I go back to work this morning, somewhat sadly: I haven't finished reading all my books!
Once it was clear my pulled leg muscle was going to heal fairly fast––it's almost normal now––I had a dreamy week off.
Forced to stay home, mostly, I did what I like to do. I'd thought that might include sewing (clothes for the Orphan Reds, etc.), but it was all reading and blogging.
I don't know about you, but even a short post can take me a couple hours. Say I mention Arthur Koestler; I've spent some time looking him up. (I've only ever read his Darkness at Noon, and that was twenty years ago.)
And I delete a lot--sometimes a whole lot.
Saturday's short section about my problems with my sister, for instance, had started as a long rant.
I'm glad I wrote it out for myself, to clear my head, but in the end a simple example caught it best.
How to write about family?
Amos Oz's memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness, is a stellar example. I'd started it back in January, reading carefully, and I finally finished it this week. It's excellent, and I loved it.
Oz lets political history set the stage for his parents, Arieh and Fania Klausner, and other characters of his childhood. Their history is vivid, since they were Jews who emigrated in the 1930s from Eastern Europe to British Mandate Palestine, where Amos was born in Jerusalem in 1939.
Oz uses repetition to highlight certain things.
Several times throughout the book, his mother gets together in Jerusalem with friends she knows from her childhood in Poland. Each time, he mentions that they talk about a handsome high school teacher all the girls had been in love with.
Elsewhere he talks about the fate of people left behind––an uncle, his wife, and their newborn baby murdered by the Germans, for instance. He doesn't say, but you can guess what happened to the handsome teacher...
This is the backdrop for his mother's decline.
His mother killed herself when Oz was twelve.
I was forty-one when my mother killed herself, which is hugely different (I was her child, but I wasn't a child). Yet when Oz tells how his mother ended her life, in the very last section of the book, pages 531–538, I entirely recognized his grief.
(The book's copyright is 2003, when Oz was sixty-four.)
Sometimes the repetitions seemingly don't carry much weight. He mentions sugared orange peels two or three times. Embroidered Oriental pillows turn up.
Why did he single those out?
Why do I remember them?
Along with little details, sometimes he backs up and gives a sweeping picture. This description of the difference between his parents reminds me of the differences between my parents––though I've often put them in movie terms:
The Godfather for my father, the child of Sicilian immigrants, and Gone with the Wind for my Southern belle mother.
Speaking of movies, Israeli-American Natalie Portman, who looks a lot like the handsome Oz's beautiful mother, made a film of Oz's memoir--the part after 1945.
It got a decent Guardian review, but I can't bear to watch it.
And now, to work...
Once it was clear my pulled leg muscle was going to heal fairly fast––it's almost normal now––I had a dreamy week off.
Forced to stay home, mostly, I did what I like to do. I'd thought that might include sewing (clothes for the Orphan Reds, etc.), but it was all reading and blogging.
I don't know about you, but even a short post can take me a couple hours. Say I mention Arthur Koestler; I've spent some time looking him up. (I've only ever read his Darkness at Noon, and that was twenty years ago.)
And I delete a lot--sometimes a whole lot.
Saturday's short section about my problems with my sister, for instance, had started as a long rant.
I'm glad I wrote it out for myself, to clear my head, but in the end a simple example caught it best.
How to write about family?
Amos Oz's memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness, is a stellar example. I'd started it back in January, reading carefully, and I finally finished it this week. It's excellent, and I loved it.
Oz lets political history set the stage for his parents, Arieh and Fania Klausner, and other characters of his childhood. Their history is vivid, since they were Jews who emigrated in the 1930s from Eastern Europe to British Mandate Palestine, where Amos was born in Jerusalem in 1939.
Oz uses repetition to highlight certain things.
Several times throughout the book, his mother gets together in Jerusalem with friends she knows from her childhood in Poland. Each time, he mentions that they talk about a handsome high school teacher all the girls had been in love with.
Elsewhere he talks about the fate of people left behind––an uncle, his wife, and their newborn baby murdered by the Germans, for instance. He doesn't say, but you can guess what happened to the handsome teacher...
This is the backdrop for his mother's decline.
His mother killed herself when Oz was twelve.
I was forty-one when my mother killed herself, which is hugely different (I was her child, but I wasn't a child). Yet when Oz tells how his mother ended her life, in the very last section of the book, pages 531–538, I entirely recognized his grief.
(The book's copyright is 2003, when Oz was sixty-four.)
Sometimes the repetitions seemingly don't carry much weight. He mentions sugared orange peels two or three times. Embroidered Oriental pillows turn up.
Why did he single those out?
Why do I remember them?
Along with little details, sometimes he backs up and gives a sweeping picture. This description of the difference between his parents reminds me of the differences between my parents––though I've often put them in movie terms:
The Godfather for my father, the child of Sicilian immigrants, and Gone with the Wind for my Southern belle mother.
"Both my parents had come to Jerusalem straight from the nineteenth century.
"My father had grown up on a concentrated diet of operatic, nationalistic, battle-thirsty romanticism... whose marzipan peaks were sprinkled, like a splash of champagne, with the virile frenzy of Nietzsche.
"My mother, on the other hand, lived by the other Romantic canon, the introspective, melancholy menu of loneliness in a minor key, soaked in the suffering of broken-hearted, soulful outcasts, infused with vague autumnal scents of fin de siècle decadence."
––A Tale of Love and Darkness, p. 250
Speaking of movies, Israeli-American Natalie Portman, who looks a lot like the handsome Oz's beautiful mother, made a film of Oz's memoir--the part after 1945.
It got a decent Guardian review, but I can't bear to watch it.
And now, to work...
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