NOTABLE

What a year for reading. There was a lot on my list and, while I did get through most of it, there remains plenty more. Without a doubt, the best and most memorable book of the year for me was one I read just recently, Anthony Marra's A Constellation of Vital Phenomena. This is one that takes you to a place you may not know much about, Chechnya, specifically over a span of time that includes both wars there since the collapse of the Soviet Union. This is Marra's first book and with its quality he sets a high bar for himself. But, he is one from that favorite of places for me, the Iowa Writer's Workshop, so the high caliber of his work is not a surprise at all. He is also a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Two things that stood out were, firstly, the unique way he structured the book, moving back and forth over the course of about twenty years and giving us the points of view of a number of characters, all of whom are so well-constructed that they will make you ache. Instead of feeling as if you are reading a collection flashbacks, though, it is more akin to watching the pieces of a puzzle fall steadily into place in a satisfying kind of way. The second thing to savor was the absolute quality of his prose. It sings. Find this book and read it.

And what of my favorite end-of-year list? Take a moment to peruse the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2013. In the fiction portion, you will find Marra's book as well as our friend, Jhumpa Lahiri, and her novel, The Lowland, which is one that I wholeheartedly recommend, of course. I was also able to read Philipp Meyer's The Son and The Twelve Tribes of Hattie by Ayana Mathis, yet another first time novelist with roots at the Iowa Writer's Workshop. I picked up We Need New Names fully expecting to be blown away, but I am getting much better at not wasting my time with books that do not grab me and this was one. Two that I have not gotten to yet but that are lying on the desk beside me as I write are Local Souls by Allan Gurganus and Dirty Love by Andres Dubus III. These two are from the house for which I am honored to work, W.W. Norton. Though I have generally only hinted at my work in publishing here on the blog, I have to take the opportunity to share my good fortune through my job to have gotten to meet and chat with Andre Dubus over the summer. It was a treat, not only for his openness and willingness to talk about his writing, but also for his gracious inquiries about my own and his genuine curiosity about the place I call home.

The year was unusual for me with very little in the way of nonfiction added to my list of reads, though I did read Sonia Sotomayor's My Beloved World and enjoyed it very much. And the NYT list definitely adds to the t0-be-read list, including the new book by Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit, Sheri Fink's Five Days at Memorial, though I am not quite sure I am up for it yet, and Rick Atkinson's The Guns at Last Light, which will likely take some serious commitment. The one I really want to read and plan to grab from the library as soon as I see it there is Ari Shavat's My Promised Land, which I actually started in a bookstore but did not plunk down the money to buy. I have heard good things about both Wave from Sonali Deraniyagala and Year Zero by Ian Buruma, so while I am at it, I might as well add them to the list, too.

And just like that, I am already behind. 

    

POWER

I was lucky enough to be directed this week to an interview with novelist Ann Pancake in The Georgia Review that let me build upon the thoughts I discussed in my post from October, entitled POLITICS. That post centered around the political decisions we all make on a daily basis and around questions about writers and their responsibilities as public figures. I read Pancake's novel, Strange as This Weather Has Been, shortly after it was published some years ago and it remains one of the most important books I have ever read. It is far and away one of the better books of and about the Appalachian region. It is also a singularly important exploration through fiction of the devastating impacts of mountaintop-removal mining, not only on the landscape and natural habitat, but on the human beings who live directly in its shadow and on the communities they have built. I have also read no other author who so perfectly captures in her work the Appalachian dialect. It is a difficult thing to write, a way of speaking that is hard to authenticate in printed form. It must be heard and felt and Ann Pancake gets it right.

Take a few minutes to read the interview here and also her essay published in the same issue of The Georgia Review here.

There are a couple of things in Pancake's essay that especially struck me and that also hit upon issues that we have spent much time discussing here before. One, the unique and powerful way that fiction can create empathy. This was an important factor in her decision to approach the issue of mountaintop-removal mining in the form of a novel and not as a work of nonfiction. 

"I started to perceive the unique abilities literature, including fiction, has to educate, move, and transform audiences that are possessed by no other medium, including reportage and documentary . . . It's not easy to actually feel, with our hearts, with our guts, overwhelming abstract problems that don't directly affect us, especially now, with so many catastrophes unfolding around us, and it's tough to sustain compassion for the nameless souls struggling with those catastrophes. But we do have great capacity to empathize with the personal stories of individuals."

It is one thing to say the practices used to extract a resource like coal are simply part of the cost of having the luxury and convenience of electricity, to see the issue in stark black and white or purely pragmatic terms. It is quite another to see and understand the people in those places where it is happening as individuals and as human beings with the same needs and fears that we ourselves carry. Fiction provides a space in which we can be fully immersed in the sufferings of others in a way that lets us imagine clearly our own suffering.

 "Pushing a little deeper into the relationship between literature and the imagination, I want to point out, too, the way literature -- both the reading of it and the writing of it -- can reunite an individual's conscious and unconscious . . . our very business as artists is trafficking between the conscious and the unconscious . . . "

And here is where she really gets me.

" . . . I'll propose that artists are also translators between the visible and invisible worlds, intermediaries between the profane and the sacred. How is this pertinent to the case I'm making for art's ability to create change in the world? Only by desacralizing the world, over centuries, have we given ourselves permission to destroy it. Conversely, to protect and preserve life we must re-recognize its sacredness, and art helps us do that. Literature re-sacralizes by illuminating the profound within the apparently mundane, by restoring reverence and wonder for the everyday, and by heightening our attentiveness and enlarging our compassion." 

I underline that last statement because it encapsulates for me the truth of why all art, but most especially literature, is so important. Later in the piece she refers to writers as the mythmakers of human history. It is and has been the writers among us who tell our stories, the most important ones, the stories that define us and give meaning to our being, the stories that bridge that ghostly gap between our profane physical world and the unknown sacred one.What a way to talk about the work a writer does. And, what a way to make us think of the sheer power of telling stories.