The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

The Christmas before last I received a very large novel from my sister. I admired her taste in choosing a hip new story as well as the lovely cover, generally highly recommended author, and fine subject matter. She doesn’t realize this, of course, since it’s been sitting on my shelf for over a year. But, somehow, the books I own don’t feel as pressing to read. I don’t have to renew them. They’re here as long as I like them to be (with the sad, infrequent exception of books I lend out and never see again).

So, this year I resolved to read The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski before another season passed. This is a story with a fantastic title, a fantastic Prologue, a fantastic premise, and a fantastic execution. This made Christmas of 2008 good twice, first when I opened the present, and again when I read the story.

But it is long. It is one of those stories that take so many things into account, so that you feel filled up by it. I sat night after night with a cup of hot tea and my book for dessert. It is a rare treat, to find a story full and long and engaging enough to think about from time to time throughout the day in anticipation.

Beyond the telling, long and intricate of a boy, dogs, and family, the setting was stunning. I have visited Wisconsin and realize how that countryside is truly amazing. The added pleasure of scenery, with seasons, and action during the summer, even seemed to keep my toes toasty! My connection with the storytelling was so profound that I was traveling alongside Edgar and began to imagine knowing those roads and lakes as well as he.

Feeling enormous awe, as he communicated each command, each question, to the dogs, I admired Edgar Sawtelle’s coming of age. Without saying a word, his story is told, and as the end comes into sight it becomes clear why, at last, Stephen King would give this book such grand acclaim. Read, enjoy, cry, but certainly don’t let this book just sit on your shelf.

Seattle Reads again

Airplane rides are useful. Of course, moving long distances at great speed is valuable. But there’s more. For example, a direct return flight from Seattle to Dallas is plenty long enough to read a novel, including time for naps each way. How do I know this? I know through experience.

Very recently I read, on both ends of a long weekend, the ‘Seattle Reads’ book of the year, Secret Son. Like other years, it’s not a very good book. However, it certainly raises LOTS of contemporary issues regarding East/West, wealth/poverty, social standing, nationalism, politics, language, family duty, love, manipulation, coming of age, honor, and education. Hmm, strange, now that I’ve listed the themes they appear more perennial than acute….

Helpful, at the back of the book there is an anonymous interviewer questioning the author, Laila Lalami. The interviewer could probably pose more interesting questions, but it does give me a sense of what Seattle was thinking in choosing this book. Lalami did a fine job responding to the questions and possibly speaks as well or better than she writes.

Lalami tells us that she tries to write “the most engaging, the most complex, and the most truthful story” she can. Complex I rate very high. Truthful I rate quite high. Engaging slips to a pretty low percentile. I wish I could say that if I wasn’t stuck on an airplane with no other novel, or if I was indifferent about reading for my book group conversation next week, that I would have found it a good use of my time, but I might not.

That lies are told in Morocco, even in Casablanca, where the interviewer insists heretofore in the American imagination only romance blooms a la Bogart and Bergman, isn’t altogether surprising. That locals and foreigners alike prey on the weak cannot surprise, either. Both of these together, as the two bruising whips driving the plot, however, do come as a surprise. Surely the portrait of even the cruelest poverty can be drawn with beautiful lines, making one unable to put away what hurts to view. But there it goes: away, secret, done.

A Rose by Nearly Any Other Name

Sometimes I do meet someone and think to myself, “Huh, you don’t seem like a Jenny.” So, there certainly is a point to Roy Feinson’s assertion that we make assumptions about who the person we’re going to meet is based on their name, and even, perhaps how we may carry out our lives based on our own names. But… how can you say that Ella is going to be happier in love than Edda?

Well, the Secret Universe of Names: The Dynamic Interplay of Names and Destiny, not only makes that determination, but many more. There are strong names, soft names, masculine names, and feminine ones. I guess that makes sense. But often there are family names. Does your daughter remind you of your mother because of her nose… or her name?

So, I checked out my name – the only thing to do, right? Reading about what an ADR person is was just like reading a horoscope. A big ‘well maybe.’ Interestingly some other people’s names I came across were very like their personality! So, I began to get drawn in by Feinson’s study and writing (not the spelling errors, though) and wondered if I was perhaps missing out on some of the benefits of being called Adrian. (Specifically my supposed main attributes: charismatic, sexy, admirable – think Audrey Hepburn…)

Speaking of Audrey Hepburn, there are nice little boxes at the base of each page giving a real-life example of how each type of name has been embodied the way that Feinson discovered it would. ADR has a tiny biography of Audrey. Although ADRs apparently should be able to take on most any profession with success, a movie actor makes a good example. But on the opposite page ADM also has a movie actor for its good example of that character. So I turn the page in either direction and discover that ADL and AG also have biographies of movie actors. After a few pages I find ALBRT, which is pretty much the whole name anyhow. Guess who? Yep, Albert Einstein is there to explain how ALBRT is one of the top names available for anyone – even working for one of Canada’s central provinces to this day.

So, this was fun, but also stupid. I am convinced that naming a kid Piscine might get him into trouble, but less because it’s a ‘paternal and benign’ letter ‘P’ starting it off than the fact that dear Piscine from the Life of Pi had a difficult time getting anyone to say anything better than pissing when talking to him.

Seattle Author

I love stories that have a lot of characters whose lives intertwine and are told from all kinds of angles. Mainly I see this happen in movies, but sometimes it can be done by a novelist. Here’s Erica Bauermeister’s debut novel – a Seattle author, whose book is set in Seattle – The School of Essential Ingredients doing just that.

This is the ideal rainy day book. The fact that I read it cover to cover one such evening after work should attest to that. This book was a gift from my aunt, who also read it with great enjoyment, and, before passing along the gift, my mom read it, too. (Don’t worry, she told both parties of her intentions which were accepted all around!) That in itself shows it’s a fun read.

Bauermeister’s characters all end up in this class, some with very unusual reasons, and get to put together meal after meal. One class each month from fall to spring – just long enough of a term to allow each student’s point of view to show up once. I actually love to cook as well as bake and last night I tried the sketchy description in January’s class of a bolognaise sauce! As was described, I poured milk, quite a lot, into my ground beef and wondered what would happen. What happened was great spaghetti (of course it was, I used my own frozen tomato sauce from last summer’s produce).

Also, with the truth of any class that is long enough to get to know your classmates, but is also significantly finite, each story has an open ending. Each student has made one or many decisions to propel their future. It certainly makes me want to know what’s on the menu for next year!

Orthodox Heretic?

First, I did exactly what the author, in his preface, requested I not do. I breezed through The Orthodox Heretic in a couple seatings. Second, I judged the book, as well as its author, Peter Rollins, by their respective covers.

Why do authors put pictures in the back of the book? I’ve asked that a hundred times. I’ll ask it a hundred more. Why do I have my picture on my blog? (Actually, it’s only because there was a spot to put one when I set out the title and my name.) Perhaps it’s only another thing to tick off to send to a publisher: name, book title, book content, return addressed stamped envelope, photo.

Enough about the picture, now on to the actual writing. Lots of good disclaimers made in the introduction. Well, these could be parables, if they mean anything. Well, I could be interpreting them, but art speaks for itself. I love it. And I laugh at it.

Pretty much, according to my reading of Rollins’ parable tales, he’s doing a study on Jesus’ parables. One of my favorite/most frustrating parables of Jesus’ was the Good Samaritan. Although there were no retakes on that, nearly all of Rollins’ parables touched on service, the poor, and the ‘wrong’ ending (which is probably part of the definition of a parable).

I do wonder, though, as a Trinitarian Christian, how Jesus was left out (unless one counts reusing Jesus’ parable, which the reader would have to already know). This may be petty, but there were a lot of tales about heaven and reward, not even veiled as “there was a landowner” or something, making the reader have to agree to the idea of afterlife. Not Sadducee friendly stories.

I appreciate how so many tales determined that the everyday character is wasting his life. (Incidentally all the tales were about men; no women finding coins here.) I particularly enjoyed the tale of the scholar changing to a life of service once he’d established, by God’s self-revelation, that God does not exist (p 104, Agnostic to Atheist). There was also treatment of religion getting in the way of faith and needing to be stopped for life to begin (p 57, Finding Faith). Also thought-provoking was a story about how the power of a great gift elicits a heart change at last (174, Reward). Yes, Rollins got at this from many angles.

The ones I’ve mentioned I enjoyed and found interesting. However there was one that just grates (p24, Salvation). The character is more or less completely believable. The tale is a lot like Les Miserables, where the priest gives more than even what was stolen. Yes, there are people (not often me) like that. But in this story there is a demon who is destroying everything while the priest calmly prays. Ultimately the demon asks to enter the priest’s heart. The priest welcomes him. This unprecedented hospitality ultimately defeats the demon who can’t bear to act on his own request and leaves dejected. The priest maintains his resolve to praise his Lord no matter what test comes his way. (I described the ending more to my theological tastes than the author did, in case you read it and think I got it all wrong… J)

This is a tale which I’m sure I’ll never forget… even if I somehow neglect to exercise the hospitality of the priest.

New Recipes, New Policies

Eric Kayser’s New French Recipes have regretfully brought back the sourest of childhood memories. Incidentally it has nothing to do with Kayser, really. It has to do with me not getting around to things. I’ve had Kayser’s cookbook since December. I checked it out from the library and have neither cooked from it nor written about it. Happily I have looked through it, especially at the sweeter recipes, which is why I’ve insisted on keeping it despite the pile-up of late notices and reminders in my email inbox.

It turns out someone else wants this cookbook, as well. Someone in Seattle, which means possibly someone I know. I wish I could keep it, but here I am at the library sending it away to its next home. (Should you wonder if this cookbook is worth asking for from your library, I think – yes.)

New recipes, perhaps, but not so new as to sound unpalatable from the get-go. The organization is exciting as Kayser is originally a bread baker. He concentrates on three French categories, four if you’re a Seattleite: Grains, Seeds, Dried Fruit and Nuts. I’m certain the recipes are good because the ingredients are so delicious and the pictures, go Clay McLachlan, are making me just crazy hungry!

A couple of the things I’ve learned just reading the recipes are that this would be useful for people who don’t want gluten in their diet. Grains include wheat, but are not defined by it. Another interesting adjustment to old recipes is the use of brown sugar, which in France would invariably be cassonade. These are not the same. American brown sugar is far superior in taste and texture – hurrah for us!

Policies have also come into play. I sat down to write about a cookbook, unobtrusively, I believed, in the library. It turns out that Seattle Public Libraries have a “Public Use of Children’s Areas Policy” which conceivably bars me from writing further of Kayser’s recipes because I was in the wrong section of the library. A librarian exercised her newfound right to expel me from sitting where Dr Seuss stories are on the shelves as I cannot prove to have brought a child with me. This offends me deeply, and I believe I will share a comment with the City Librarian’s Office for this disruption to my exceedingly important blog.

No doubt the sour memory with which I began arose from being surrounded by otherwise happy childhood things. Apparently this memorable librarian has become overwhelmed with her own sourness. Kayser’s brown sugar may be the antidote!

Daughter of Persia

Being sick is no excuse. And yet it’s the one that both gave me nothing to do but read Daughter of Persia: A Woman’s Journey from her Father’s Harem Through the Islamic Revolution and the thing that made me too sluggish to write about it afterward. Yet, here I am. Moved and perplexed again at the history and story of Persia, or modern day Iran. Happily there have been many intriguing stories about Iran all of which I have enjoyed reading while simultaneously cringing with something near disbelief.

Persepolis, Reading Lolita in Tehran, The Mulberry Empire (which is fiction) and many articles have given me something of a feel for what the Persians have been through. Not surprisingly that is no comfort as mostly they seem to have gone through a lot of internal-personal mistrust accompanied by foreign meddling.

Satti, who was born into the just deposed ruling family at the turn of the 20th Century, grew up in an anduran, a harem. She does not mind this at all. Her mother does not mind this at all. Her siblings, the servants, the extended family part of the compound don’t mind it, either. I minded. Somehow relegating this to ‘cultural differences’ seems inadequate. The fact that Satti chooses work rather than the life her mother led assures me that there is more than she chose to reveal in the 400 pages she wrote about her life.

Satti’s parents, whom she only praises the entire length of the book, appear as saints. I do not doubt for a minute that her mother was loving and her father clever, nor that both were wonderfully and terribly strong. I wonder whether being very young when her father died and very alone when her mother died were things that kept her perspective on her family so entirely golden. She did not even tell about any sibling that she had particular fights or squabbles with. It’s as though to be in that anduran was on par with being in Eden. Yet she longed to leave.

When Satti’s father died, she took her inheritance of about $2000 and traveled to ‘Amrika’ for university studies. She thought she’d get to see the Statue of Liberty, but showed up in Los Angeles instead. This section of the book was by far the most thrilling. Leaving home, travelling far, meeting people, testing risk and chance, all activities that Sattareh thrived in and excelled at. I haven’t even read many stories of American women at that time taking so many risks. Why, her first boat out of Bombay was sunk by Japanese submarines! Although I have traveled extensively to places full of risk, I’ve never been under fire. I found her story of leaving home riveting.

Later, Sattareh returned to Iran and built the School of Social Work which sounds absolutely astounding. For twenty years she devotes herself to the poor of her country because of the Islamic example set by both of her parents. Their example became her motivation and now she, too, becomes a saint of selfless devotion to work on behalf of the powerless. The school she founds grows from twenty students to over a couple thousand. Meanwhile Sattareh creates jobs for her graduates, sends them abroad for further education, and ensures that they learn to actually care for the poor.

India had Gandhi then Mother Theresa, and Iran first had Sattareh’s cousin Dr. Mossadegh and then herself. What went wrong? I believe it to be a fair question. Sattareh blames the people for following the wind rather than their own convictions. The majority always favors the strong and many manage to survive. Sattareh Farman Farmaian also survives, along with much of her extended family, as she escapes death and Iran, her beloved homeland becoming both to her essentially overnight.

I'm very glad to have read Satti's story and her perspective of Persian history. Learning how a family of great means and power conducted itself on the other side of the world a century ago has certainly caused me to consider the personal choices and votes I'm making here and now.