Writing that rocks – Life of Pi

Cathy LaGrow 10 Comments

Classification: Fiction

I will concede right off the bat that Life of Pi, by Yann Martel, will not appeal to everyone. But I’ve got to tell you – dude can write.

The book was a best seller when it was published, and won a bunch of awards and other critical praise, but I resisted reading it for years. I got the impression, from the cover illustration, that the book involved a guy and a tiger that sat in a boat and talked to each other. I have nearly zero tolerance for “magic realism,” as it is called in literature – a dislike that probably revokes my literary credentials. (I once eagerly bought and read the fanatically acclaimed One Hundred Years of Solitude – and I hated it.)

Anyway, my oldest brother and I were at Powell’s, an independent bookstore that takes up an entire city block and goes on for days. (Every time I go in there, I’m tempted to tie a bell and a rope around my ankle, in case I need to be hauled out like an Old Testament priest.) We were in the main lobby, hanging out by the bargain table, which is my section of choice these post-income days. My brother saw Life of Pi on the table and said that I should get it.

“I don’t do talking tigers,” I said. I pointedly turned to a different book.

“I don’t think that’s what it’s about,” he protested.

I scowled and sighed, then picked up Life of Pi and flipped through it. I started reading passages aloud to my brother. Within minutes, we were bent double over the table, chortling madly while the other customers gave us a wide berth. The plot isn’t a comedy; the writing is just that marvelously clever. Who was I to resist? I bought the book.

Life of Pi is separated into three sections. (The author divides it up differently than I do. I’ll give you my version.) The first part sets up the main character (Pi’s) childhood in India. It is part narrative, part philosophical conversation. The story tracks Pi as he learns about animals from his zookeeper father, and it follows his childish attempt to embrace three very different religions at once. The author’s descriptions of zoo animal habits and treatment are fascinating. The appealing qualities of Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism are all presented with equal clarity and tenderness. There are many wonderful passages in this section. At one point, Pi muses:

I’ll be honest about it. It is not atheists who get stuck in my craw, but agnostics. Doubt is useful for a while. We must all pass through the garden of Gethsemane. If Christ played with doubt, so must we…But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.

The second section is the book’s tour de force – and it is sensational. Pi’s father closes down the zoo and decides to take his family and all the animals to North America. Their ship goes down in the Pacific Ocean. Pi makes it onto a lifeboat; the only other survivors are a small group of animals, which includes a large tiger. The tiger quickly kills the other animals, and Pi survives on the lifeboat, with the tiger, for 227 days. This sounds really bizarre, I know – but Martel’s writing is so elegant and rich in detail that you would swear that all of this had actually happened to him. It’s simply riveting. By the end of this part, I felt I knew precisely what it would be like to be set adrift on a small boat with a large tiger for a long period of time.

And then, in the third part, the story takes a swan dive into a sea of surrealism, and loses me completely. Pi takes refuge on an algae island that has trees that come alive and consume creatures at night. There are – oh, I don’t even know what there are. This section is mercifully short. I’m quite sure it is supposed to symbolize something, but I’m either not smart enough or not weird enough to figure it out.

At the end, there are five chapters of wrap-up that turn the story on its head. There is a major twist that may or may not be real. My oldest brother, who is a good deal more sophisticated than I am, enjoyed the ending very much, when he borrowed the book. So there you go.

Wait – is this a recommendation, or not? Well…yes. Although the story itself is more than a little peculiar, and it gets macabre, the prose is so lovely that even the most dreadful parts are not disgusting. The book is a treat for writers, because Martel’s writing is exceptional. As for non-writers – if you don’t mind some strangeness, Life of Pi tells a terribly interesting story.

Just watch out for those ridiculous magical trees.

What I read, and recommend

Cathy LaGrow 8 Comments

If you like to read, you have come to the right place!

Thanks to a runaway curiosity, I read books from every genre I can think of, and they’re all likely to make an appearance here. Russian/British/American classics, biographies of every stripe, literary memoirs, scientific tomes, 19th-century Children’s fantasy stories, great fiction of every kind…good heavens, it goes on and on. (And those are just from my personal stash.)

My only criteria are an interesting subject and really good writing. “Good writing” is, of course, a somewhat subjective term. But here’s the deal: I have been reading like a maniac since I was five years old – and that was a long time ago, thank you very much. That really shy, bespectacled kid in the corner, the one who got the nervous sweats when she was forced to go outside and play dodgeball with the other children? That was me. My best guess is that, in the years since kindergarten, I have read at least 3500 books.

Downside: I developed bad social skills, and I ruined my eyes. (Seriously. I’m practically blind without my contacts.) Upside: well, if you spend that much of your life consuming something, you tend to develop good taste buds.

My goal is to tell you about 1-2 books a week (among other things.) I’d better get cracking.

Spotlight – North Sentinel Islands

Cathy LaGrow 12 Comments

I was at my brother’s house, standing in his newly put-together office, trying hard not to covet the enormous, gorgeous new map of the world covering the wall over his desk (also trying hard not to covet the fact that he HAS an office with an honest-to-God door that closes – also, wondering if the wall map would fit in the baby’s diaper bag when I left, and if my brother would miss it), and I learned something extraordinary.

We were gazing at the new map when my brother casually pointed to a little spot in the ocean near Indonesia, and said, “That’s the North Sentinel Islands.” Then he stepped back and said, “The people who live there have never been touched by civilization.”

Oh, how he knows what gets me going.

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

My brother, who teaches high school English, assumed his classroom voice and held both of his hands up to make air brackets. He is extremely tall, so when he takes this stance, it’s very dramatic. “There is an indigenous tribe of people living there who have never been contacted by anyone from the outside world,” he said. “Every time outsiders have approached the island by boat, they are driven off. Helicopters have tried to circle overhead, and they are met with a hail of arrows.”

“WHAT?” I squawked. (I tend to squawk when presented with brand-new and intriguing information.)

He leaned over and tapped on his computer, pulling up the Wikipedia page for “North Sentinel Island.” Sure enough, this small island remains a mystery, in the year 2010. It is unknown exactly how many people live there, or what language they speak. They have never interacted with fellow natives on the islands surrounding them. The Indian government made repeated attempts to engage them, before officially giving up in the 1990’s. They are considered to be the most isolated people in the world.

Perhaps I should not admit it, but this information positively floored me. It had never occurred to me that there are pre-historic people still living on this planet.

My brother pulled up a couple of poorly-shot Youtube videos made by researchers who have tried to reach North Sentinel. The first video looks almost fake, with its blurry white beach and dark, stick-figurish natives prancing on the shore, legs akimbo, bows held high. In the second video, the researchers actually crept onto shore and left some gifts, then retreated to their boats and watched as the natives retrieved the offerings. That is as close as anyone has ever come to the North Sentinelese. In 2006 the natives killed a couple of fisherman who got too close to the island and since then, the world has left them alone.

A few days after I learned all of this, I sat on my back patio, reading a memoir called Disturbing the Universe, which was written by a physicist who did work on government nuclear projects in the 1950’s. The more I tried to read about the splitting of the atom and the possibility of interstellar travel, the more my mind kept returning to that little island in the Indian Ocean. I finally leaned back in my chair and listened to the sounds of civilization around me – the drone of a lawn mower, the buzz of a prop plane passing overhead, my air conditioner switching on with a thump – and I thought about the Sentinelese. The same sun warmed their skin and mine, yet our lives might as well be centuries apart. They never hear anything but the dull roar of the ocean, and each other’s voices. They know almost nothing.

As early as 340 B.C., Aristotle hypothesized that the earth was finite, and round; but for all the Sentinelese know, the ocean stretches on forever. They don’t know what an atom is, or a horse, or a paper clip. They don’t know about the Dark Ages, or the Middle Ages, or any of the Ages. They don’t know that World Wars have taken place. They’ve never heard about a man named Christ. The North Sentinelese have missed every single event that has happened outside of their tiny island. Even as I write this, I find it difficult to fathom.

I know that there are millions of people in third-world countries who do not have access to education or technology or medicine, people who don’t know much about history or science. But those individuals have still become a part of the whole – they are still connected to the rest of us, however tenuously. They have still, perhaps, seen a drinking glass or a piece of paper. They are somewhat accessible. The North Sentinelese are not.

Of course, if you really want to tumble down a rabbit-hole, you could pose the question: Are we better off than the Sentinelese? It’s an interesting thought. They have food, and water, and companionship. The “advances” that we take advantage of are not needed for survival. Of course, all of our technologies do make life easier – um, until they don’t.

Ultimately, I would choose my life over theirs, simply because I am a knowledge junkie. I have a curious streak as long as our galaxy. The more I learn, the more I want to learn. If, at its core, civilization is nothing more than knowledge, then I will stay on the side of civilization.

Every now and again, though, I still think about those North Sentinelese, and I wish I could drop them a line. They wouldn’t believe what we’ve been up to…

Writing that rocks – Serena

Cathy LaGrow 2 Comments

Classification: Fiction

Great writing is one of my top five favorite things on this earth (it’s actually probably #3, just below God and my family, and just above sunshine and a good plate of fettucine alfredo.) There are so few truly great writers, compared to the vast number of people who publish books. The Great Ones convey information in such a lovely way, you don’t even realize how much information they’re conveying.

Serena by Ron Rash is a beautifully written book. (Small wonder that Rash is an established poet – this is his first novel.) I’m going to give you the book’s first paragraph in a moment.

Here is the information that Rash is going to convey in that first paragraph:

The setting is the early 1900’s.
The protagonist is a man named Pemberton.
He has relocated to the South.
He is wealthy, and has just inherited a large estate.
He is an important man, with underlings.
He is a hard man, careless with those “beneath” him.
He has gotten a young, poor girl pregnant.
The girl’s father has a wary loathing of Pemberton, and intends to kill him.

Now, here it is:

“When Pemberton returned to the North Carolina mountains after three months in Boston settling his father’s estate, among those waiting on the train platform was a young woman pregnant with Pemberton’s child. She was accompanied by her father, who carried beneath his shabby frock coat a bowie knife sharpened with great attentiveness earlier that morning so it would plunge as deep as possible into Pemberton’s heart.”

Can you see how he gave all the information I listed above, in a gorgeous way, sometimes with just a word or two? All of these details are fleshed out in the pages that follow, but you already know them after the first paragraph. A far clunkier writer (like me) would have laid out the facts with a great deal of rambling, relying way too heavily on workaday adjectives.

(Plot, briefly: the book follows Pemberton as he brings home his new wife, Serena, a tough and cruel woman. She helps him run their timber business and won’t let anything stand in her way. Not even Pemberton.)

This book was an absolute pleasure to read, interesting and suspenseful and so rich in details. And that writing! On one page, Rash signals that it’s twilight by referring to “a pale moon impatient for the night.”

In Heaven, I will write like this. God and I have already discussed it.