is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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the lovers.
I keep reading books that are about mourning, sometimes without knowing that�s what I�m doing. I picked up Vendela Vida�s The Lovers just after finishing The Year of Magical Thinking because I�ve been meaning to read it for two years. It was, literally, sitting a sad/dusty pile of to-be-reads for two years. In the book an older woman who is a recent widow travels to Turkey on her own, to the site of her honeymoon decades earlier. I�m not going to go into detail about the plot because it�s impossible to do so without spoiling what happens for those who might read it. At some point while I was reading the book Gus asked me what it was about, and I tried to tell him, and then I stopped and said: I think I�m not going to be able to tell you until it�s over. The book somehow manages not to reveal what it is really about, while keeping you hooked to the story and also reassuring you that it will pay off in the end, without saying any of that. It�s quite a feat.
So I won�t say much about what happens, except to say that what I ended up loving most about the book is similar to what I loved in Didion�s memoir. It draws attention to all the ways in which each of us come to conclusions about the people we love and don�t love, those conclusions turn into categories that we unthinkingly allow to describe those persons thoroughly, and then we let them sit there in their boxes in our minds, even when they�ve worked for years to give themselves different shades of self. We fail to let the people we love live and change, sometimes.
I know this from my own life from both sides. People who have known me for 30 years sometimes still think I am an impatient overly-demanding angry-yelling person. They love to joke about it, too. People who have known me for 10 or 15 years do not understand those jokes, because I have worked my ass off to be better at being with people, and it worked. One can transcend one�s own upbringing. Even my father, who gave me the talent for anger, got over most of his own anger well before the end of his life. (And it is always �most� of one�s anger or other imperfect trait one softens, not �all.� Anger is part of life, and very useful in certain settings. And early training is never entirely overcome.)
I�ve also failed to recognize changes in people I�ve loved when those changes most deserved to be recognized. We�re all lazy about these things. I try to take up practices that remind me to be open, to see people truly, rather than relying on some past-written report in my head. Writing is one way of doing that. Taking the time to really be with people is another. Both of those take commitment and time. The time is time worth spending. But, like all things that require constant effort, I don�t always succeed in getting it done.
Vida�s book does all this gorgeously and with a lot of subtlety�it is the kind of light touch that only a tremendous amount of skill could accomplish. So I recommend the book to you. It also brings to the fore how mourning one loss might make one more aware of other losses, ones that may have been left unremarked.
There are some loose threads in the book, some things that didn�t make sense to me. But who cares. Perhaps that�s also part of being with other people.
Disclaimer: Vida is a friend of mine, though I don�t know her all that well. She is married to a very good friend of mine. So I already liked her a lot and wanted to love her books before I read them. But I don�t think that has clouded my judgment here, as I was genuinely taken by surprise by what the novel accomplished. Right after I read it I read her first novel, And Now You Can Go (The Lovers is her third), which was good but not as deft at achieving its goal (in my estimation), and I am currently in the midst of reading her second novel, Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name, which I am really enjoying. Why did I wait all these years to read these books? Because being an academic does stupid things to a person�s ability to commit to reading non-work-related material. I want to stop being that person.
It helps, of course, that I am currently on leave. Time is a wonderful gift.
12:35 p.m. - August 28, 2012
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