Tallying Our Truths
JENNY HENDRIX on Ramona Ausubel,
E.C. McCARTHY on Michael Ondaatje,
and JARDINE LIBAIRE on Dinaw Mengestu.
JENNY HENDRIX
Lost and Saved
Ramona Ausubel
No One Is Here Except All of Us
Riverhead, February 2012. 336 pp.
Ausubel’s is a novel of almost remembering, a story of remnants and skeletons and the stitching together of now from the flotsam of then. “This book is about what we pass on,” Ausubel writes in her author’s note, “and the right of the next generation to keep telling the story long after the facts have melted away and what is left is truth, glittering in a sky deep and dark enough to hold everything lost, everything saved.” Those four words might have provided Ausubel a title: her novel is stuffed with things simultaneously lost and saved — those saved by virtue of their lost-ness, and those lost in the act of becoming saved.
The book takes place largely in the Romanian Jewish village of Zalischik, located on a peninsula in the Dniester River (perhaps a relative of the peninsular Sitka in Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union). Village life is an idyll, almost a cartoon: cabbages are picked, potatoes dug, children wear “scrubbed cheeks that looked like juicy, pluckable fruit.” Characters, except for the narrator and her family, are indicated only by their occupations — “butcher, baker, saddlemaker” — and serve largely as faceless vehicles for given attributes like bigness or envy.
As war threatens to consume the country, and indeed the world, the village’s nine families, with the help of a pogrom survivor they’ve found in the river, decide to start over by erasing the past and the rest of reality with it. Zalischik already seemed unanchored from history, and now the characters slip the last of the moorings. Time and all obvious markers of era are banished, clocks, typewriters, and radios thrown into the river. Jobs, ages, husbands, and even a child are shuffled up and reassigned.
Like everything else in this novel, the change is about a story. This forgotten village’s Jewish former identity was founded in a mythology “of wandering, of being lost, of starting again,” and so too is their new one: “When there is nothing left to do, and there is nowhere else to go, the world begins again.” In the village’s new truth, today is the first day of the world. Their existence becomes both a radical act of denial and a Herculean labor of faith.
In Holocaust fiction — which Ausubel’s book only sort of is — the demand for truth has been intense, even while exigencies of time make rags of whatever border once existed between fact and fiction, that art Oscar Wilde defined as the “telling of beautiful untrue things.” Wilde wrote of Art that she “takes life as part of her rough material, recreates it, and refashions it in fresh forms, is absolutely indifferent to fact … keeps between herself and reality the impenetrable barrier of beautiful style.” Ruth Franklin, in her A Thousand Darknessess: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction, notes that critics of Holocaust fiction have failed to accept this definition of art: indifference to facts, Franklin writes, is the one thing the Holocaust will not abide. Yet it’s this very prohibition that both Ausubel and her villagers exploit: art, in the novel, provides a barrier to an increasingly savage real, the indifference to fact crumbling the reality the village seeks to avoid. Style is literalized, and the impossible facts of history are both processed and avoided by a turn toward fantasy.
In this respect, Ausubel’s novel has much in common with Nathan Englander’s short story “The Tumblers.” In the ghetto of Chelm, the Yiddish village traditionally populated by fools, Englander’s characters rename bad things for good: “they called their aches ‘mother’s milk,’ and darkness became ‘freedom’; filth they referred to as ‘hope’ — and felt for a while, looking at each other’s hands and faces and soot-blackened clothes, fortunate.” Potatoes are gold and gold potatoes; sour cream is water and water sour cream. Englander’s Jews, like the occupants of the train car his villagers stumble into, are magicians, their disappearance a sleight of hand. Now you see them, now you don’t. To escape this fate, the villagers pretend to be acrobats, and for a few magical moments, they are.
So, too, Ausubel’s villagers enjoy, for a time, a safety conjured out of pure will, and like Englander’s tumblers, it’s despair that propels their belief, making them seem as much like deluded fools as like magi. “This world is about hope more than events,” they believe. It’s to Ausubel’s credit that she recognizes how vigilantly such an enclosure of belief must be tended, as the old world continues to exist alongside and its letters, radio waves, and memories to beat their wings against the walls.
Central to the village’s storytelling effort is the novel’s narrator, an 11-year-old girl named Lena. In the new world, Lena is adopted by an aunt and uncle, raised as though she’d begun again as a baby, and summarily married off to the banker’s son, with whom she has two children. Lena recounts, for her infant daughter, “both the parts I saw with my eyes and the parts I did not … Truth is not in facts. The truth is in the telling …” Perhaps, though letting Lena narrate events that she does not directly witness tends to undermine parts of Ausubel’s plot, weakening, for instance, the fear of separation (“Did I wait all day, all the next day?” — a deflated question, as she and the reader both know already) and leading to the occasionally strained arrangement of pronouns.
Among the jobs created in the newborn village are those of “The Committee for What We Have and Where We Have It,” a group responsible for the cataloging and measurement of possessions both tangible (“Forks: 498, Full Grown Trees: 190”) and not (“Overbearing Mothers-in-Law: 11, Regrets in Matters of Love: 1,987”). This kind of listing is a frequent tendency of Ausubel’s: notes left in pockets read “mouse, bed, fingernail, missing, hot, fire, lie” and the names of stars are repeated like prayers (“the horse, which oversees the birth of babies; the pine tree, which keeps watch over men who can’t sleep; the potato, which looks after those who fear being alone. The frog, which must have some purpose, and the chicken, which pecks the frog”). This constant itemization recalls Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated: in his old woman’s house, there were also boxes, marked with labels like “Weddings and Other Celebrations” and “Hygiene/Spools/ Candles.”
Like that house and like Zalischik, Ausubel’s novel is not only an island but an ark, laded with objects for protection and preservation. The answer to the village’s question — “Who are we?” — seems to be: “We are these things.” Still, at one point, the stranger wonders:
Even so, because of its ornateness, Ausubel’s prose seems to float around the idea of trauma — she addresses the Holocaust by embroidering around its edges. Even death, when it comes, is given an eerie magic: a baby’s bones sewn together and capped with a bird’s skull are made to dance like a marionette; a mother, about to give away her only child, watches snow turn into apple blossoms and bank against his sleeping back. Moments like this flirt with whimsy, perhaps not as directly as Everything Is Illuminated, but in a more explicitly sentimental way. It’s not so much that Ausubel is unserious about such serious things, but that the evenness of her tone — lilting, singsong, its solemn beauty never wavering — makes her seriousness seem like a pose. Her words tend to abstract rather than describe (there’s the mention of “a man with a square moustache,” which feels unnecessarily oblique). This can seem like the enactment of a certain idea of literariness, a common beginner’s mistake. Her prose is sometimes just too decorated to access real pain: when Lena dreams of “the dictator’s” underground wedding, a disjunction occurs as the fragile magical-realist world rams up against what happened.
As in fact it must: belief, though beautiful, must occasionally bow to fact if it’s not to become fanatic. In Zalischik, history arrives in the form of a single bullet through the side of a barn, the new world suddenly breached by the old. Yet, half by fault of Ausubel’s prose style and half by that of her story, once outside the village’s protective shell, places and times never seem quite real. Lena, sent away to tell the village’s story, is lost in a world she did not create with no idea which way or when she is traveling, nor even how old she might be. Most of the time, we don’t know either, so it’s astonishing when it’s manifestly fall or spring, when we find ourselves on a boat, or in a country with a name like “Italy.” The novel is so adrift in its ahistorical linguistic idyll that when history intrudes, we find it difficult to believe:
As it turns out, though, No One Is Here Except All of Us does have a historical foundation: it roughly follows the story of Ausubel’s Romanian great-grandmother. But adherence to the facts of a family past is not Ausubel’s métier: “My territory, my work, was the dark matter, the emptiness of what is not known,” she writes in her afterword, “what is unthinkable yet can still be felt. My head was quiet, but something in my chest knew what to do.” This echoes Lena’s explanation of how she came to be narrating scenes she was absent from, and its intimation of intuitive historical understanding is disconcerting given the novel’s context. But the story’s not really about history. It’s about how history’s remembered. And Ausubel’s novel, for all its faults, succeeds in posing the narrative question of why pins hurt and cabbages roll. It’s a way of getting at how stories — including its own — can both protect and injure us when the big cruel world comes knocking on our doors.
¤
E.C. McCARTHY
Mixed Memories
Michael Ondaatje
The Cat’s Table
Alfred A. Knopf, October 2011. 269 pp.
Memories are fickle beasts, living alongside our dreams. We often don’t realize when one devours the other, or when they meld into that hybrid of fantasy and reality that becomes our truth. In earlier novels such as The English Patient and Divisadero, Michael Ondaatje explored the agony of living while consumed by memory. His most recent book is imbued with acceptance: memory is unreliable and desire is a compulsive curator of the past.
The Cat’s Table recollects a singular event in the life of Michael, a writer who, at 11 years old, embarked upon a three-week sea passage from Sri Lanka to England in the fifties. The narrative flips from past to present and back again, showing us that the journey’s significance, for both Michael and his fellow passengers, is only absorbed in the years that follow. Their shared experience, compressed into fixed space and time, leaves its mark in myriad ways, affecting the most important choices of love, marriage, and the pursuit of dreams. Everyone is changed. The delight of Ondaatje’s story is in the application of childhood lessons, in the slow reveal of what truly matters once time has earned the answers.
As with Ondaatje’s previous novels, the lapping waves of thought and image present a nonlinear tale while the narrator guides us between past and present, connecting the dots of meaning. The passengers blend into one another in Michael’s memory — “I cannot remember who told us the first part of that story…” — and they exist as a function of adult Michael’s search for the origins of his expectations. The story is populated with many characters, rendered succinctly, most without full arcs. To pull any one of them forward is to take a magnifying glass to one thread of memory — first love, first death, first crime, first freedom — but in reality the vignettes are interconnected: a true rendering of seminal experience.
¤
¤
The most compelling thread of The Cat’s Table is this tracing of memory. Ondaatje’s grasp is firmer than in previous books; there isn’t the trademark struggle with truth that is bound to end in misery, and the unknowable is accepted with distinguished grace. To catalogue memory is a desperate act of photography, the sift of diminishing landscapes captured from a passing ship; we are forever coming away with time, leaving even our most recent discoveries to join the archives.
¤
JARDINE LIBAIRE
Good Liar, Terrible Liar
Dinaw Mengestu
How to Read the Air
Riverhead Books, October 2010. pp320.
Dinaw Mengestu’s The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears, published in 2007, concerns an Ethiopian man who fled his country for the United States. It hinges on friendships made from hardship, and identities cemented during transitions. The melancholic book doesn’t mince words, but the story is still charming and warm, taking hearts and selling copies.
So many, in fact, that Mengestu became a “prizewinning international literary star,” according to his book jacket. He was buried alive with accolades, and pigeonholed as an Ethiopian immigrant-story memoirist, even though it’s more accurate to call him an American novelist. (He was born in Ethiopia but raised in the US.) Now, in his second novel, How to Read the Air, Mengestu’s characters again arm-wrestle with identity and the American dream; and he’s also acquired the new burden of investigating storytelling itself, and the art (or game) of fiction.
Anger is the quiet engine in How to Read the Air, likely born from Mengestu’s particular experience as a famous author. The novel is a creative, not destructive, retort to readers and critics (like me) who think they know Mengestu’s story better than he knows it. “What does happen with immigrants and migration,” Mengestu said in a 2010 WNYC interview,
Both the author and the protagonist go on to test and bend and measure the powers of storytelling, as if gathering data to make a verdict. They graduate from this original purpose of filling a vacuum, of completing a history, to trying out darker, more illicit tricks, to working with more majestic reasons, and to playing stranger games.
During the course of this experiment, Mengestu exploits each character as a storyteller, to a rainbow of ends. He hands the reader a stack of drafts and anti-drafts in the guise of a book. The material is rife with desperate riddles: What is true? Who is honest? How do these conflicting stories fit together? What does it mean for these stories to coexist? Who owns these stories? Who is responsible for their repercussions? Is a lie a story? Is a story a lie?
¤
In How to Read the Air, a story is first and foremost a sacred action. Jonas works temporarily at a refugee resettlement center in Manhattan. He is “the literary type in the office,” and lawyers pass client fact sheets to him to be “‘touched’ or ‘built upon.’” As an example, he takes
Abrahim is the prophet-like man who educates Yosef about survival while Yosef prepares to smuggle himself out of Sudan. Abrahim, in Jonas’s version of his father’s story, should have no hope left, but
Although storytelling is demonstrated here as an honorable pursuit, there is a cost to the storyteller, as there can often be to messengers and visionaries. Jonas has heard bits and pieces of this road-trip-from-hell tale over the years from each parent. And he finds himself in the archetypal position of the “broken family” child:
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One of the most pressing dualities raised in How to Read the Air is the guilt or innocence of a storyteller. Mengestu pokes and prods at the issue. In The Rumpus interview, Mengestu brags: “Of course, I’m a good liar — I’m a fiction writer. I could tell you anything.” In the novel, Jonas lies, hiding his layoff at one job, fabricating a promotion at another, and his wife calls him out: “‘You think you can lie,’ she said. ‘But really you can’t. You’re terrible at it.’”
When does storytelling cross over from art to manipulation? Mengestu spends much of the book drawing this line, erasing it, trying again. In happier times, Jonas and his wife play an almost adolescent game of redesigning better pasts:
Both Jonas as narrator and Mengestu as author reach a level of obsession with storytelling that verges on addiction. Jonas has to walk off his high after the classroom episodes: “I knew after the first time I told my father’s story that it was important to come down from the almost delirious heights I had reached before returning home.” He wastes hours roaming aimlessly, and buys Angela gifts and makes up unlikely stories for her afterward — pages torn from any junkie’s handbook.
Jonas’s lies to Angela about his promotion, his plans for success and how he’s going to achieve it, grow with the same exponential fever.
As readers, we notice that Mengestu as novelist can’t stop either; he keeps playing, figuring out how many permutations of the “concept” of story he can use. He has Angela inventing anecdotes for her father’s abandonment of her family: once he goes out for cigarettes and never returns, or he goes to Mexico before Christmas and never returns, or he doesn’t come home from work, or he goes out for milk, or her mother throws him out. Mariam makes up stories for social workers: her family had been like royalty in Ethiopia, a grandfather has just died, Jonas has a mysterious ailment leaving him too weak to walk. Yosef memorizes stories about American landmarks because he thinks it will make him assimilated. Jonas tells the story of his own childhood to his recently deceased father as Jonas walks through Manhattan. Mariam makes up stories for Jonas about the people who once owned the family’s now secondhand furniture. Jonas imagines a moment on his parents’ road trip when they could have taken advantage of the silence and told each other stories, and Jonas makes up those stories for them in this re-imagining: Mariam tells Yosef about men she slept with in Ethiopia, Yosef dreams about being killed by a man who puts a bag over his head.
At a certain point, How to Read the Air feels like a funhouse of stories, an avalanche of stories, like a swarm of little stories that are devouring the larger one. This breeds claustrophobia, which is instrumental to this difficult novel. Once in a while, even Jonas goes too far though, testing limits like anyone caught up in compulsive behavior. While creating a rest stop vignette on his parents’ big drive, Jonas has put his mother in the woods, about to run away from Yosef.
How to Read the Air, for all its back and forth movement, staking and unstaking claims, lying about the truth and telling true lies, does make steady progress to what feels like an inevitable end. But no question is answered. There is just the weary and sincere satisfaction one gets when every angle has been covered, all options exhausted. Reading the book is like watching a child play with clinical toys in a psychologist’s office, as he dedicatedly works out a few dozen versions of reality until the session is up.
In a 2010 New York Times profile, Mengestu talks about the trauma that sparked his own family’s departure from Ethiopia, and the subsequent silence:
Jenny Hendrix is an un-Googleable freelance writer living in Brooklyn.
E.C. McCarthy is Deputy Editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books. She lives in Los Angeles.
Jardine Libaire is the author of the novel Here Kitty Kitty. She lives in Austin.
Image: Top Hat © Cornel Rubino, 2012 [http://bit.ly/rrKK08]
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E.C. McCARTHY on Michael Ondaatje,
and JARDINE LIBAIRE on Dinaw Mengestu.
JENNY HENDRIX
Lost and Saved
Ramona Ausubel
No One Is Here Except All of Us
Riverhead, February 2012. 336 pp.
While Gentiles experience and process the world through the traditional senses, and use memory only as a second-order means of interpreting events, for Jews memory is no less primary than the prick of a pin, or its silver glimmer, or the taste of the blood it pulls from the finger. The Jew is pricked by a pin and remembers other pins. It is only by tracing the pinprick back to other pinpricks — when his mother tried to fix his sleeve while his arm was still in it, when his grandfather’s fingers fell asleep from stroking his great-grandfather’s damp forehead, when Abraham tested the knife point to be sure Isaac would feel no pain — that the Jew is able to know why it hurts.River, Goat, Rain, Child, Cabbage, Mother, Mustard, Stranger, Letter, Compass, Letter, Letter, Star: How easy it is, from a string of nouns, to pick out a constellation, a story. Identity itself often seems this kind of narrative, daisy-chained from a million disparate moments, objects, emotions. Who we are, as Ramona Ausubel puts it in her debut novel, No One Is Here Except All of Us, can almost be summed up by the physical things we know are real around us, a pinprick connecting us to a history of pins.
When a Jew encounters a pin, he asks: What does it remember like?— Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated
Ausubel’s is a novel of almost remembering, a story of remnants and skeletons and the stitching together of now from the flotsam of then. “This book is about what we pass on,” Ausubel writes in her author’s note, “and the right of the next generation to keep telling the story long after the facts have melted away and what is left is truth, glittering in a sky deep and dark enough to hold everything lost, everything saved.” Those four words might have provided Ausubel a title: her novel is stuffed with things simultaneously lost and saved — those saved by virtue of their lost-ness, and those lost in the act of becoming saved.
The book takes place largely in the Romanian Jewish village of Zalischik, located on a peninsula in the Dniester River (perhaps a relative of the peninsular Sitka in Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union). Village life is an idyll, almost a cartoon: cabbages are picked, potatoes dug, children wear “scrubbed cheeks that looked like juicy, pluckable fruit.” Characters, except for the narrator and her family, are indicated only by their occupations — “butcher, baker, saddlemaker” — and serve largely as faceless vehicles for given attributes like bigness or envy.
As war threatens to consume the country, and indeed the world, the village’s nine families, with the help of a pogrom survivor they’ve found in the river, decide to start over by erasing the past and the rest of reality with it. Zalischik already seemed unanchored from history, and now the characters slip the last of the moorings. Time and all obvious markers of era are banished, clocks, typewriters, and radios thrown into the river. Jobs, ages, husbands, and even a child are shuffled up and reassigned.
Like everything else in this novel, the change is about a story. This forgotten village’s Jewish former identity was founded in a mythology “of wandering, of being lost, of starting again,” and so too is their new one: “When there is nothing left to do, and there is nowhere else to go, the world begins again.” In the village’s new truth, today is the first day of the world. Their existence becomes both a radical act of denial and a Herculean labor of faith.
In Holocaust fiction — which Ausubel’s book only sort of is — the demand for truth has been intense, even while exigencies of time make rags of whatever border once existed between fact and fiction, that art Oscar Wilde defined as the “telling of beautiful untrue things.” Wilde wrote of Art that she “takes life as part of her rough material, recreates it, and refashions it in fresh forms, is absolutely indifferent to fact … keeps between herself and reality the impenetrable barrier of beautiful style.” Ruth Franklin, in her A Thousand Darknessess: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction, notes that critics of Holocaust fiction have failed to accept this definition of art: indifference to facts, Franklin writes, is the one thing the Holocaust will not abide. Yet it’s this very prohibition that both Ausubel and her villagers exploit: art, in the novel, provides a barrier to an increasingly savage real, the indifference to fact crumbling the reality the village seeks to avoid. Style is literalized, and the impossible facts of history are both processed and avoided by a turn toward fantasy.
In this respect, Ausubel’s novel has much in common with Nathan Englander’s short story “The Tumblers.” In the ghetto of Chelm, the Yiddish village traditionally populated by fools, Englander’s characters rename bad things for good: “they called their aches ‘mother’s milk,’ and darkness became ‘freedom’; filth they referred to as ‘hope’ — and felt for a while, looking at each other’s hands and faces and soot-blackened clothes, fortunate.” Potatoes are gold and gold potatoes; sour cream is water and water sour cream. Englander’s Jews, like the occupants of the train car his villagers stumble into, are magicians, their disappearance a sleight of hand. Now you see them, now you don’t. To escape this fate, the villagers pretend to be acrobats, and for a few magical moments, they are.
So, too, Ausubel’s villagers enjoy, for a time, a safety conjured out of pure will, and like Englander’s tumblers, it’s despair that propels their belief, making them seem as much like deluded fools as like magi. “This world is about hope more than events,” they believe. It’s to Ausubel’s credit that she recognizes how vigilantly such an enclosure of belief must be tended, as the old world continues to exist alongside and its letters, radio waves, and memories to beat their wings against the walls.
Central to the village’s storytelling effort is the novel’s narrator, an 11-year-old girl named Lena. In the new world, Lena is adopted by an aunt and uncle, raised as though she’d begun again as a baby, and summarily married off to the banker’s son, with whom she has two children. Lena recounts, for her infant daughter, “both the parts I saw with my eyes and the parts I did not … Truth is not in facts. The truth is in the telling …” Perhaps, though letting Lena narrate events that she does not directly witness tends to undermine parts of Ausubel’s plot, weakening, for instance, the fear of separation (“Did I wait all day, all the next day?” — a deflated question, as she and the reader both know already) and leading to the occasionally strained arrangement of pronouns.
Among the jobs created in the newborn village are those of “The Committee for What We Have and Where We Have It,” a group responsible for the cataloging and measurement of possessions both tangible (“Forks: 498, Full Grown Trees: 190”) and not (“Overbearing Mothers-in-Law: 11, Regrets in Matters of Love: 1,987”). This kind of listing is a frequent tendency of Ausubel’s: notes left in pockets read “mouse, bed, fingernail, missing, hot, fire, lie” and the names of stars are repeated like prayers (“the horse, which oversees the birth of babies; the pine tree, which keeps watch over men who can’t sleep; the potato, which looks after those who fear being alone. The frog, which must have some purpose, and the chicken, which pecks the frog”). This constant itemization recalls Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated: in his old woman’s house, there were also boxes, marked with labels like “Weddings and Other Celebrations” and “Hygiene/Spools/ Candles.”
Like that house and like Zalischik, Ausubel’s novel is not only an island but an ark, laded with objects for protection and preservation. The answer to the village’s question — “Who are we?” — seems to be: “We are these things.” Still, at one point, the stranger wonders:
If the people had been put out to sea, would their odd cargo have sustained them? On their lost ark of a world, floating alone, unpulled by the moon, unwarmed by the sun, the people waited to be dragged up onto some dry shore, some island where flowering trees might drop petals into their salty hair, and not long after, globes of waxy fruit.One might ask the same thing of the novel: can its collection of objects keep a story of this heaviness afloat? Ausubel has a pack rat’s greediness with imagery, and the well-built raft of her novel can seem overloaded with similes: “My mother absently took my braids in her hand and held them like rein”; “We remained in the healer’s kitchen, and danger crept around us like a salamander”; “The banker’s wife woke up and swatted at her eleven children, huddled close, like a woman keeping flies off the pie.” When so many things are like so many other things, it is easy for the prose to grow hazy, its edges melting into a kind of association-broth. We do sometimes pine for a dry shore. But then Ausubel surprises us, and something gorgeous cuts through: “my mother released my braids, which fell palm-warmed onto my neck”; “my father was not home yet and the room was like a painting we had made for him”; “the three of us children raced to show our father the evidence that we, too, had been alive all day long.”
Even so, because of its ornateness, Ausubel’s prose seems to float around the idea of trauma — she addresses the Holocaust by embroidering around its edges. Even death, when it comes, is given an eerie magic: a baby’s bones sewn together and capped with a bird’s skull are made to dance like a marionette; a mother, about to give away her only child, watches snow turn into apple blossoms and bank against his sleeping back. Moments like this flirt with whimsy, perhaps not as directly as Everything Is Illuminated, but in a more explicitly sentimental way. It’s not so much that Ausubel is unserious about such serious things, but that the evenness of her tone — lilting, singsong, its solemn beauty never wavering — makes her seriousness seem like a pose. Her words tend to abstract rather than describe (there’s the mention of “a man with a square moustache,” which feels unnecessarily oblique). This can seem like the enactment of a certain idea of literariness, a common beginner’s mistake. Her prose is sometimes just too decorated to access real pain: when Lena dreams of “the dictator’s” underground wedding, a disjunction occurs as the fragile magical-realist world rams up against what happened.
As in fact it must: belief, though beautiful, must occasionally bow to fact if it’s not to become fanatic. In Zalischik, history arrives in the form of a single bullet through the side of a barn, the new world suddenly breached by the old. Yet, half by fault of Ausubel’s prose style and half by that of her story, once outside the village’s protective shell, places and times never seem quite real. Lena, sent away to tell the village’s story, is lost in a world she did not create with no idea which way or when she is traveling, nor even how old she might be. Most of the time, we don’t know either, so it’s astonishing when it’s manifestly fall or spring, when we find ourselves on a boat, or in a country with a name like “Italy.” The novel is so adrift in its ahistorical linguistic idyll that when history intrudes, we find it difficult to believe:
“It’s over,” the man in the black hat said, “Hitler is dead. The camps are being liberated.”It’s the first time Lena has heard of the camps, and the first time Hitler has been given a name. It’s hard not to wonder why Lena thought she was in danger, or why her story and sacrifice mattered so much if this is so.
“I don’t know what those things are,” I admitted.
As it turns out, though, No One Is Here Except All of Us does have a historical foundation: it roughly follows the story of Ausubel’s Romanian great-grandmother. But adherence to the facts of a family past is not Ausubel’s métier: “My territory, my work, was the dark matter, the emptiness of what is not known,” she writes in her afterword, “what is unthinkable yet can still be felt. My head was quiet, but something in my chest knew what to do.” This echoes Lena’s explanation of how she came to be narrating scenes she was absent from, and its intimation of intuitive historical understanding is disconcerting given the novel’s context. But the story’s not really about history. It’s about how history’s remembered. And Ausubel’s novel, for all its faults, succeeds in posing the narrative question of why pins hurt and cabbages roll. It’s a way of getting at how stories — including its own — can both protect and injure us when the big cruel world comes knocking on our doors.
¤
E.C. McCARTHY
Mixed Memories
Michael Ondaatje
The Cat’s Table
Alfred A. Knopf, October 2011. 269 pp.
Memories are fickle beasts, living alongside our dreams. We often don’t realize when one devours the other, or when they meld into that hybrid of fantasy and reality that becomes our truth. In earlier novels such as The English Patient and Divisadero, Michael Ondaatje explored the agony of living while consumed by memory. His most recent book is imbued with acceptance: memory is unreliable and desire is a compulsive curator of the past.
The Cat’s Table recollects a singular event in the life of Michael, a writer who, at 11 years old, embarked upon a three-week sea passage from Sri Lanka to England in the fifties. The narrative flips from past to present and back again, showing us that the journey’s significance, for both Michael and his fellow passengers, is only absorbed in the years that follow. Their shared experience, compressed into fixed space and time, leaves its mark in myriad ways, affecting the most important choices of love, marriage, and the pursuit of dreams. Everyone is changed. The delight of Ondaatje’s story is in the application of childhood lessons, in the slow reveal of what truly matters once time has earned the answers.
As with Ondaatje’s previous novels, the lapping waves of thought and image present a nonlinear tale while the narrator guides us between past and present, connecting the dots of meaning. The passengers blend into one another in Michael’s memory — “I cannot remember who told us the first part of that story…” — and they exist as a function of adult Michael’s search for the origins of his expectations. The story is populated with many characters, rendered succinctly, most without full arcs. To pull any one of them forward is to take a magnifying glass to one thread of memory — first love, first death, first crime, first freedom — but in reality the vignettes are interconnected: a true rendering of seminal experience.
¤
I thought I was being loved because I was being altered.Michael, Cassius, and Ramadhin are Sri Lankan-born, of the same age, and fast friends once they find each other at the cat’s table — the one located farthest from the captain and therefore least prestigious. They are traveling unchaperoned to begin school in England, and this journey marks a turning point in their lives. The adults who usher them into new awareness are a varied bunch — a jazz aficionado, a ship dismantler, a horticulturalist, a budding femme fatale, a delicate circus girl, a thief — and possess the sorts of exotic names you might find on Agatha Christie’s Orient Express: Max Mazappa, Flavia Prins, Hector de Silva, Asuntha. While others yearn for a seat at the head table, Michael notes that greater distance from authority offers the most fertile ground for adventure:
What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power. Nothing much of lasting value ever happens at the head table, held together by a familiar rhetoric. Those who already have power continue to glide along the familiar rut they have made for themselves.Revelations are bountiful for three feral boys with free range of a ship. They make one rule: “Each day, we had to do at least one thing that was forbidden.” They rise at dawn and roam the empty decks, hide in lifeboats, and spy on passengers. The exercise yields an informative notebook of “Overheard Conversations,” but the weightiest observations are of body language, the uncritical guess at blossoming relationships between newly acquainted adults; the foundation for recognizing love. Unlike Ondaatje’s previous novels that swallow whole the dilemma of reckless hearts encased in caring, rational beings, The Cat’s Table cuts apart the experience, finally. The passengers on the Oronsay, viewed alternately by Michael the boy and then the man, come into focus in hindsight, their self-deceptions recognized as the storms that pass through our lives. Once exposed to these inner tempests, our minds are powerless to remain unchanged, while our hearts deflect reason. This lesson recurs throughout the novel, a motif so pure and simple it’s almost embarrassing to realize how unlearned we can be when our hearts are involved. Mr. Mazzapa, resident authority on sex, instructs the boys that men have “[t]wo hearts. Two kidneys. Two ways of life. We are symmetrical creatures. We are balanced in our emotions …” As for women, Mazzapa provides a thrilling explanation that is lost on his listeners:
“There is a madness in women,” he tried to explain to the three of us. “You have to approach them carefully. They might be quaint and hesitant as wild stags, if you wish to lie with them, go drinking with them. But you leave them and it’s like plunging down a mine shaft you didn’t realize was in their nature … A stabbing is nothing. Nothing. I could have survived that.”Each boy assimilates this lesson according to his nature: Ramadhin protects himself, Cassius burns with a desire to be rid of his neediness, while Michael, adult Michael, identifies his young heart as cold and unfeeling, able to be locked away at the first sign of pain. It is a prominent feature in Michael’s adult recollection of the voyage that he possesses a second heart, possibly one that isn’t so cold. That he can trace his adult choices back to those childhood moments suggests a profound truth: self-knowledge lies in the acceptance of our emotional core as unchangeable. Perhaps the heart can’t learn, only lead.
¤
But are we alright?Early in the voyage, Michael is gripped with fear over the ship’s seaworthiness. Suddenly realizing they are a floating “castle,” adrift and vulnerable, he seeks reassurance from Mr. Nevil, the ship dismantler. Nevil draws him an ancient Greek warship, a trireme:
“This was the greatest ship of the seas. And even it no longer exists. It fought the enemies of Athens and brought back unknown fruits and crops, new sciences, architecture, even democracy. All that because of this ship. It had no decoration. The trireme was what it was — a weapon. On it were just rowers and archers. But not even one fragment of it exists now … Our ship is safer.”Traveling across the ocean alone creates understandable fear in a child, yet Michael is strangely calmed by Nevil’s assurances that “the greatest ship of the seas” is no longer in existence; he is told their vessel is safer. He listens for what he needs to hear. The rest is fodder for his imagination to bend and shape the Oronsay into a stronger ship, a trireme, with himself as warrior and Nevil as naval commander. Where adults task themselves with initiation and action, life is constantly revealing itself to a child, a quicksilver map of landscape and emotion. Children default to fantasy when confronted with overwhelming feelings, while caring adults gently pave the way toward meaning:
[It] was painful to realize that nothing was permanent, not even an ocean liner. “Not even the trireme!” [Mr. Nevil] said, and nudged me. He had been there to help dismantle the Normandie — “the most beautiful ship ever built” — as it lay charred and half drowned in the Hudson River in America. “But somehow even that was beautiful … because in a breaker’s yard you discover anything can have a new life, be reborn as part of a car or a railway carriage, or a shovel blade. You take that older life and you link it to a stranger.”There is no control over the adults one will encounter in childhood; one can only hope the preponderance will be benevolent teachers. While Mr. Nevil is a kind, guiding presence, Ondaatje’s story lays out a full spectrum, from compassionate to evil. He shows how easily a child can be misled, how innocence is abused — a crook plies Michael with ice cream and entreats him to slither through windows into unguarded cabins. The boys are in a true learning state, one that will be lost to adulthood, and their education dangles by the shoestring of fate. When they are steered wrong, or fed too much freedom, their fates are in jeopardy. Michael’s stoic recollection of their scrapes with death and persecution belies a wellspring of gratitude, or possibly sorrow. The boys have no right to their lives, only luck and wiser heads to thank for them. Adulthood brings that knowing, in hand with grief for guileless curiosity.
The three weeks of the sea journey, as I originally remembered it, were placid. It is only now, years later, having been prompted by my children to describe the voyage, that it becomes an adventure, when seen through their eyes, even something significant in a life. A rite of passage. But the truth is, grandeur had not been added to my life but had been taken away.While Michael is aboard the Oronsay, he is distracted by the memory of his abandoned homeland: its smells, its sounds, and its people, his friends. He is mourning, as are many others aboard the ship, yet nothing can be processed until years later, once safely back on familiar ground. It is this particular sway that Ondaatje offers us, even in light of dramatic and frightening acts: how the new commingles with the old, the present dances with memory, and the trodden path reveals itself in a broadened landscape of meaning.
The most compelling thread of The Cat’s Table is this tracing of memory. Ondaatje’s grasp is firmer than in previous books; there isn’t the trademark struggle with truth that is bound to end in misery, and the unknowable is accepted with distinguished grace. To catalogue memory is a desperate act of photography, the sift of diminishing landscapes captured from a passing ship; we are forever coming away with time, leaving even our most recent discoveries to join the archives.
¤
JARDINE LIBAIRE
Good Liar, Terrible Liar
Dinaw Mengestu
How to Read the Air
Riverhead Books, October 2010. pp320.
Dinaw Mengestu’s The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears, published in 2007, concerns an Ethiopian man who fled his country for the United States. It hinges on friendships made from hardship, and identities cemented during transitions. The melancholic book doesn’t mince words, but the story is still charming and warm, taking hearts and selling copies.
So many, in fact, that Mengestu became a “prizewinning international literary star,” according to his book jacket. He was buried alive with accolades, and pigeonholed as an Ethiopian immigrant-story memoirist, even though it’s more accurate to call him an American novelist. (He was born in Ethiopia but raised in the US.) Now, in his second novel, How to Read the Air, Mengestu’s characters again arm-wrestle with identity and the American dream; and he’s also acquired the new burden of investigating storytelling itself, and the art (or game) of fiction.
Anger is the quiet engine in How to Read the Air, likely born from Mengestu’s particular experience as a famous author. The novel is a creative, not destructive, retort to readers and critics (like me) who think they know Mengestu’s story better than he knows it. “What does happen with immigrants and migration,” Mengestu said in a 2010 WNYC interview,
is it’s very difficult to take the stories that the previous generation has experienced and translate them into America. In that regard, there often is a distance and a silence that takes place between one generation and the next.In How to Read the Air, Mengestu’s protagonist dives into that silence. Jonas Woldemariam’s marriage to Angela is falling apart, so for insight he recreates his parent’s disastrous honeymoon road trip from Peoria, Illinois to Nashville, Tennessee. (He was present on the original jaunt, as a three-month-old fetus.) His folks, Yosef and Mariam, immigrated to the United States from Ethiopia as adults, and they lost suitcase-size chunks of soul en route. “I need a history more complete than the strangled bits that he had owned and passed on to me,” Jonas explains about filling the gap his father left him.
Both the author and the protagonist go on to test and bend and measure the powers of storytelling, as if gathering data to make a verdict. They graduate from this original purpose of filling a vacuum, of completing a history, to trying out darker, more illicit tricks, to working with more majestic reasons, and to playing stranger games.
During the course of this experiment, Mengestu exploits each character as a storyteller, to a rainbow of ends. He hands the reader a stack of drafts and anti-drafts in the guise of a book. The material is rife with desperate riddles: What is true? Who is honest? How do these conflicting stories fit together? What does it mean for these stories to coexist? Who owns these stories? Who is responsible for their repercussions? Is a lie a story? Is a story a lie?
¤
In How to Read the Air, a story is first and foremost a sacred action. Jonas works temporarily at a refugee resettlement center in Manhattan. He is “the literary type in the office,” and lawyers pass client fact sheets to him to be “‘touched’ or ‘built upon.’” As an example, he takes
“They came at night” and turned it into “We had all gone to sleep for the evening, my wife, mother, and two children. All the fires in the village had already been put out, but there was a bright moon, and it was possible to see even in the darkness the shapes of all the houses. That’s why they attacked that night.”Jonas saves lives with fiction. Meanwhile, his mother often tries to save herself by dreaming stories. After being beaten, in the “twelve minutes and thirty-two seconds that she was unconscious,” Mariam dreams a replica of the house where she grew up, but it has new furniture, “sleek, low-slung, and thoroughly modern,” and a “sheer absence of sound that is otherwise impossible to find except in dreams. Here then is the place where no harm can happen: sanctuary that even the dead would be envious of.”
Abrahim is the prophet-like man who educates Yosef about survival while Yosef prepares to smuggle himself out of Sudan. Abrahim, in Jonas’s version of his father’s story, should have no hope left, but
[w]hen it came to Europe or America, men supposedly hardened by time and experience like Abrahim were susceptible to almost childish fantasies. They assigned to these faraway lands all the ideals of benevolence and good governance lacking in their own, because who among us doesn’t want to believe that such places exist.In a 2010 interview with The Rumpus, Mengestu said that “there is a necessity to imagination that I believe in very deeply. Fiction fills a role in our lives that I think nothing else can,” and Jonas’s return to his parents’ honeymoon warpath is a spiritually responsible act of imagination. As he stops at a landmark on the drive, he calls his journey a pilgrimage: “It’s been said that the only way to truly know any history is to walk in its footsteps.”
Although storytelling is demonstrated here as an honorable pursuit, there is a cost to the storyteller, as there can often be to messengers and visionaries. Jonas has heard bits and pieces of this road-trip-from-hell tale over the years from each parent. And he finds himself in the archetypal position of the “broken family” child:
I didn’t know it at the time but two completely different versions of history were being offered to me in preparation for my inevitable role as both advocate and judge over what happened between my parents on this trip, the events of which would determine nearly every aspect of their relationship from that point on […]It’s a psychological burden to know two true and conflicting stories. Jonas even feels this schizophrenia on a visceral level, and he will occasionally “submit to the confusion of time” that is brought about by weather. He talks about how September can feel like May, and
the shared sense that you can get at the start and close of each season — the tumult and confusion that comes when the air holds the distinct memories of two different times at once.This division unnerves him. As does his mother’s wariness when he visits her late in the story to talk about the family’s past, and he can tell she still doesn’t know which parent’s version he believes.
She leaned in at that moment and almost touched her hands to mine, but pulled back before she could complete the gesture; she didn’t know if I was fully on her side, and was afraid of finding out I wasn’t.Nurturing multiple realities in one’s imagination is the basic trade of a good writer, but Mengestu has said that the family in this book is not based at all on his family, so this is not where he was trained in double lives. He does however, in a 2010 Paris Review interview, mention a different schism omnipresent in his life: “I’m aware that I’m American and African at all points and times.”
¤
One of the most pressing dualities raised in How to Read the Air is the guilt or innocence of a storyteller. Mengestu pokes and prods at the issue. In The Rumpus interview, Mengestu brags: “Of course, I’m a good liar — I’m a fiction writer. I could tell you anything.” In the novel, Jonas lies, hiding his layoff at one job, fabricating a promotion at another, and his wife calls him out: “‘You think you can lie,’ she said. ‘But really you can’t. You’re terrible at it.’”
When does storytelling cross over from art to manipulation? Mengestu spends much of the book drawing this line, erasing it, trying again. In happier times, Jonas and his wife play an almost adolescent game of redesigning better pasts:
Our inventions, you see, worked both ways, and in whatever false histories I created, there was always room enough for Angela to join me when and if she cared to —The territory becomes more dangerous when Jonas, now an English teacher at a private high school, invents a story for his students about his father’s illegal border-crossings. He makes most of it up, extending the story for days, using up class sessions, forfeiting the syllabus. The abstract recipient of Jonas’s story (and perhaps of Mengestu’s writing) is personified by one student, a “round, freckle-faced blonde” who wants to know where his teacher with the exotic last name “was from.” Jonas has “heard that question before,” and knows it’s only one of the “warm-up questions to the greater narrative that they wanted to get a hold of,” the one that would allow them to “mark me as being theirs.” This is where Mengestu presents us with the hardest questions about the responsibilities of both reader and writer. When Jonas launches into the mythologized story of his dad, the dynamic in his classroom changes dramatically. Jonas sees the students
“What happened after graduation?”
“You picked me up in your father’s car.”
“What kind of car was it?”
“A 1972 black BMW.”
“Really?”
“Yes. It was your graduation gift, remember?”
“That’s right. He bought it used from a friend.”
“Exactly.”
“And where did we go?”
“We drove all the way to Chicago.”
lingering together in the hallway after class, convinced that they were privy to a private history that only they could understand. Even though large parts of what they had been told were fabricated, I took pride in feeling I had brought them together.Eventually, stories about Jonas’s father “began circulating freely around the academy.”
There were smiles for me everywhere I went, all because I had brought directly to their door a tragedy that finally outstripped anything my students could have personally hoped to experience.At a certain point, Jonas feels a “growing vortex of e-mails and text messages” passed among students about him.
[…] I was their sole subject and object of concern. I don’t know why I found so much comfort in that thought, but it nearly lifted me off the ground […]Although there is disdain in these passages for the students, Jonas, the creator, is guilty, too. As he walks through the city, he passes people in the streets and incorporates them mentally into his narrative; “[…] I could add their stories to my own basket of origins.” He uses Haitians, giving them “a mix of political persecution at the hands of one of the Docs and several large-scale natural disasters,” and Orthodox Jews who had “made their way here immediately after the end of the Cold War and never once looked back,” and Africans who, “despite the reports of torture and imprisonment on their asylum application forms, were here just because they wanted to have an easier time getting on with their business plans and dreams, and who could blame them?”
If my fictional narratives lacked any veracity, it didn’t really matter. Whatever real histories any of the people I encountered had were forfeited and had been long before I came along, subsumed under a vastly grander narrative that had them grateful just to be here […]This process of embezzling human stories is how things got done at the refugee center, too. Bill, one of the “white middle-aged lawyers” who ran the place, told Jonas it was necessary to combine immigrant narratives:
Bill put it to me this way once: “When you think about it, it’s all really the same story. All we’re doing is just changing around the names of the countries. Sometimes the religion. But after that there’s not much difference.” It was his suggestion that I borrow from one story to feed another.At the end of the book, one passage seems to forgive (or surrender to) Jonas’s students for the way that they are, and maybe social discourse for the way that it is:
And Jonas goes along with the process.
My students, for all their considerable wealth and privilege, were still at that age where they believed that the world was a fascinating, remarkable place, worthy of curious inquiry and close scrutiny, and I’d like to think that I had reminded them of that. Soon enough they will grow out of that and concern themselves with the things that were the most immediately relevant to their own lives. They will opt for the domestic and local news any day of the week; they will form rigid political alliances and dogmatic convictions that place them in good standing with one group or another, but at that time these things had yet to pass.¤
Both Jonas as narrator and Mengestu as author reach a level of obsession with storytelling that verges on addiction. Jonas has to walk off his high after the classroom episodes: “I knew after the first time I told my father’s story that it was important to come down from the almost delirious heights I had reached before returning home.” He wastes hours roaming aimlessly, and buys Angela gifts and makes up unlikely stories for her afterward — pages torn from any junkie’s handbook.
Jonas’s lies to Angela about his promotion, his plans for success and how he’s going to achieve it, grow with the same exponential fever.
Angela, a skeptic at heart, tried to remain unaffected. I thought, if she’s ever had an addict in her life, this is what he must have sounded like. Always this promise of renewal.Jonas’s students start a Save Africa Now campaign, which Jonas sees as a sort of philanthropic addiction. “My students were naturally infected,” he says, because “Africa was everywhere in the news and the pity for it and its inhabitants had spiked a thousandfold.” The media has lured the kids into a craze for stories about violence, tragedy, grief, occasional triumph, injustice, and Jonas does nothing to deter them from the path.
As readers, we notice that Mengestu as novelist can’t stop either; he keeps playing, figuring out how many permutations of the “concept” of story he can use. He has Angela inventing anecdotes for her father’s abandonment of her family: once he goes out for cigarettes and never returns, or he goes to Mexico before Christmas and never returns, or he doesn’t come home from work, or he goes out for milk, or her mother throws him out. Mariam makes up stories for social workers: her family had been like royalty in Ethiopia, a grandfather has just died, Jonas has a mysterious ailment leaving him too weak to walk. Yosef memorizes stories about American landmarks because he thinks it will make him assimilated. Jonas tells the story of his own childhood to his recently deceased father as Jonas walks through Manhattan. Mariam makes up stories for Jonas about the people who once owned the family’s now secondhand furniture. Jonas imagines a moment on his parents’ road trip when they could have taken advantage of the silence and told each other stories, and Jonas makes up those stories for them in this re-imagining: Mariam tells Yosef about men she slept with in Ethiopia, Yosef dreams about being killed by a man who puts a bag over his head.
At a certain point, How to Read the Air feels like a funhouse of stories, an avalanche of stories, like a swarm of little stories that are devouring the larger one. This breeds claustrophobia, which is instrumental to this difficult novel. Once in a while, even Jonas goes too far though, testing limits like anyone caught up in compulsive behavior. While creating a rest stop vignette on his parents’ big drive, Jonas has put his mother in the woods, about to run away from Yosef.
The temptation to set her loose makes for a stronger narrative. I can let her dash past bushes and branches. I can give her scrapes on her arms, let a little blood trickle down her legs over her knee, where it dries and hardens into a firm dark blotch.Cutting up one’s mother is too taboo, too transgressive even for this narrator, and he retreats from the fantasy. “[…]but God, what a beautiful run we might have had.”
How to Read the Air, for all its back and forth movement, staking and unstaking claims, lying about the truth and telling true lies, does make steady progress to what feels like an inevitable end. But no question is answered. There is just the weary and sincere satisfaction one gets when every angle has been covered, all options exhausted. Reading the book is like watching a child play with clinical toys in a psychologist’s office, as he dedicatedly works out a few dozen versions of reality until the session is up.
In a 2010 New York Times profile, Mengestu talks about the trauma that sparked his own family’s departure from Ethiopia, and the subsequent silence:
“We had no memories in our house … We were never allowed to, we never spent time talking about it, and yet you’re very aware that it haunts everything. It’s that absence that creates the concern for it. Nothing can be passed on.”How to Read the Air is the fulfillment of that empty house. In this way, Mengestu has participated in a cycle as necessary as decomposition or photosynthesis. Jonas exquisitely spells out the sequence to his wife:
As babies and young children we know and understand only what is immediate and before us, I told her. We accumulate memories and in doing so begin to make our first tentative steps backward in time, to say things such as “I remember when I was.” And from there our lives grow into multiple dimensions until eventually we learn to regret and finally to imagine.¤
Jenny Hendrix is an un-Googleable freelance writer living in Brooklyn.
E.C. McCarthy is Deputy Editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books. She lives in Los Angeles.
Jardine Libaire is the author of the novel Here Kitty Kitty. She lives in Austin.
Image: Top Hat © Cornel Rubino, 2012 [http://bit.ly/rrKK08]
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