer, which forced me to examine my own views as I read. As I became more involved in AIDS advocacy during the past few years, I thought I had read fairly widely about the AIDS crisis. I attended the Global AIDS Alliance’s action conference in 2003, which featured many inspiring and informative speakers, including Millie Katana, a prominent advocate for Uganda’s AIDS victims and a member of the board of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria, and Stephen Lewis, then the UN Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa.

Conference attendees participated in a lobby day on Capitol Hill regarding AIDS relief. Unable to stop thinking about what I’d learned, and with images of mothers like me trying to deal with the epidemic keeping me up at night, I started Southwest Georgians United Against AIDS (now defunct, and honestly, never terribly effective) in order to work on AIDS advocacy. The president of a local AIDS nonprofit in Georgia, which assists people living with HIV/AIDS in ten counties, asked me to join the board, and to spearhead that group’s effort to help a small group of AIDS orphans in a rural area of Uganda.

So I think of myself as a person who is fairly informed about global AIDS, and I opened Epstein’s book feeling like I knew what to expect. Within the first fifty pages I was amazed. Not only by the information Epstein provides on the possible origins of AIDS, the spread of the epidemic, the impact on various countries and within certain populations, and the response. But also by the fact that despite reading a wide variety of mainstream media and specialist literature, I was still misinformed on many aspects of the AIDS epidemic.

For example, I knew that abstinence has been the cornerstone of the Ugandan prevention program during the past several years. I did not realize that Uganda experienced a huge drop in HIV infections under a campaign called “zero grazing,” which did not push abstinence, but rather faithfulness, and that some of the scientific data from Uganda on the success of “zero grazing” has been suppressed or ignored by both pro-condom and pro-abstinence groups, including some of the most prominent world bodies, while ordinary Ugandans have suffered.

Despite the fact that I am a voracious reader, and my daily news intake usually includes two or more NPR programs, a daily newspaper, at least the lead stories from the NY Times online, and both weekly and monthly news magazines of various viewpoints, I had no idea the Global Fund has withdrawn grant money in some countries due to corruption charges and that it’s own leader stepped down amid mismanagement allegations — this is the fund that is touted as the transparent, grassroots, multilateral, effective way to fight AIDS. While I’m glad the anti-corruption mechanisms are working, I am distressed to think of how much money and time have been wasted while people die.

I also did not realize the extent to which the Western response to AIDS is frequently self-benefiting. For example, American aid programs spend large sums of donor money (in the case of USAID and PEPFAR, the government’s programs, that means taxpayers’ money) in America before anyone ever sets foot in Africa. Obviously, there are overhead costs to any program, but Epstein’s examples are stark, clear, and painful.

The Invisible Cure also reinforced my belief in the importance of local community decision making and ownership in any development work. My family prefers to support nonprofits who work with their constituents to find out what they need, rather than dictating one size fits all solutions to them. If some of the most influential forces in global public health could overlook their own interests and understand Uganda’s earlier AIDS prevention and home care successes, how many lives could be saved?

The most refreshing aspect of this important book is Epstein’s fairness. She exposes the problems with liberal, conservative, religious, secular, private and public aid. No one is spared her careful, considerate examination. Neither does she appear to target any one group or point of view for criticism — refreshing, when many activists’ writings simply blast anything to do with whomever they view as the opposition, without really going into the nuances of the points they make. If you’re tired of all the shouting in the public arena and want to read a measured, thoughtful book, this is it.

The one type of program Epstein praises repeatedly in The Invisible Cure are the small, very grassroots, often barely recognized community organizations which work to prevent AIDS and care for its victims. Her book has inspired me to seek out these local organizations somehow, and to channel more of my family’s giving budget towards this type of direct work.

One such nonprofit, a partnership between an African woman who knows her community and its needs and an American who wants to help her fund orphan care, is Zienzele Foundation. Although my motivation for buying a basket from this organization at an alternative giving fair a few weeks ago was partially to assuage my own feelings of guilt — I live in comfort, while across the world, by an accident of birth, people suffer needlessly — I am confident that my purchase truly funds an actual grassroots program, and that there are real people both helping and being helped.

As fragile humans, that is ultimately all we can do in the face of the AIDS crisis or any other overwhelming problem — help each other, as best we can. Thanks to Ms. Epstein’s excellent book, more help is possible for Africa’s HIV/AIDS victims and their families and communities.

Twain’s War Prayer, or everything old is new again

As I mentioned in my last post, the bookconscious household spent October packing up, moving, and unpacking. We are so happy to be mostly settled in our new (to us) home, back in New Hampshire. I noodled around a couple of books while in transit — I read most of Out of Africa and some of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Madness.

My mental and physical chaos weren’t conducive to concentrating for long periods of time. And I was having a hard time keeping track of where various books were — we packed you-don’t-want-to-know-how-many book boxes. When I’d reached the zenith of my move discomfort level, on the very last weekend in our small town in Georgia, I went to the library book sale.

We didn’t really need any more books to pack, but I am a book junkie: I absolutely love the little jolt of pleasure that comes with finding a treasure among the trash at book sales. I found a few potential gems, including one book that fit both my state of mind and my need for portable reading material I could slip in my bag: The War Prayer by Mark Twain.

My edition is illustrated by John Groth. Twain wrote the piece and submitted it to Harper’s Bazaar in 1905, when he had become disillusioned by the Spanish American War, specifically the war in the Philippines. The magazine rejected it, and because he had an exclusive contract, he couldn’t sell it elsewhere. He told a friend in a letter, “I don’t think the prayer will be published in my time. None but the dead are permitted to tell the truth.” His prediction was accurate, and the prayer remained in his papers until 1923, when it came out in a posthumous collection.

The War Prayer is a short piece, describing the scene in a small town church, where the patriotic congregation has gathered to send their young men off to battle. The pastor prays that they will be successful, imploring God to:” . . . make them strong and confident, invincible in the bloody onset; help them to crush the foe, grant to them and to their flag and country imperishable honor and glory –”

What struck me as I read this first part was that Twain could have been describing a church service in America today, sending a unit off to Iraq or Afghanistan. We’re a long way from 1905, yet some of us are still praying for the destruction of our enemies and we are still sending young people off to battle. Depressing that the pastor’s words, written in another century, could fit the current situation so easily:

“Bless our arms, grant us the victory, O Lord our God, Father and Protector of our land and flag!”

Haven’t you seen or heard the same sort of rhetoric in the past few years? I know we did in rural south Georgia. An alarming (although happily, dwindling) number of people believe that God blesses our troops and is on America’s “side” because as the President insists, “our cause is just.”

Never mind that this is exactly the sort of thing we decry in Islamic extremist propaganda. Ministers and other leaders of churches in our little town either stayed quiet or chimed in with the patriotic blather in 2003. In fact, I ruffled some feathers at our Episcopalian parish by asking why we weren’t discussing, as followers of the Prince of Peace, the moral problems with pre-emptive war.

Brief aside: one reason I love my new neighborhood is that there appears to be, based on an unscientific survey of yard signs, a healthy dose of dissent here, and also, not everyone agrees with each other (yes, I am actually glad for people who don’t necessarily share my own views, as much as I am glad for those who do. A spectrum of ideas is the best thing for developing clear thinking, I believe).

My kids have asked how people who claim God’s approval know what God thinks, and I tell them, honestly, that in my opinion, they don’t know, they believe they know. I particularly struggled with explaining the “just cause” idea when it came up — even a kid can see that when it comes to the Iraq war, it’s a simple case of cognitive dissonance, or, “I chose this, so it is the best choice.” Stay the course.

Another brief aside: today was “Issues in Contemporary Science” at our house — with a nod to a fellow unschooler in Atlanta who I piked the name from, this means that the kids and I sit around the computer and read articles from Science News for Kids and the Science section of the New York Times, which comes out on Tuesdays.

Nothing like sitting in your jammies (the kids), drinking coffee (me), and discussing the latest happenings in the world of science, such as a study that explores cognitive dissonance in monkeys and 4 year old children., suggesting the instinct to believe our choices are superior to the alternatives is primal. When I sat down to write about The War Prayer, the connection came to me. Autodidactism is contagious.

My son was only 9 when America invaded Iraq. He asked our rector at the time whether soldiers who killed someone would go to hell, since he’d learned in Sunday school, “Thou shalt not kill.” When the rector shuffled a bit and said we couldn’t really know but that he felt probably not, my innocent child asked in a skeptical voice whether killing was really wrong, then, after all. Also, he asked me why we weren’t looking for the bad guys who flew those planes into buildings anymore, and what Iraq had to do with anything.

The kid’s a genius, and a lot of adult thinkers have come around to his way of seeing things. Twain was writing about the blinding patriotism that accompanies the rationalization process in wartime, and he really nailed it. When you read the second half of The War Prayer, you see the unpleasant, unavoidable truth. It’s not that the current war is a terrible disaster; all war is a terrible disaster.

As Twain’s minister wraps up, a stranger enters the church and begins his own prayer. He claims to be sent by God to speak the “unspoken” other half of the prayer. He tells the congregation they must “pause and think” about what they’ve asked. And then he lets loose with the flip side of praying for their own young men to enjoy a valiant victory in battle: the pain, suffering, destruction, and loss their answered prayers will cause for people just like them who are the families and friends of the young men on the other side of the fight.

Twain doesn’t mince words, and the second part of the prayer is tough to face: “help us to turn them out roofless with their little children,” and “help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells.” You can read for yourself what the congregation thinks of the strange visitor.

I’d like to send the link to all the presidential candidates, to all of Congress. No need to send it to the President, whose thinking is either the best example of cognitive dissonance I’ve ever heard or has been spun that way by his handlers. The thing is, I’m not sure any of them would act on it, just as the people in the church in The War Prayer are unmoved. Twain wrote his prayer before the worst wars of the twentieth century. It was published prior to the development of nuclear weapons. Generations of people have read it.

And we’re stuck, still rationalizing our bellicose behavior, still praying for victory. What is God thinking? Sometimes I think we’ll be sorry to find out. But I’m heartened that my children can clearly see the moral consequences of war regardless of the actions of the adult leaders in their world. Raising them to resist and respond to cognitive dissonance is at least one part of my own war prayer.

Teaching them that they can be the stranger in the room if they have the courage to keep asking questions is another part. On that note, I will email the link to my elected representatives after all. We’ll talk about it tomorrow during “Active Citizenry 101,” also known as reading and discussing the Concord Monitor over breakfast.

A haiku respite

I haven’t been reading at my usual pace lately, because the bookconscious household is less than three weeks away from moving from southwest Georgia to New Hampshire. In the chaos of packing and attending to the myriad of details involved in transferring our lives back to the land of four glorious seasons, I’ve tried to keep up with magazines, but haven’t had time to lose myself in a book. But I did have a birthday in September, and naturally, I received some new books. One of them is just the right size and mood for a person who barely has time to sit down: She Was Just Seventeen, by Billy Collins.

If you aren’t familiar with Collins, he is a former poet laureate and one of the most popular poets in America. I’d say he’s my favorite living poet. If you haven’t heard him read his work (he appears every so often on A Prairie Home Companion and other public radio programs), you can listen to recordings of his readings (I was the lucky recipient of one of those as well). His readings are delightful — he is a poet of the people in the best American tradition, writing about everyday life, music, nature, relationships, and the world around us. And his humble, self-effacing style creates a palpable rappor with the audience that comes across even on a recording.

Some critics say his poems aren’t cerebral enough, but a close reading refutes that theory — Collins likes to poke fun at the stuffy side of literary academia, but his work is plenty smart. Check out this interview with Powells.com for more on Collins style and substance.

I frequently re-read favorite poems, and many Collins works are on that list. Young readers respond well to his work, too — readers of poembound, my blog about leading poetry workshops for teens, will recognize some of his poems among my favorites: “Introduction to Poetry,” “I Go Back to the House for a Book,” “Japan,” “The Trouble With Poetry,” “Marginalia,” and “Looking West,” are a few.

Honestly, I’ve never read a Billy Collins poem I haven’t admired on some level. My family loves them too; we take turns putting a poem on the fridge each week and a Collins poem never fails to earn at least a “cool” from kids and adults alike. One reason I enjoy his work so much is that as I read, I suspect Mr. Collins admires some of the same things I do — good food, the natural world, jazz, and the literature of the East, particularly haiku.

Over the past few years, I’ve published many poems in small literary magazines, and my work appears most often in a handful of journals dedicated to English language haiku and related forms. One of the best such journals, Modern Haiku, prints poems in alphabetical order by author, and I can’t tell you how thrilled I was the first time I saw my own poem on the same page as work by Billy Collins. Haiku has become more mainstream in recent times, but despite the fact that several prominent poets embraced the form in the 20th century, haiku is generally on the fringe of the American literary scene — and here was one of the most admired contemporary poets, published beside ME.

That’s how I confirmed my secret belief that Billy Collins and I have something in common. Unfortunately, I don’t have the publishing clout of Mr. Collins, so my first haiku collection is as yet unpublished. But Lee Gurga, the former editor of Modern Haiku, and a respected voice in the haiku universe, explains in the afterword of She Was Just Seventeen that he read the aforementioned Collins poem, “Japan,” and felt inspired to write a letter to Collins, asking if he wrote haiku and whether he’d like to submit some to MH.

I’m grateful he did. She Was Just Seventeen is a wonderful little book, beautifully produced — it’s printed on thick, textured paper, stitched rather than bound, with a snazzy cover. Collins writes both traditional haiku (that of the seventeen syllables, like you learned to write in grade school) and contemporary haiku (if you’re not sure what that means, see the Haiku Society of America’s definition). One or two seemed to stretch the genre beyond it’s parameters, but a few are new favorites:

Crossing the river
on the new stone bridge –
the geese below look the same.

Awake in the dark –
so that is how rain sounds
on a magnolia.

Black hearse rushes by–
blue chickory on the roadside
swaying in its wake.

Heavy rain all night –
with closed eyes I see
the orchard, the dripping leaves.

Most contemporary English haiku does not use capitalization or punctuation, but I noticed that Collins adherence to a regular style gave the book continuity. Most importantly, as the four poems above illustrate, Collins captures the “haiku moment” in his poems.

Great haiku is both momentary and timeless, a specific experience captured but also freed for readers in any time or place to experience again, and again. Like all good haiku poets, Collins describes ordinary experiences in his poems, subtly noting the connection that binds humans and the natural world. Each poem is both a snapshot and a viewfinder, a picture and an invitation to see.

This conscious seeing, being in the moment of an experience, is in line with not only my own writing practice, but also my continued quest for mindfulness. It’s also the topic of another book I am reading, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. More on that next time in bookconscious.

Living in tension

I’ve just finished a book I started during a trip last week, Bless Me Ultima , by Rudolfo Anaya. Anaya is a prolific American writer of Mexican descent. He was born and raised in New Mexico and much of his work is set there. Bless Me Ultima is another of my library book rack purchases, and it’s a small paperback, which is how I chose it for my travels. It’s a novel, so I thought it would be good escapist reading at a stressful time — the bookconscious household is about to move from the Deep South to the Northeast, and while we’re thrilled, there is a lot on our minds right now. Tension is my new normal, although I am trying to relax and be mindful and peaceful. Balance is everything at times like this.

As it happens, Bless Me Ultima is a novel about living in tension, albeit far more complex than my own, and finding a balance in that tension. Anaya’s protagonist in the novel, Antonio, is only six when the book opens. Yet already he is very perceptive and his young identity is stretched between the culture of his father’s family, who are cowboys, and his mother’s family, who are farmers. He’s already acutely aware of the family’s various hopes for him, made more urgent by the fact that his three brothers, serving in WWII as the novel begins, come back changed young men, unable to stay in their small town with its confining social structure and limited opportunities.

Even more troubling to Antonio is the tension between traditional beliefs and the Catholic faith that is a major part of his life. His very devout mother prays at the feet of a statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe for the safe return of her sons and ensures that the whole family says rosaries and attends mass. She tells everyone of her hope that Antonio will become a priest. But early in the book, Antonio’s family takes in Ultima, an elderly woman who is a curandera — a traditional healer and midwife. His mother embodies the ability, common in cultures from Greece to Latin America and many places in between, to meld strong Christian faith and trust in folk beliefs.

The young boy and the old woman become good friends and Antonio begins to learn the curandera’s art, assisting Ultima as she gathers herbs and even attending some of her most difficult healings. At the same time, he starts school (more tension: between Latino and non-Latino culture, English and Spanish, scholarship and fitting into the rough and tumble boy culture at school) and he begins to learn the catechism in preparation for reception of the sacraments.

As he ventures into the social circle at school, Antonio learns of a local legend that seems to be blasphemy, and yet, also appears rooted in fact. He follows his thirst for knowledge to try and understand for himself how the legend fits into his world view and his growing consciousness of life as shades of gray, not black and white. As Antonio struggles to reconcile his faith and yearning for God with the good he sees in those around him who are nonbelievers, he also wonders why Ultima can heal in situations where prayers to God or blessings from a priest have not worked.

While all of this coming of age, exploration of belief, juxtaposition of tradition and modernity is going on, Antonio’s world is rocked by evil and death. He discovers his beloved brother’s sinfulness, witnesses the death of a man who is “sick” from his war experience, sees the murder of a family friend, and watches a neighbor of his mother’s family descend into madness and vengefulness, directed at Ultima and finally, at Antonio himself.

Light reading it’s not. Escapist? No. But Bless Me Ultima, though somewhat disconcerting and difficult, is a thought provoking read. Shifting perspectives, presented through the eyes of an impressionable but strong child, force the reader to consider all points of view. As good and evil unfold, perceptions of the unconventional versus the doctrinal appear as multifaceted and vision-warping as a prism in the New Mexico sun. The reader becomes immersed in Antonio’s evolving understanding and is drawn into his struggle to transform the permutations of belief and meaning into a system he can rely on as he grows up.

Like so many good books, Bless Me Ultima left me with a slightly disoriented feeling when I put it down — I wanted to sit quietly and process what I’d read. Anaya’s description of his native New Mexico, his sprinkling of Spanish throughout the novel, and his multiple narrative threads, building to an inter-related thematic crescendo, helped me enter the time and place of the novel. It also reminded me that moving is pretty minor on the stressfulness scale.

As I prepared to write this blog entry, I learned that Bless Me Ultima is not only one of Anaya’s best known works, but also is on the “list of most commonly challenged books in the U.S.” As Wikipedia explains, if a book is on this list, it has frequently faced censorship — groups have repeatedly tried to have it removed from libraries or schools, for example. I was surprised to see how many challenged books I’ve read. But it’s not surprising that Anaya’s novel, which provokes readers to suspend their impressions and “build strength” from life’s experiences, as Ultima tells Antonio, would strike fear in parts of our society.