Category: Books Page 8 of 19

I recently asked a friend about the [admittedly strange] movie “12 Monkeys” and she replied telling me that though she remembers the movie being interesting, she couldn’t remember a whole lot about it. She confessed to the same experience with books.

It usually takes three encounters with a story for me to create a long term memory of it. That makes mystery novels more reusable, but isn’t otherwise a useful quirk.

It thrilled me to hear her say this. When others sit around discussing the meaning and impact of a book or movie, more often than not I’m simply happy to recall a character or two, much less the plot and attending symbolism. I find that I am left with impressions of books and movies, and perhaps a remembrance of the experience of reading it, but am quick to forget the actual contents.

She and I are not unintelligent. We just don’t remember what we read. So why read?

That’s the question addressed in an encouraging NY Times piece from a few years ago.

Certainly, there are those who can read a book once and retain everything that was in it, but anecdotal evidence suggests that is not the case with most people. Anecdotal evidence suggests that most people cannot recall the title or author or even the existence of a book they read a month ago, much less its contents.

So we in the forgetful majority must, I think, confront the following question: Why read books if we can’t remember what’s in them?

The author, James Collins, himself a novelist, concludes that the experience of reading is a part of the answer, but he is also persuaded, and suggests there is evidence to back up his claim, that we are changed in some way by the books we read even when we can’t retain the contents.

It’s an interesting, and hopeful, thought. It’s good to know that I’m not completely wasting my time. But I’m just glad to find that I’ve got company. Good company. Perhaps a vast company.

Elsa, we are not alone.

In the Garden of Beasts is Erik Larson’s offering opening a window on the troubling world that was Berlin prior to WWII. Subtitled “Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin”, the book follows the experience of the United States’ first ambassador to Hitler’s Germany, William Dodd, his wife Mattie, and their adult children Martha and Bill, Jr. Their life in Berlin paralleled Hitler’s ascension to the chancellory and eventual assumption of complete power. The more power that Hitler assumed, the greater the culture of fear and suspicion and intrigue spread.

The realities detailed are not altogether surprising. Larson in all his books finds an intriguing tale to tell (The Devil in the White City remains my favorite), and the tale he tells inevitably involves some unspeakable evil. While in his previous books that evil was hidden and surprising, in this one though the evil was visible to all, few took note of it.

One would expect that nothing evil would trouble an author who writes so frequently about it. (The Devil in the White City is subtitled “Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America”!) But this story effected him differently.

What I did not realize as I ventured into those dark days of Hitler’s rule was how much the darkness would infiltrate my own soul…. [L]iving among Nazis day in, day out proved for me a uniquely trying experience.

I can still not fathom how evil of this depth can gain such broad acquiescence. I like to believe that it could not happen again. But just over a week ago (on April 19) Matthew Kaminski, a journalist on the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, tweeted

What’s Moscow like these days? Longtime diplomat suggests reading “In the Garden of Beasts,” Erik Larson’s account of Berlin in late ’30s. (@KaminskiMK)

One can hope the unnamed diplomat is wrong.

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If I wanted to follow this book up with something less troubling, I probably should not have turned to this one: World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks. But I did.

Though I read a lot, the time I get to read books unrelated to my ‘work’ is fairly limited. When I choose a book to read I know that it likely will be my companion for many days.

Knowing this, I hesitated picking up David James Duncan’s 645 page The Brothers K. Could I trust the recommendation of the man who loaned it to me? Would it be worth the six week investment it would take to read it?

I have the answers, now.

Yes. And yes.

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I had never before heard of David James Duncan. My fault, of course, not his. It is true that he writes books that attract literary attention (this was a NY Times Notable Book for 1992). It is also true that he generates them slowly. Nearly ten years separated this from his previous release of The River Why.

The title is a clear allusion to another ‘Brothers’ book (one I’d like to read again, the next free ten weeks or so I find), but in this case the ‘K’ refers not to the brothers’ last name, but to the symbol used for a strikeout in scoring a baseball game.

Like Dostoevsky’s novel, The Brothers K follows the lives of four brothers and their relationship with their father. Added in the mix are twin sisters, baseball, Seventh Day Adventism, fly-fishing, the Vietnam War, broken dreams, and reconciled lives. Duncan captivatingly recounts 20+ years of a family’s life from the fifties to the seventies. Hugh Chance is a pitcher whose potential major league career is cut short by the Korean War. His often rocky marriage to his Adventist wife Laura produces four sons, each begging to be assigned a different four-letter code by Mr. Myers and Mr. Briggs: Irwin is passionate, Everett is the skeptic, Peter is the spiritual one, and Kincaid observes and records it all.

I know little about the author other than he, like many, has little patience with religious fundamentalism and blowhard clergymen. And though the book has smoking, drinking, drug use, Buddhism, fornication, swearing, anti-war rhetoric, and religious skepticism, it is one of the richest affirmations of the importance of committed family relationships that I’ve encountered in some time. Family values rule.

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I’m intrigued by what an author can do, and the relationship he can build with his reader. The details Duncan exposes concerning this family are vast. One might at times judge them tedious. But I can picture the house in which they live and the town they inhabit. Quote me a piece of dialog and I could probably tell you which character spoke it. I fully expect that I could travel to Washington state and sit down with the children and grandchildren of this family, though I know they are fictional. I feel like I understand them, I understand what makes them tick, I understand what motivates them, I understand why they care so much about what they care about.

And I realize that to come to this place, I needed to spend hours with each. I understand these fictional characters better than I understand many real people. And it’s quite possible that I have spent something like fifteen-twenty hours letting their story be told without interjecting my own words and thoughts and judgments. I’ve only been able to listen. How many real people – even those in my own family – get such attention from me? Not many. Maybe none.

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I’ve been searching for a word that captures a book like this. Like Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections the novel’s plot lines are not as important as the characters that inhabit them. Unlike Franzen, these characters become ones we (at least I) love though we may fiercely differ with them. The word that comes to mind is ‘rich’.

There are a few books that, after reading them for some time, I have not wanted to come to an end. Matterhorn was one. The Elegance of the Hedgehog was another. The Brothers K, rich, surprising, rewarding, has joined that list.

A few months after I entered college I hooked up with a campus ministry that spoke continually about having a ‘personal relationship’ with Jesus Christ. The summer after that, and often since, was spent puzzling over that terminology, wondering what it meant if I had that of which it spoke. It was not, really, a matter of faith – it was a matter of the vocabulary of faith. The words spoke of a reality in a way that caused me to question the presence of the reality in my own life. I think I know what was meant then, but as these words are not biblical words, I tend not to use them today.

Poet and essayist Kathleen Norris in her book Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith addresses the power words posses to shape and to repel; to build up and to confuse. This is true in any arena, but in Christianity our desire is to see words open eyes and reveal Jesus. So complex can be the vocabulary that some leave the faith, and others who would understand give up in confusion.

I am reminded of how hard it is to be in a setting where no one speaks my language. To not hear the familiar rhythms and comforting resonance of one’s own language can leave us weary and longing for silence. Norris speaks of her own experience of trying to return to the church after a twenty-year absence.

When I first ventured back to Sunday worship in my small town, the services felt like a word bombardment, an hour-long barrage of heavyweight theological terminology. Often, I was so exhausted afterwards that I would need a three-hour nap.”

And though it is already difficult for someone new to learn to understand basic terms like ‘faith’ and ‘salvation’ and ‘love’ and ‘heaven’, we tend to complicate matters by creating our own internal jargon (which my friend Mike Osborne is busily battling) adding another layer to the fog. But even without that, we can give specialized meaning to words not meant to bear that.

Any language can become a code; in religious terms, this means a jargon that speaks only to the converted. But in my long apprenticeship as a poet I leaned to refuse codes, to reject all forms of jargon. [I have] a preference for the concrete and specific language of poetry….

Norris’ book is her attempt to provide some concrete ways of thinking about dozens of words from our Christian lexicon. I probably will not agree with all she will say, but I’m enthusiastic about the project. Perhaps it might help this preacher open pathways for others to have a ‘personal relationship’ with Jesus.

Whatever that is.