The Meaning of Home: Houses From Great Works of Literature

Home: it's the street you're on, it's your perch in the apple tree, it's tall maple you planted when you were this high, it's your favorite hiding spot to smoke when you're a teenager - its all these things and more. But fundamentally it comes down to the house. Mine was a big creaky hundred year old white house with a wrap around porch, dormers, crawl areas, maple floors, a fireplace that didn't pass code, a finicky water softener, and even a closed off section that we never got around to renovating.

Literary houses, if under the care of an expert pen, can come alive just as much as our own treasured abode. Here are some of my favorite passages about fictional homes:

Maurice(E.M. Forster):

...Penge [Maurice's ex-lover's English estate], instead of numbing, seemed more stimulating than most places. How vivid, if complex, were its impressions, how the tangle of flowers and fruit wreathed his brain!...he sprang up and flung wide the curtains with a cry of 'Come!'

The Great Gatsby(F. Scott Fitzgerald):

A wafer of a moon was shining over Gatsby's hosue, making the night fine as before, and surviving the laughter and the sound of his still glowing garden. A sudden emptiness seemed to flow now from the windows and the great doors, endowing with complete isolation the figure of the host, who stood on the porch, his hand up in a formal gesture of farewell.

Jane Eyre(Charlotte Bronte):

I would have got past Mr. Rochester's chamber without a pause; but my heart momentarily stopping its beat at that threshold, my foots was forced to stop also. No sleep was there: the inmate was walking restlessly from wall to wall; and again and again he sighed while I listened. There was a heaven - a temporary heaven - in this room for me, if I chose...My hand moved towards the lock: I caught it back, and glided on.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll):

Alice opened the door and found it led into a small passage, not much larger than a rat hole: she knelt down and lookied along the passage into the loveliest garden you ever saw. How she longed to get out of that dark hall, and wander out among those beds of bright flowers and those cool fountains, but she could not even get her head through the doorway...

Giovanni's Room(James Baldwin):

But it was not the room's disorder which was frightening; it was the fact that when one began searching for the key to this disorder, one realized that it was not to be found in any of the usual places. For this was not a matter of habit or circumstance or temperament; it was a matter of punishment and grief.

Emma (Jane Austen):

What totally different feelings did Emma take back into the house from what she had brought out! - she had then been only daring to hope for a little respite of suffering; - she was now in an exquisitve flutter of happiness, and such happiness moreover as she believed must still be greater when the flutter shuld have pased away.

They sat down to tea...and how often had her eyes fallen on the same shrubs in the lawn, and observed the same beautiful effect of the western sun! - But never in such a state of spirits, never in anything like it; and it was with difficulty that she coud summon enough of her usual self to be the attentive lady of the house, or even the attentive daughter.

Afterword: Home can be a source of shame, a refuge, a container for great affection, a barrier to achieving our dreams or a symbol of significant loss. Whatever it is to us, home is often much more than four walls and a bed. I hope yours brings you happiness!

Lilliputian Review: Still Alice

From the Publisher: Alice Howland is proud of the life she worked so hard to build. At fifty years old, she's a cognitive psychology professor at Harvard and a world-renowned expert in linguistics with a successful husband and three grown children. When she begins to grow disoriented and forgetful, a tragic diagnosis changes her life -- and her relationship with her family and the world -- forever.

At once beautiful and terrifying, this extraordinary debut novel by Lisa Genova is a moving and vivid depiction of life with early-onset Alzheimer's Disease that is as compelling as A Beautiful Mind and as unforgettable as Ordinary People.

My Take: I have a weakness for debuts that become New York Times bestsellers. Why else would I have picked up The Shack(child killers and justification for God, anyone?). While I find these books rarely have any literary merit they frequently tackle commonplace subjects in an uncharacteristic manner. Still Alice reminded me of My Stroke of Insight in that both take the uncommon approach of examining an illness from the perspective of the person experiencing it and therein lies their strength.

Still Alice has one central problem - it's not really a novel. It's a fictional story but it's written like a memoir. This is a compliment in that the story feels immediate and emotionally available. You believe (or I did) that there really was someone named Alice and that this is her story. You identify with her life at Harvard and her commitment to her work, her struggle to connect with her husband and her deep love for her three children. The book doesn't stand to see Alice degraded but neither does it wrap things up too neatly - her husband can bear only so much, Alice's plans to save herself are thwarted, time marches on, unrelenting.

Yet, I wish that Genova had taken some poetic license with Alice's perspective. The experience of Alzheimer's is so foreign to us that I think some literary writing would have gone far to tease out the deeper implications of losing one's sense of self and place. Genova does attempt this - for example, Alice is struck by how beach houses near her summer home are kept safe from the ravaging effect of the sea and she wishes desperately that her memories and mental abilities could be kept just as safe and pristine. These little flourishes help but they don't qualify as earth shattering.

As the novel stands, though, it is a highly readable and compassionate portrait of what it's like to live with Alzheimer's, both as the sufferer and as the family. I myself lost my grandmother to Alzheimer's years ago (and in full a few months ago) and I wish that I had read this book earlier so that I could have understood what she was going through. As a vehicle for this understanding, Still Alice is exactly what it needs to be.

Still Alice/ Lisa Genova / Simon and Schuster / PB, 2009

Related Posts:
Review of My Stroke of Insight
Review of Opening Skinner's Box (unusual experiments in psychology)

Book Links..You Make My Heart Sing...You Make Evvverrrything...

• Only loosely book-related but what the hell: awesome possum Vogue spread recreating Hansel & Gretel! Now we all know Vogue editor Grace Coddington has a hard on for soft-focus photos of fairy tale characters in $10,000 gowns but this one has Lady Gaga! And crazy tree props from the Met Opera! Click through to Jezebel for sample photos.
• Ariel Levy, author of Female Chauvinist Pigs, recommends a feminist reading list for those who need a primer or just to brush up. Sadly, yours truly has never read, even heard of any of these books. Clearly it is I who needs the primer.
  
• Another treatise on why Edward Cullen (of Twilight - did I even need to explain that?) is the cause of so many weak knees. The article argues that though 13-years-olds love Edward (and this is creepy..he is creepy) what we expect out of a mate as we age will surely evolve/mature. Except please explain why there are legions of grown women ready to sell their souls for a crack at the famous sparkly vamp? That's what really gets me.
• What I've been waiting for: indie-rock YA! Yes, YA not about interspecial love between mermaids/vampires/werewolves and humans! Stuts and Frets still seems uber packaged but BoingBoing seems extremely excited about this mash-up between music and young love so decide for yourself.
• The new compendium of portraits of early-20th century muse and celebrity Marchesa Luisa Casati, The Marchesa Casati: Portraits of a Muse, is going to make a great addition to my coffee table. That day might come sooner as one of my fave fashion bloggers, The Clothes Horse, is hosting a giveaway! Also, now I know who's on the cover of Canadian Russell Smith's novel Muriella Pent. [ed: I had Russell Brand originally. HA.]
  
• Canadian blogger Bambi of Bambi Reads attended a reading of Cormorant and Giller longlisted author Claire Holden Rothman, author of The Heart Specialist, and wrote a great review of the book and the event.
  

Lilliputian Review: Juliet, Naked

From the Publisher: Annie loves Duncan—or thinks she does. Duncan loves Annie, but then, all of a sudden, he doesn’t. Duncan really loves Tucker Crowe, a reclusive Dylanish singer-songwriter who stopped making music ten years ago. Annie stops loving Duncan, and starts getting her own life.

In doing so, she initiates an e-mail correspondence with Tucker, and a connection is forged between two lonely people who are looking for more out of what they’ve got. Tucker’s been languishing (and he’s unnervingly aware of it), living in rural Pennsylvania with what he sees as his one hope for redemption amid a life of emotional and artistic ruin—his young son, Jackson. But then there’s also the new material he’s about to release to the world: an acoustic, stripped-down version of his greatest album, Juliet - entitled, Juliet, Naked.

What happens when a washed-up musician looks for another chance? And miles away, a restless, childless woman looks for a change? Juliet, Naked is a powerfully engrossing, humblingly humorous novel about music, love, loneliness, and the struggle to live up to one’s promise.

My Take: Strangely, About a Boy didn't do it for me (guess I'm not in love with books centring around egomaniacal child-men) but I really fell hard for Juliet, Naked. In Annie, Hornby has finally produced a fully developed female character who's not just out to break hearts. I think women will relate to Annie, someone who's coasted through life by doing what's easiest - staying in a dreary but familiar small town with the same guy she's dated for over a decade. Many of us can relate to these lost months, years, even decades. What Annie realizes (and Tucker too, whose story is a nice counterpart to Annie's) is that there is no reclaiming that time, that one has to move on and accept that while we've been shaped by that experience, it's not the only one we're possible of having.

Juliet, Naked focuses on the negative shapes of our experiences - the album, Juliet, Naked, is the negative to the finished album, Duncan is the negative to what Annie is really looking for in a partner and Annie's lost years are the negative to what she can become if she will just let herself live. Juliet, Naked is also a book about wanting, something Annie and Tucker have desperately tried to repress, and the total joy waiting when one capitulates utterly to it.

Not only is Juliet, Naked a great rock and roll story but it also rocks as a story about the redemptive power of creative and romantic desire.

Juliet, Naked / Nick Hornby / Riverhead Books / HC, 2009

More:
Excerpt from Chapter One

I Heart It and So Must You

Yesterday I took my first real lunch break in..forever..and you know what I did? I went to the library. If I involve books anymore in my life I am going to start smelling like an old musty book. I am going to start talking like a book (too late! I love using big words that I don't understand). I am going to start sh...well let's not get too personal here. Thus, here are some links and they won't all be about books (quelle horror!):

• Nerd Uber God Cory Doctorow (also known as a writer for the blog BoingBoing) visited the Lillian H. Smith library in Toronto yesterday to promote his novel, Makers, and boy did things get fantastically geeky according to Torontoist! What the hell is a custom Python script??
• Daniel Suarez has posted the first chapter of his upcoming sequel to Daemon, Freedom, on his web site! Haven't read it yet but the weather forecast says this book is GOING TO KICK MONKEY BUTT SO HARD!
• On a more serious note, authors used to be removed from the process of publishing their book (in the olden days). With the rise of online social media and slashed budgets, the author must now be intimately involved in all stages of a book's life. Index//mb has put this concept in graph form, good for all you visual learners out there.
• An amazing banana bread recipe from Pink of Perfection. NOT book-related!
  
• Q and A up on Maud Newton with urban farmer Novella Carpenter (author of Farm City) and her radical but sustainable ideas about growing things (including pigs!) in your backyard.
• All the dirt on Linden MacIntyre's Giller upset c/o The National Post. The man is a machine - he went to work for 7am the next day! I'd be two sheets to the wind, hanging out of the side of a limo, drinking straight from a bottle of Moet, screaming at the top of my lungs for a week straight! Anyway, I'm starting to warm up to this Linden character. Seems genuine.
  
• I am obsessed with this outfit and this apartment. They slay me.
  

The Meaning of Home: Under This Unbroken Sky, Part The First

Under This Unbroken Sky is by no means experimental, it's Can Lit down to its very core. In fact, one of the Giller judges, UK novelist and critic Victoria Glendinning, commented recently in the Financial Times:

...there is a striking homogeneity in the muddy middle range of novels, often about families down the generations with multiple points of view and flashbacks to Granny’s youth in the Ukraine or wherever.

As UTUS was one of the novels read for the Giller, the judge was indubitably referring to it.

I don't give a flying fruit - UTUS, Canlitish or not, is a work of art. It impresses in every avenue and I am happy to call it one of the best novels I've read in 2009.

UTUS is the story of Ukranian immigrants Teodor and Maria Mykolayenko. Teodor is lured to Canada by the promise of land (and is driven from Ukraine due to Stalin's reign of terror). When Teodor fails to adhere to the impossible terms of the contract, he is forced off his land. He takes a wagon load of seed in order to survive and is promptly sent to prison.

His sister Anna takes in his family for the year he is away. Anna's husband, Stefan, was once a dashing solider in Ukraine but has now decamped to a nearby town to drink and whore away what money he can scrape up, leaving Anna depressed and pregnant. When the book opens, Teodor has just returned his family. He promptly sets about clearing Anna's land and building his own house, while his wife Maria feeds and tends to Anna's children.

From the opening pages we are told that great disaster will strike. This is a heavy blow for a beginning and it leaves little room for hope but it does fairly reflect the attitude of the book. There is much joy to be found in UTUS and I'm going to chalk it up to Shandi Mitchell's expansive writing. Mitchell is a filmmaker by trade and her prose pays close attention to the minute details of place. Every scene is evocatively portrayed, for example:

Above, a wash of northern lights pulse green and white across the prairie sky. Below, a chorus of frogs croaks...Spring has arrived swollen and impregnated by the retreating frost. He can smell her sweet decay. He can almost hear the earth heaving and groaning beneath his feet, opening herself wide to push her seedlings into light.

This reflects the Mykolayenko family's intimate love of home. Every small detail is celebrated - making love in the cleared land of their future home; taking a pee on a frigid night with the comfortable knowledge that one will soon be inside, safe and snug in one's bed; an impromptu family dance party; a hearty pot of borscht; or the pleasure glutting oneself on eggs during a superior laying period. It's more than the stoic British attitude, 'there is nothing too grim to bear', it's a celebration of the present, of the joys of home and Earth. As Maria says when trying to heal Anna's pain:

She was relieved when Anna joined them in the garden. Hard work, fresh air, sunlight, and, the most important, being surrounded by life would be the best cure for her sister-in-law. Sometimes it is better to forget.

Home is a religion all in its own. Teodor, after his return from prison, refuses to go to church and instead takes Sunday to work on their new house:

He no longer believes in promised lands. He rejects suffering for salvation later. He believes in life now...now he knows there is no God. A compassionate God wouldn't have tried to starve his family. A just God wouldn't have taken away everything that he had.

Those that reject life are those that suffer the most in UTUS. Anna alienates herself from those closest to her and brutalizes her own flesh and in the end, she suffers deeply. Stefan rejects his farm and his family and can find no peace with himself. Even when the Mykolayenko family loses almost everything, they are still a family, bonded together to face whatever (certain) ills will befall them, willing to forget the past and move on. It's safe to say it's love of home that carries them forward.

The ending is climactic and brutal and almost tips the novel towards nihilism. Yet, it is not suffused with despair but rather a type of hope that few of us could ever think of possessing. And that this hope can exist is the greatest joy of all.

In Celebration of Last Night's Giller Choice...Black Plants

Yes, congratulations Linden MacIntyre for winning the 2009 Giller Prize. I have not read your oeuvre, The Bishop's Man, but I am able to tell you that you can now expect unprecedented publicity, sales and happiness. Bliss even. How sweet it will be! Enjoy!

It all reminds me of a book that caught my eye a few days ago: Black Plantsby Paul Bonine. It comes complete with my favorite subtitle of the year (so far) - 75 Striking Choices for the Garden. I don't know why this is so funny to me. It makes me think of a suburban housewife trying to liven up her garden of petunias and pansies. She stumbles across this book and thinks, yes, I really do need a row of Black Scallop buglewood to liven things up! Meanwhile, all the neighborhood kids are talking about how she bakes babies for breakfast in her secret basement kitchen and flies around on a motorized broomstick.

No matter.

This book epitomizes to me everything that the Twilight craze candy-flossed-up - a twisted love of the macabre made alluringly beautiful, in form and in language. This collection of 75 black (or nearly black) plants has wonderful names like Devil's Tongue, Voodoo Lily, Bat Flower, Mourning Widow and Chocolate Cosmos. With names like these I feel like I don't even need to show you photos..okay okay!..here we go:

The CoverDracula Orchid
Iresine Plant
Details for the above here

Paul, you are seriously stingy with your promo photos. The above is all I could find. That is, until I get my own copy. Stay tuned.

Greedy Guts:
Publisher's page
An excerpt from The Mercury News
Christian Science Monitor feature