I’m about a month late for the Global Voices Book Challenge, where their wide world network of bloggers posted about “a book from a country whose literature [they had] never read anything of before.”

Since I rarely follow directions anyway, I chose to read Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth, a collection of fictional short stories presumably written in Brooklyn about Bengalis and their experiences mainly living outside of India.

You might choose to read this one on the Kindle, since the cover art with red foil serif lettering and gold jewelry awash in the swirling tide (you learn later the gold jewelry represents a significant bangle bracelet) promises a highbrow romance—until you spot the other gold circle on the cover, labeling the work as “a New York Times Book Review Best Book of the Year.”

The tension between an author celebrated in English-speaking circles, keenly aware of the American literary appetite and an appointed cultural interpreter of Bengali-American lives ripples throughout, pointing up the universality of alcoholism as a family secret, the well-intentioned phone calls with old news about family friends, while staking a curious feminism in the triad centerpiece series that anchors the whole, culminating in protagonist Hema’s indulgent Eat Pray Love-type affair with luscious Italian pasta and childhood crush Kaushik before her steely resolve carries her onto a plane to India and an arranged marriage that will allow her to continue her professorial work studying Etruscans, the culture that bequeathed a lifestyle the Romans perfected into carpe diem. The narrative uses “I” in these three stories as a device to alienate the reader, suggesting the intrusion omniscient narration always carries, and causing discomfort when the “I” becomes particularly intimate, when the Reader knows she/he is not the lover to whom the confessional narration is addressed.

Instances of aborted delivery of media abound and become the true link between the stories–from the wedding placed at the exclusive private boarding school that tucks public phones nicely away from campus visitors to scanning disaster photo credits to ascertain proof of life to an unmailed postcard taken by a child and planted in a garden freshly dug.

The collection opens with a Hawthorne epigraph;

Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil. My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth.

And so it is a trifle heavy-handed in the opening story for a child to be planting a letter–in dirt that’s just been turned–written by one generation but not delivered, handled by the generation he begat, and implanted by the youngest generation just taught Bengali words.

Like Hawthorne’s work, Lahiri’s pieces rely on the everyday nightmarish excesses of the American Gothic, on tales told twice (which is to say: beautifully narrated, deeply felt, and tediously redundant) with fastidious framing that works as a device to take us far from what could be a deeper understanding of a group of people she seems to usher into and through a Custom House (the introductory setting for Hawthorne’s famous Scarlet Letter and another reason for the title) that works as a sieve, leaving dry characters straining against cosmopolitanism while Lahiri’s lilting prose laps over the pages—though, as a caveat, I’m spoiled by Global Voices, a model with local bloggers attending to issues in their national purview that works quite well.

If there’s any golden ring to reach for in this overwhelming stream of content, truly local narratives that stand alone and are placed in context alongside narratives from and about other (sometimes nearby, something distant) localities seems to me a bright, shiny one—

More reviews in the kthread reads section.

in Miami, have the tire patched in that area within wandering range of neighborhood Cuban restaurants, where they serve roasted pork with soft red peppers, grilled onions, the whole plate filled with the good pieces you usually selectively unearth and save for last—

and progress to the black beans and rice and the sticky plantains, too much by far (especially for seven dollars), but nice to attempt as the cars race down 8th Street in front of you.

Then, in my opinion, you should meet a good friend at a good bookstore and sip bubbly things while you plan for trips to other destinations with decidedly different transportation options and cuisines, leaving holes for chance excursions, literary inspiration, and lazy afternoons.

I firmly believe Sunday afternoons should be sparkly…

I spent Saturday afternoon reading in the sun in Charlottesville, Virginia, the way I spent many weekends when I lived in this little town.

Dar Williams refrains filled the cul-de-sac, and the wireless networks were named “TJistheman”, “PabstBlueNetwork”, and “moonbaker” (the last, perhaps belonging to a baker at Mellow Mushroom pizza near campus).

I thought about how hard it is to leave this place, and the first time I heard the author’s name of the book I was reading, Love is a Mix Tape. Rob Sheffield, like me, was once in Professional English Nerd School at the University of Virginia. Now he’s a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, so perhaps we’re the same type of academic flake. Charlottesville formed us in many ways, but we had to leave the field to use what we learned here.

The best explanation I’ve found for why this particular track of graduate school remains a ludicrous idea happens on page 90 (I will say knowing how to survive on $14k a year is a useful skill in any economy and also that I have close friends who I do not doubt will be successful at this):

My friends and I assumed that we would soon be tenured professors, which is an excellent life goal–it’s like planning to be Cher. You think, I’m going to wear beads and fringed gowns, and sing “Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves” on the way to work every morning, and then one day, I’m going to get a call saying, “Congratulations! You’re Cher! Can you make it to Vegas by showtime?”

I know I channeled Bob Mackie when I dressed to teach class.

The music scene was different when Sheffield lived in town and the highlight of the summer was the Pavement show, but there are still a few people from Charlottesville who make music; I’ve bought eggs at Dave Matthews’s farm, watched Carbon Leaf rise to national prominence, and wished for better sound in Satellite Ballroom for Dave Berman (of the Silver Jews).

And there are places to buy records like in that book everyone references to talk music and record store culture, but an elegiac tone elevates Sheffield’s book from what could be a trivial subject. Like the wind that whips around town in winter months, the prose reveals a narrator smarting from the death of his wife and the included music must be intimate and loss-y.

MP3s buzz straight to your brain. That’s part of what I love about them. but the rhythm of the mix tape is the rhythm of romance, the analog hum of a physical connection between two sloppy, human bodies.

The dialogue between the two, Rob and Renée, flickers at that wonderful level that will never translate for a mainstream blockbuster audience:

“Where are you parked?”
“I walked.”
“What’s a catachresis?”
“A rhetorical inversion of tense, kind of like a transumption. Let’s go.”

Hot.

Even narrating Renée’s “big, messy, epic” life, the author finds room to celebrate that forgotten classic music video “Justified and Ancient”:

a few pages to brood on quibbling couples shopping in the middle of the night at Wal-Mart (173), imagines gonzo names for chain restaurant carb offerings (175), and insists that the songstresses run away from the “Magic Man,” a troubling song I’ve always avoided too (199).

Inexplicably, you leave parts of yourself in Charlottesville. For me, it was the first time that I had a group of friends, a whole group, that mixed and mingled and was largely, incredibly cohesive. My role was to throw parties and feed those that sat on the chairs by the kitchen and, through that, to heal the parts of me that I stayed in Charlottesville to repair, to remember.

The book echoes that sort of affection for the place while voicing a big love for a woman who changed the author. The narrator closes with a meditation on strong women in rock during his tenure in Virginia, wistfully hoping they still exist in pop music. He talks about Renée’s sewing, and how the clothes she made (often to wear at shows at Toyko Rose) fit her body as it became more like the women before her.

And so the mix tape playlists that begin each chapter add explanation to this real woman’s actions rather than reduce her (or the author) to a series of lists, ranked in order. This was a true, I’ll-love-you-even-and-especially-when-your-hips-spread love. Like a really good album, that kind of relationship nudges forth nuances each time you listen closely.

My sister Kat and I are reading one book together each month in 2009. This is February’s book; please join us below and in March for Love is a Mixtape by Rob Sheffield.

Last night, I sat with vintage dresses draped across my lap, remembering the moment the bottom seam came loose on the brown velour, thinking about the scene in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway where Clarissa Dalloway sits in her drawing room mending her party dress, recalling the instance of the tear.

The silvery-green dress folds spill over her while she stitches and sorts through the morning’s moments, completely mistress of the room and the household being polished and primped in anticipation of her guests that evening.

All of a London June day somehow fits in Virginia Woolf’s crisp text, and even the doors are about to be taken off their hinges as Clarissa strides into the book’s opening pages and the morning, exhilarated with the day’s possibilities. Her thoughtful musings interrupted with the bombastic Hugh Whitbread’s, “Where are you off to?” She deflects breezily; “I love walking in London,” and carries on toward the shops, reveling in even her errand run.

Though bounded by the “leaden circles in the air” as clocks chime the hour and increments between, Clarissa radidates “on waves of that divine vitality.” And like the flowers in the flower shop, Woolf’s beautiful phrases wait for us to admire, inhale, and gather up as we walk from one basin to another with Clarissa.

How fresh like frilled linen clean from a laundry laid in wicker trays the roses looked; and dark and prim the red carnations, holding their heads up; and all the sweet peas spreading in their bowls, tinged violet, snow white, pale—as if it were the evening and girls in muslin frocks came out to pick sweet peas and roses after the superb summer’s day, with its almost blue-black sky, its delphiniums, its carnations, its arum lilies was over; and it was the moment between six and seven when every flower—roses, carnations, irises, lilac—glows; white, violet, red, deep orange; every flower seems to burn by itself, softly, purely in the misty beds…

If Clarissa repeatedly mentions her lack of knowledge, gesturing at a life experience limited by class, sphere, role, that combined with the nearness of death throughout (especially appropriate in this post-war novel) brightens the shine around her small triumphs and actions connecting people, one to another. While Virginia Woolf stated Mrs. Dalloway’s double is the doomed war veteran Septimus Smith, Clarissa’s opposite is zombie Lady Bradshaw, who infects others with her stupor as she entertains.

Our heroine Clarissa pours out courage, quietly affirming the extraordinary capacity to give and forgive as we press on into our days, buying the flowers, mending the dresses ourselves. And she is the perfect hostess (a role she both embraces and refuses), standing at the top of the staircase welcoming and wishing us safe passage.

As Peter Walsh, the old flame who truly sees her, notes, she perseveres; “there being in her a thread of life which for toughness, endurance, power to overcome obstacles, and carry her triumphantly through he had never known the like of.”

Your thoughts on, favorite moments in Mrs. Dalloway?

My sister Kat and I are reading at least one book every month in 2009 together. Next month: Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. Join us–

The Wonder Spot by Melissa Bank

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars

If nothing else, former lovers should give good fodder for brunch conversations. Laughter (and mimosas and cosmopolitans) mitigates the grieving process for relationships, particularly important for a the “chick lit” cottage industry that Melissa Bank is said to have spawned with her Girl’s Guide to Hunting and Fishing in 2000.

Much like her previous collection of short stories (the format perhaps best suited for her style), this novel opens with a protagonist of biting wit, cigarette gestures, and composure beyond her teenage years. Plot details are in service of protagonist Sophie’s one-liners, and aside from college roommate Venice (who counts herself lucky she wasn’t named ‘Gondola’ or ‘Canal’), the book settles into the yawning heteronormativity of this genre.

The difference being, the significant affair is between the city and Sophie—the narrative drives toward Williamsburg and Pennsylvania (and back) instead of a ring. In the penultimate story, she is rescued from party drama and a suitor who will disappear before the next episode with a wonderful line of prose that stretches out to lift her from the loft’s balcony.

In the midst of another party with an indie rock date, Sophie thinks:

The women are young, young, young, liquidy and sweet-looking, they are batter and I am the sponge cake they don’t know they’ll become. I stand here, a lone loaf, stuck to the pan.

Sophie’s baking line reminded me of one of my favorite exes, who hung a large poster of that incorrigible loafer-poet Walt Whitman on a wall and winked at me; “Isn’t he handsome?” he said.

“Mm,” I replied; alone with the poster’s self-satisfied grin, I rolled my eyes. Sure, this old man could call himself large, contain multitudes—in this younger man’s apartment, I felt like a floufy sponge cake, bloated with age.

Connecting the reader with those interior moments—like when we turn social unease into a self-deprecating food metaphor—demonstrates the promise good work in this genre still holds. Sophie and the musician pick up milk and the paper on their way back, closing the narrative with a small, habitual New Yorker moment that might lead (as all those airbrushed magazine covers in late-night corner grocers guarantee) to the discovery of the wonder spot.

View all my Goodreads reviews.