What I'm Reading

Winter Birds, Jamie Langston Turner. What a lovely, well-written story. It's the story of Sophia, an eighty-something year-old woman who moves in with her nephew and his wife after a lifetime of silence and loneliness, of being drab and plain, hiding much of her spirit and intellect even from herself. When I picked it up from the library I was hesitant to begin. After reading the blurbs on the back cover it sounded...heartwarming. "An insightful and moving portrayal of the transforming power of love." *sigh* I read the book anyway. Insightful, yes. Moving, quietly. Did love transform the Sophia? I don't think so. I think that's one of the points of the whole story: Sophie gets to be who she is, who she's always been, and she's shown kindness and love. And, just as important, she is valued for what she has to offer: She can sit with a child, teach a sullen teen, make a perfect peach pie for a friend, care for the people around her.

One of the most moving scenes of the book happens when Rachel gives Sophie a foot bath. It's moving because it is done in silence, gently and with kindness. Sophie ponders afterward:

It would be tempting to foist some religious symbolism upon the scene just past, for I have read the Gospel According to John in the red Bible....And how do I explain what Rachel has done? If I thought for a moment that she had simply purposed in her heart to obey a commandment, that she set her jaw to the task and humbled herself as an emblem of Christian piety, I would have kicked over the basin and drenched her with the liquid indulgence. No thank you, I would have said, I do not care to be a part of a religious reenactment....In the end I have no explanation that makes sense. It is a mystery.

The reason Winter Birds works without tipping over into "heartwarming" is that Turner just tells the story without trying to foist meaning onto the story. She lets her characters, particularly Sophie and Rachel, be real, as real as fictional folk can be, at any rate. Mindy, the neighbor's struggling teenage daughter, tutored by Sophie for part of the school year, doesn't become Sohpie's best young friend, she doesn't turn her life around as a result of Sophie's involvement in her life. But a friend of Mindy's tells Sophie, "Mindy said you were smart." And Sophie glows, inwardly. Turner is gifted at writing silence-- Rachel's silent slow movement around the house and her wordless kindness, Patrick's uncharacteristically unspoken love and care for his wife, Sophie's wordless acceptance of the gifts she's given. Turner trusts the reader to read between the lines, to read the silences, to understand that even in a novel sometimes actions speak far more potently than words.

Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books, Maureen Corrigan. I can't wait until wonderful husband says to me, "What are you reading?" (And I can say...) This is one of my birthday books. I haven't finished this one yet, but I wanted to write about it a) before I forget, and b) because reading the first section of Corrigan's book while reading Winter Birds was interesting. In the first third of Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading Corrigan, a book critic for National Public Radio, writes of the contrast between the male writer extreme-adventure stories and what she sees as women's "extreme-adventure" tales. Women's stories of waiting, of daily life, of internal conflicts, of childbirth and abuse and depression-- all the stuff of daily life, experience that we don't traditionally consider as "adventure." She has many interesting things to write on this subject, but as I was reading Winter Birds also (depending on which book was at hand at any given settling-to-read moment) this was what stood out:

If stories about women plugging away, day after day, sound more like a literary call to conscience than a pleasure to reaad, stories about caring for the elderly-- or stories of the lives of old people and their struggles-- have even less of the potential-bestseller aura about them. Getting old and infirm is way down on anyone's list of favorite fantasies, and this fact is reflected in how few novels, short stories, or poems have tackled the subject. Yet, I think that aging and its attendant challenges and miseries are very much the stuff of real-life female extreme adventures...

Corrigan goes on to write of the solitude, the inner journey, the quotidian that mark the female variant of these extreme-adventure stories. A favorite bit so far is when Corrigan envisions Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte as army privates in WWII movies: Austen as the wise-cracking kid from Brooklyn, Bronte as the kid overcome by the horror of war.

I've started another blank bookmark for Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading:

Words: apotheosis, proleptic

Books I Want to Read:
The Maltese Falcon
Testament of Youth (Vera Brittain)
Black and Blue, One True Thing (Quindlen)
Elegy for Iris (Bayley)
Villette (Charlotte Bronte)
Shining Through (Isaacs)
Emily (Bedard-- picture book)
Lucky Jim (Amis)
Dorothy Sayers

And I'm only about 1/3 through the book.