The Museum of Innocence -- I read for the women

It has become painful to read this book. My heart is broken for the young women that are part of the triangle central to the story. Both are as easy to like as the main character is dislikable.

Sibel is sophisticated, educated, and on top of the world. She's preparing for marriage, a smart marriage one would say. She likes the guy. She's content. And she's blind to what's going on. There are hints that she knows something's wrong but doesn't see.

Then there's Fusun, a very young woman, practically a girl, whose beauty stops men in their tracks. She knows what she's in the middle of. She seems so far to remain hopeful that there will always be a place for her. And yet you can see how much pain she feels. I can't imagine how awful it must be to find yourself drawn to a man so bad for you. And here she is arriving as if on command to be with Kemal full of love for him and, worse, full of trust.

The author, Orhan Pamuk, has focused so much more on Fusun -- the afternoon rendezvous are written in minute detail -- while keeping Sibel at a distance. It's terrible, really, that the bride should be secondary in her fiance's life. And yet, it's clearer with every page, that his interest in her is obligatory now that he's met Fusun.

I'm expecting disaster on every page and yet Kemal keeps on going. He calls himself a playboy and says it with obvious pride. I realize these are days of great change in Turkey, westernization and more liberal views toward the sexes are discussed, and so is the value of virginity and a woman's reputation, as Pamuk describes new acquisitions for his museum. But every time Kemal approaches either of these women, I can't help but think skewed his thinking is: he's excited to see this sexual liberation. But who's liberated?

I'll keep reading for Fusun and Sibel. Even if it feels as if I'm watching disaster in slow motion.

The Museum of Innocence -- the hero

Plain and simple, I can't stand the main character, the narrator. A 30-year-old Turkish man, employed in the family business, well-to-do and doted upon. He's preparing to marry an educated, beautiful Turkish woman whom he has known for a year.

He has no goals, no interests beyond his own pleasures. He speaks of soccer matches and dinners with too much alcohol. He is disinterested in the religion of his family, a faith his parents are cool to as well. He doesn't even work very hard. I am not even sure of his name.

But instead of living a life of meaning, or at least preparing to live one, he's become obsessed with a distant cousin 12 years is junior. This 18-year-old beauty has, it appears, fallen in love with him even though she knows he's engaged. She's had an ugly life surrounded by creepy men and creepy boys. She works in a shop while she studies for entrance exams for the university. And she's spending her afternoons in bed with this self-centered man. She's innocent and trusting--even if she does ask him if he's lying to her. Of course, he lies about lying.

So I'm making my way through this heavy book grossed out by the main character. Is he a hero at all?

I don't think so. But the two women who love him will keep me reading. Both are drawn sympathetically, graced with charm, compassion and sweetness. I ache for them both. I worry about them. One of them has to be hurt by this vile man. Even if he doesn't see how cruel he's being, I do. And I don't like it one bit.

The Museum of Innocence -- Book #3

The Museum of Innocence

by Orhan Pamuk

Alfred A. Knopf, 2009

I picked up this heavy tome knowing Pamuk has won the Nobel Prize and thought, I'll never be able to read this. I've tried other current Nobel Prize winners and found myself lost in strange imagery, stream of consciousness sentences, ideas way beyond my comprehension. I gave up every time.

I'm not going to do that this time. Pamuk has written in language clear as a bell -- although I don't know if this was written in English first. No, he wrote it in Turkish. Thanks to his translator, Maureen Freely.

And slowly I realized I was being taken through a museum. Pamuk was showing me artifacts from what he called in the first sentence "the happiest moment of my life." There's a menu and napkin from the restaurant where he used to go with his fiancee. He describes a handbag, a yellow dress. Sometimes he speaks directly to the reader as if showing them the napkin and menu. Other times the paragraph points to objects subtly, showing them as the story progresses.

It's a big museum and the artifacts are small. The memories seem to be both grand and the meaningless little stuff that remains with you because it really has meaning. I'm in Turkey though I don't quite know when it is yet -- modern time but which decade? So I'm in for a tour of the mundane as well as the exotic, everyday mixed with the life-changing.

The Gate at the Stairs--finished

I should have known the gate at the stairs wouldn't protect anybody.

Not Tassie, the babysitter.

Not her parents or her brother.

Not Sarah or Edward.

Not Mary Emma.

And, no, it didn't even protect me.

All fall down! as the children's nursery rhyme goes. Have you ever watched as someone you loved took a tumble down the stairs and you were helpless to stop them, catch them, keep them from getting hurt? All you could do was watch.

At three o'clock this morning, I couldn't stop watching as this sweet domestic novel took a turn to to the dark side of life. Everybody fell. It hurt. How it hurt to see these people fall. I couldn't stop it but I had to keep reading as if I could at least help them up. No, of course, I couldn't; but I read to see that they picked themselves up as best they could.

And they did. Followed by a weather report. A lyrical moment followed a tragic moment. And then a wise moment.

and then

The End.

Two books down from my list. I'm way behind and now I move onto 500 pages of Orham Pamuk's The Museum of Innocence. A Nobel Prize winner, no less. I'm intimidated.

The Gate at the Stairs--what's the weather like?

What is it with the weather? The author must have a very good reason for long passages on the temperature, the season, the precipitation. "Classes began in a deep cold spell, a high of one-below for the week."

Now if I had written this book (oh that I could) I'd have left the weather right there. But Lorrie Moore went on (and on) about how really cold it was. I understand how cold weather can eat right through your gloves--it practically did while we skied in three-degree temperatures in Western Maryland this past New Years. In the book, we are shown frozen laundry, icicles, even boiling water thrown off a porch to see whether it would freeze right away. It did not.

When the book opened -- with the weather of course -- I thought it set a lyrical tone for the book which really is about a babysitter. But enough of the weather, already. It was winter on the first page and it's still winter on page 143.

The thing that bothers me is that this is a story about the babysitter and I've only had two or three wide-angle views of baby and babysitter. I have been told a bond is forming between them but I don't really see it. The problem, I think, is the details are left for other parts of the book. I don't really know what Emma looks like, though I know she's of mixed race. I don't know what the babysitter looks like, come to think of it--though first-person narratives usually don't include self-description, do they? We've had better descriptions of the missing roommate, the cute Brazilian guy in her Sufism class and even the creepy husband. Well, he seems creepy to me; I don't know how Tassie feels.

I came to this book looking for a study of baby and babysitter. I like Tassie and want to see her taking care of her charge. I am interested as a mother who hired plenty of babysitters and as the mother of daughters the same age as Tassie.

Themes of disconnection of post 9/11 America, the insidiousness of racism, recklessness in the name of love...these are supposed to be in here. I'll keep reading and maybe they'll appear. If scenes of Tassie and Emma develop I'll be happy with that. These two characters are why I'm still reading.

The Stalin Epigram -- finished

I didn't want this book to end. I knew it had to and I knew, at least I thought I knew how it would end. But I didn't want to read it.

These were characters—real people—I learned to love and admire in 363 simply written, carefully written pages. I don't know how they carried on as they lived and worked in an atmosphere tense with paranoia. But they did. They continued not only to live, but to create new poetry, to cherish friends and colleagues. The weightlifter's innocence charmed me. The poet couple's dedication to one another inspired me. Stalin and his cronies terrified me more and more with each new sentence.

And now it's over. But I think this is one of those books I will remember.

A good way to begin 2010, a year of reading and writing.

A Gate at the Stairs-- Book #2

A Gate at the Stairs

by Lorrie Moore

Alfred A. Knopf

When Isabel Allende heard her grandfather was dying, she sat down to write him a letter. (This story comes from Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac on NPR.) The first sentence became the first sentence of her book The House of the Spirits. Since that time, she begins all of her novels on January 8, the date she wrote that first sentence. The first sentence determines the path of the new book.

This is a long way of saying what Dorothy tells Jerry Maguire. "You had me at 'hello.' "

Lorrie Moore had me at the first sentence of her 2009 book, A Gate at the Stairs. "The cold came late that fall and the songbirds were caught off guard."

I thought of Isabel Allende the minute I read that sentence. I thought of Dorothy much later. What a sentence. I had to go back to the inside cover flap to read what what this book was about. Remember, I just went to the library and got whatever The Washington Post listed as the ten best of 2009.

Ah, yes. I wrapped myself up in my grandmother's afghan and settled in for some fun. Especially welcome after The Stalin Epigram (only half read.) I didn't get far; it was 3 in the morning and I needed to read something, anything but Epigram.

What I got was 30 pages of fun: a charming college student far from her family's truck farm and the beginning of her new job as nanny.

Thirty pages of beautiful sentences touched off by that very first sentence about the cold and songbirds.

The Stalin Epigram -- Book #1

This book, set in 1930s Moscow, haunts me. Each new account of prison interrogations leaves me cold, horrified at the possibility of living in such an insane society. And I keep thinking, This isn't some futuristic nightmare tale. These are people who really existed. Writers and poets, some of whose books I have read. (Or in the case of Pasternak, have memorized the movie and play the theme on the piano. Now I really want to read his own words.)

As sad and frightening as this book is with every new chapter, I can't stay away from it. Vividly-drawn characters draw me into the story. These are passionate people who love their country, love each other, love words. But it all takes place in Stalinist Russia; I expect things to turn out badly. Doesn't matter, I want to know them for as long as I can.

A year of reading the best

As 2009 neared its final moments, The Washington Post's Book World listed the best books of the past year -- and not one of them was by John Grisham or Dan Brown. In fact, I hadn't heard of many of them. But as I went through the list, I was intrigued. Here were invitations to visit Stalin's Soviet Union, to walk with roommates in love with the same woman, to meet Charles Dickens not once, but in two different books. (And I thought I knew him pretty well, already.)

There are 80 fiction books listed in this supplement. (I'm skipping the non-fiction for now. I just may have to get Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong, though....) No, I don't think I can read them all in the coming months. But I'm going to see how many I can read, how many I consider the best, and which ones force me to wonder what makes a good novel.

As an unpublished novelist (raise your hand if you're with me), I never fail to marvel at creative prose, glossy descriptions, dialogue that snaps and plot lines that leave me breathless.

I started with a trip to the local public library -- which had two of the 10 Best Books of the Year. The Stalin Epigram by Robert Littell (Simon & Schuster) is up first. Poets, Stalin, Soviet Russia, already I'm intrigued.