I've chosen what I'm sure will turn out to be the most beautiful day of the winter to make my blog debut - it's probably close to 60 degrees in New York. Oh, well, every February I resign myself to it being February and try to ignore it with a swift turn of the deadbolt. I'm already committed to being a shut-in this month anyway and I can think of no better way to spend the afternoon than talking about books.
FEAR OF STONES, a collection of short stories by Kei Miller, was a welcome escape to a warmer clime, though much of the subject matter is not of the feel-good variety. Fine with me, Hollywood pap will fill to overflowing any need for an improbably happy ending if that's what I'm looking for, which generally I'm not. Give me something real over emotional masturbation any day. FEAR OF STONES delivers. Miller's book gives us the smells and flavors of Jamaica - it's people, culture, cadences, mores, history - while sketching out the struggles of ordinary people wrestling with big and universal themes like love, identity, religion, spirituality, abandonment and disenfranchisement. The stories are bitingly witty, some are laugh-out-loud funny, and most have a hard nugget of heartrending truth at their core. But what makes FEAR OF STONES so compelling is Miller's deft and beautiful use of the English language - he arranges words like a florist and the result is a poetic bouquet of gorgeous description. At the Soho reading that Harriet and I attended in November Miller told us that the words have to want to jump off the page and be alive for him to feel that a story is ready. Get a load of this, from "Read Out Sunday:"
"But some people just too wretched and cannot be saved no matter what. Either that, or they too simple minded. Because now that Sue found out sinners could be forgiven, and virginity could be restored, she proceeded to lose hers every Saturday night and restore it every Sunday morning. After all, the things Sue enjoyed most in life were church and sex, but until now she had felt she could never really have them both. Well, now she could and did, screaming in pleasure one night, and bawling in repentance the next morning."
This story must have screamed "I'm ready!" at him.
I just finished reading another beautifully written book -FOUR LETTERS OF LOVE by the Irish author Niall Williams. Again, the writing is gorgeous, poetic, very Irish. Sometimes I felt carried away by the evocative language - it's quite dense and reticulated, like a hardcore jazz riff, but I like hardcore jazz and the story itself is substantial enough that it brought me back around to it.The story is by no means beside the point. The idea that the threads of the events in our lives are the fabric of a larger picture, that no matter what we do or don't do, life will work itself out the way it's supposed to, kind of appeals to the fatalist in me. Good story.
On Harriet's recommendation, I'm starting on a classic which I've never read before - SNOW COUNTRY, by Yasunari Kawabata. I'm off to Japan for a while...
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