Still Veiled Allusions

Attempting to be international on this quest for love, so after finishing one set in Ireland, I ventured to Arabia and The Proof of the Honey by Salwa Al Neimi. Very much like Marguerite Duras' The Lover (in fact, Al Neimi even cites her influence), this short novella takes place primarily in the mind of the author, or as her recollections. As an emigre to Paris studying Arabic erotica, Al Neimi's character lauds the lustiness found centuries ago in a pre-fundamentalist Muslim literature. She lives her own lusty life modeled on these old premises but she never fully lifts her veil and all her tales of couplings are intellectually rather than physically tantalizing.

While she is almost Lenny Bruce like in getting the "forbidden" words down in print, they are lifeless, not to mention loveless. In fact, Al Neimi, sounds also like Tina Turner: "What's love got to do with it?" She replays the conversations she has both with male co-workers and female exiles. The former group refers to sexual conquests in jokes; the latter, as gossip, never personal disclosures. Although the female character purports to have had numerous affairs, she divides her experiences into BT and AT, the T being the main male figure, the Thinker, again emphasizing that sex is an intellectual pursuit, notwithstanding the physical benefits the classic Arabic authors describe.

Another short, short book, taking as long to read as yesterday's pedicure and hair styling at the spa. And almost the equivalent of those racy magazines I remember seeing at my father's barber shop: somewhat titillating but neither informative nor romantic.

Four Star Book: A Happy Marriage

Like the other four star book so far this year, The Last Time They Met, Rafael Yglesias employs a structure to tell his tale of alternating chapters between when this couple first me and the end of their marriage. The first chapter is hilarious: Enrique (Rafael's transparent alter ego) is all of 21, living in the Village pre-gentrification in the mid-70s. He is a high school drop out. No, no, no. Don't expect a story of failure here; he dropped out to publish his first book at 16 and by 21 is awaiting the publication of his third novel. His friend introduces him to Margaret, a recent Cornell graduate, three years older than Enrique. It is love at first sight but his friend says she is clearly out of his league. Enrique feels doomed by his perceived inadequacies, mostly his lack of formal education and Ivy League polish.

The second chapter immediately changes tone from this lightness as Margaret is dying on the private floor of Sloan Kettering. (Knocking me for an additional loop, a good friend of mine from work was at Sloan Kettering the day I read this chapter.) Yglesias has immediately captivated his readers, creating a "need to know" -- how did their awkward first meeting bloom into marriage, what happened during the thirty intervening years. The poignancy of Margs suffering and fast decline is steadied with recollections from their marriage, warts and all. The all including a rebellious second son, controlling in-laws, Enrique's affair with one of her best friends, couple counseling, psychoanalysis, and plenty of career struggles.

All the characters are multidimensional, but it is the maturing and coming to fully understand the idiosyncrasies, role models and motives of each other that marks this book as more inviting and revealing than say Didion's Year of Magical Thinking, that now seems to me too self-centered and aloof.

I dog-eared so many corners that the book bulges at the top. If I tried to select my favorite quotes, this review would run on forever. After all the "artistic" (read small publication run) of his novels and the "sell out" of his talents to Hollywood screenwriting, it is ironic that Yglesias' first award winning book is this one. Yet it does not leave the reader with any feeling that he is profiting on his wife's death; it is his catharsis, his love song, with lyrics that strike everyone's heart.

As Long as It Takes to Read 212 Pages

This short novella by William Trevor, Love and Summer, is something to read for a sense of place, Rathmoye, Ireland, rather than for an erotic romp, because the "affair" between Ellie and Florian doesn't seem to last a summer, but only as long as it takes to read the book. Ellie is a foundling, sent by the nuns to be a housekeeper to a widowed farmer. She eventually marries Dillahan and settles into her place in the small, isolated village, selling eggs and buttermilk and pedaling her bicycle down country lanes.

The town is so sparsely populated and everyone more or less content in their own sphere that a stranger draws attention when he photographs the funeral of one of the leading citizens, the owner of the inn and pub. Florian is merely idling until he emigrates after selling off his parents estate house, dabbling in photography because he does not possess the artistic talents or brio of his father and Italian mother, and pining for his first love cousin Isabella. Ellie's attraction to him seems more a teenage curiosity, a need to experience a fuller array of masculinity given her cloistered upbringing. Trevor is a master in succinctly conveying this innocence, saying Ellie had never seen a man shave.

Knowing the town has eyes and ears, they manage to see each other only in nearby but remote tourist tea rooms and amongst the "ruins." Florian never regards Ellie as more than a dalliance; Ellie imagines she would leave Ireland with him, going as far as buying a case for her bicycle to carry her meager possessions.

There is a similar theme as that found in The Reliable Wife: a widower who feels himself guiltily marked by his community, penitent and so intent on beginning a new marriage that he will not imagine the consequences of the rambling tale of the town's "mad man."

The denouement is quiet, emphasizing the worth of a community that is contained, comfortable and consoling. Trevor concludes from such stability comes strength, never sensuality.

Another Anita Shreve: Not Where or When but Why

Because I liked The Last Time They Met so much, almost grabbing strangers in the elevator and telling them to read it, I thought I'd dig deeper into her work and hope to find another love/lust story. And so, the brief description of Where or When sounded like it would also align perfectly with the 2011 blog theme and Paz standards for great love stories. Not.

As I have found with many authors, they have their own themes, their own experiences that they massage again and again in their plots, almost becoming their own self-administered psychoanalysis to make sense of their recollected lives. Shreve again presents two lovers who met as teenagers (here at fourteen as opposed to senior year in high school in TLTTM), and who knew each other only briefly, a mere week in Catholic summer camp with all that attendant structure and chaperon. Both marry, have children, and encounter life's inevitable tragedies. And again, Shreve has the woman be a poet, traveled to Africa. Where to draw the autobiographical line?

Charles sees Sean's (my converted spelling from the Welsh) picture in the Globe's Sunday literary magazine when her latest book of poems is reviewed. (The novel was written in 1993 which explains the lack of the resources of Facebook, etc.). His business is failing as is the entire blue collar fishing town to whom he sells life insurance; he is heading towards foreclosure and repossession land. Sean's husband is also having hard times: crops have failed two years in a row at his onion farm in Pennsylvania. Both marriages are down-turned.

He writes her, reminiscing on innocent first love, with the trite queries about the last 35 years. This is a love story so the inevitable happens, conveniently at their old camp site which has been turned into a quaint inn. The comment in my review of TLTTM, making lustful love dependent on a lengthy separation, is expressed beautifully here as well (if in somewhat a more shallow affair): "...eros is linked with time. It is in the very urgency of time, the sense their minutes together are short and numbered, that he must say what he has come to say before she leaves, that gestures and words cannot be wasted. But it is, paradoxically, also in the vast expanse of the lost years -- the keen sense, whenever he is with her, of all the days and hours missed, the youthful bodies not known, the thousands of nights he might have touched her easily, without loss, without guilt and anxiety ... he thinks of their hours together as time stolen or salvaged -- time-outs from their separate realities."

But it is these realities that Shreve seems to tilt to in this story. Two parallel threads direct this affair towards being, not ill-fated like TLTTM, but false. They hardly knew each other, except for teenage raging hormones. Neither has a hint of what the other is like when facing difficulties too many ages have passed. One of Shreve's best lines has Sean realizing her periods had not even started when she met Charles and now she is going through menopause. Even more poignant, emphasizing both Charles' and Sean's "real" lives are the descriptions of how both families celebrate Christmas. On balance, those years appear to outweigh their reunion season.

The story anticipates the abrupt, tragic ending in TLTTM, but here it seems forced and mundane: their spouses learn of the affair; Sean's husband shoots himself; Charles has a car accident. The ending seems as adolescent as the first encounter.

Writing is to Wording as Lusting is to Sexing

Jane Vandenburgh's novel The Physics of Sunset is as difficult to read as physics itself. It is a horribly pretentious book, set in Berkeley, populated with architects, poets, artists and European exiles, and casually referring to the California normalcy of earthquakes, floods and fires. She peppers it with references to "everyone" reading Hawkins' Brief History of Time as cocktail party conversation. All these pieces fracture the whole of the story. If it is to be a woman's view of sex, as seems to be a major plot line for Vandenburgh, the reader has to plow through 190 pages of this drivel to get there. And the sex is awful. Anna and Alec are both bored with not just their marriages but their existence and lack of professional success. Alec has his Queens/Jewish angst; Anna, her horsey Yankee stock, her inability to manage a household or child, and her poetic aloofness. After reading Sonya Friedman's theories, both Anna and Alec seem to be replicating the mating rituals, or lack thereof, of their parents.

Vandenburgh's writing style is impermeable. To hoist her on her own petard, here's a quote that refers to Alec's wife but just as accurately describes the author's lack of clarity or careful plot: "... didn't talk so much as she did what he thought of as wording, an accelerated intellectualized babble about artistic theory (or science or society or love -- my edit) and its practice that caught the listener up in a lurching and chaotic logic." And again, Alec towards the end of their "affair" opines: "Words were junk, as infinite as stars, and they were being uttered and said and written that very moment, tapped in, put out, sent, going out into the ether that was either nowhere or was the porno chat room where the lid was completely off but no actual intimacy of the mouth-to-mouth or skin-on-skin would ever transpire." Well here you have an idea about how Vandeburgh writes about Californication as well.

Although written in 1999, the book felt me feeling like I had just finished a marathon of Internet searching, occasionally finding an interesting tidbit about famous person, a facet of the universe, or a recipe from Chez Panisse. But it was equally random as a trip down a rabbit hole. Also, hardly passionately, lovingly lustful.

How Did I End Up With This Book? Remind Me

Ah, it was because it liked the Tesla story. Had trouble recalling who Samantha Hunt was, especially since this novel is nothing like The Invention of Everything Else and it certainly does not belong on a lust list, despite it's fantasies of lost loves. It belongs more rightly on the 2009 list of places, as does The Reliable Wife, the book club selection for January. Both of these books have a theme of "this place is driving me crazy."

The Seas takes place in remote northern coastal Maine. It is sort of like Shipping News in that it is set in a small fishing community where everyone knows everyone else and there basically is nothing to do. The poverty spawns alcoholism and insanity. The same family-based and almost inherited insanity that is the backdrop of The Reliable Wife and the citizens of Truitt, Wisconsin, isolated in a never-ending winter landscape.

In both there is a whisper of longed for abandoned love. In Maine, the author writes more Gothically and the nineteen year old heroine has probably lost her grip of reality for over a decade. Truitt in Wisconsin is more of a Shakespearean character -- doomed by the damnation of a religious fanatic mother, an adulterous wife and a community that blames him for his loses and loneliness. Maybe I just prefer the reality of the mid-West story to the dream like flow of the coastal Maine one. The "villains" are easier to hate; and redemption always trumps despair.

So tonight, in the never ending cold and snow and freezing rain of the Northeast, I will try to find a more lusty tale to warm my bones and spirit. Despite hearty soup, the weather feels like Ramadan or Lent, imposing a withdrawal from society that aligns too closely with these last two books. I need racing blood.

Did These Two Women Ever Talk

Hot on the heels of my finishing Tempted Women by Botwin, I quickly read another pop psych book, Secret Loves by Sonya Friedman, also written in the early 90s. Friedman is 180 degrees turned from Botwin, finding her subject in married women with long term, relatively successful affairs. Unlike Botwin's world where the women are tempted by bosses and fellow workers, the women in Friedman's book find love sometimes at work, but just as often when returning to college or even in a grocery store aisle.

Her theme is that these women find what their marriage lacks in their lovers, but at the same time, so focused on the financial and cultural states of their families that do not plan to divorce. (Well, maybe the lesbians do, statistical outlyers that they are.)

In contrast to straying husbands who seduce single women, Friedman finds these long term affairs are most often with married men who are equally adverse to breaking up their families.

So where does she come down? Being so very modern and liberal, she does not condemn such women, after all the evidence of their happiness and fulfillment is almost overwhelming, but she wraps up by saying these women should pass on to their daughters the advice to "know thyself" first so that they don't marry in haste and find their emotional lives lacking. How Pollyana.

Once again since I finished most of the book last night, and also finished The Reliable Wife, which suprisingly for a book club book was actually very well written and captivating, almost Shakespearean in its tragedies and passions. So my mind wandered into the celestial heavens, thinking of the alignment of the sun, moon and earth and using eclipses as a metaphor for human loves. The earth is convention, societal morals, and rootedness. It gets in the way periodically of the other two attractions in the sky. The sun is regularity and productivity. The moon, on the other hand, calls to us in the darkness, waxing and waning and luring us with its mystery. When the earth blocks out the sun, it creates almost a black hole of nothingness; but in a full lunar eclipse, like the one earlier this winter, the moon turns passionate blood red. The sun is a woman's spouse, the moon her lover. Who is Friedman to say one is better than the other, one optional.