4 good reads

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Among the books I’ve read so far this summer, here are a few novels I especially enjoyed.

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (2002). This Pulitzer prize winner is a big tale of Greeks in America, with a hermaphrodite man at the centre. Indeed, Cal (formerly Callie) is the narrator; an unusual choice as he knows a great deal he couldn’t actually know. Somehow, though, it works. The story inhabits history in an interesting way. It also takes one to uncomfortable places; there’s anguish and vulnerability here.

Irma Voth by Miriam Toews (2011). Irma, the narrator in Toews’ new book, reminds me of Nomi in her A Complicated Kindness, another determined young woman facing losses, and left mostly to her own devices as far as surviving them goes. The world isn’t easy in a conservative Mennonite family in Mexico, especially when you’ve been harmed, and when you’re complicit in harming others. Irma’s voice is smart and seemingly fearless, but there’s an ache in her to forgive and be forgiven. The book is sometimes amusing, often moving. Some of the “Mennonite” parts seemed not quite credible — perhaps being a Mennonite reader is a disadvantage here? Noted American writer Annie Proulx gave it a good review, though be warned if you’ve not yet read the book but want to: Proulx gives a lot of the story away. (Why do reviewers do that?)

The Forgotten Waltz by Anne Enright (2011). This is a story about adultery: how it begins and how it continues. “Not that there is anything to forgive,” states the narrator early on, but this doesn’t seem entirely true, for it’s a story weighed with guilt, envy, and grief. A cautionary tale, then. I like Enright’s style, the small pallet of her story, her astute psychological observations.

Nemesis by Philip Roth (2010). This is a relatively short book, wonderfully, seamlessly written, about a young teacher, Eugene “Bucky” Cantor, during a summer of the polio epidemic. Mr. Cantor has a keen sense of responsibility, but tragedy ensues. The way he responds is contrasted with that of the narrator, who suffers as well, and to whom, we eventually learn, Mr. Cantor is unburdening himself. This book asks big questions and critiques a selfless heroism that may be little more than pride.

Clipping through the Book of Revelation

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Usually, I encounter Scripture through discrete chunks we call “texts” — single verses or clusters, or, if one follows some reading plan, several chapters at the most. Every once in a while, however, I will read through some book of the Bible in one sitting.

When I do this — read an entire book at a time — I’m often surprised. For one thing, it rarely takes as long as I expected it would. The very fact that the books are broken into verses and chapters, I suppose, plus the fact that whole sermons are sometimes devoted to a few verses, plus the burdens (both positive or negative) of certain verses upon vast areas of our lives (I’m thinking, for example, of texts as diverse as Romans 8:28 and I Timothy 2:12,13) — all this conspires to make us think individual books are as large and strenuous as Mount Everest.

So it’s a good surprise how a sense of scale and shape return, and more quickly than expected. It’s like shifting the Google earth screen to a larger view, in which essential contours and proportions can be seen. One gains a new and necessary specificity about the book as a whole.

And then there’s the landscape one sees by clipping along through it from beginning to end.

Last week I read the Book of Revelation this way. I’m not naturally drawn to fantastical creatures or to blood, nor interested any more in the End Times jigsaw puzzles around this book that I was set to decades ago. I know that the Revelation was written for a time of terrible persecution for those who refused to worship Nero et al., and wanted to keep that context in mind, but otherwise hoped to see it as if for the first time. Impossible to do so, of course, because there’s only one first time and for me it’s long gone. But here it was again, a vivid, very visual, and action-packed display, yes, but one of consolation, of God’s protective power and zeal on behalf of God’s suffering people.

What really struck, and stayed with me, in this particular reading, however, was how the author had built his vision of hope upon earlier Scriptures (which we now call the Old Testament). I realized this because I used The Jerusalem Bible version, which has allusions and quotations in italics and so makes obvious how many there are. I saw old sources built into a striking narrative around the central fact and figure of Christ.

Such building, it seems to me, must be what it means to “let the Word of Christ dwell in you richly” (Colossians 3:16). I think of challenges that I or others in my family and community face. Can I too, more openly and imaginatively, let the Word’s “old” words, phrases, images, and people gather in me to form “new” narratives of hope?

Who keeps vigil with no candle

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My friend Leona Dueck Penner sent me an email note with the following poem by Rainer Maria Rilke, this in response to the post, “Through the unremarkable, beautiful gate.” It’s wonderful and I want to share it with you too.
The blessing of  earth
God, every night is hard.
Always there are some awake,
who turn, turn, and do not find you.
Don’t you hear them crying out
as they go farther and farther down?
Surely you hear them weep; for they are weeping.
I seek you, because they are passing
right by my door. Whom should I turn to,
if not the one whose darkness
is darker than night, the only one
who keeps vigil with no candle,
and is not afraid—
the deep one, whose being I trust,
for it breaks through the earth into trees
and rises,
when I bow my head,
faint as a fragrance
from the soil.
-Rainer Maria Rilke, From The Book of Hours II, 3