The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Back when I was a truly awful, heartless person, I made terrible fun of this book. When I heard on the radio that a French man who was completely paralyzed had written a book by blinking his one eye, I couldn't help ridiculing this. I couldn't imagine the book, or why one would even do such a thing. It was like the blind guy going up Everest or the legless man crossing the country. I wouldn't do either of those things whole, why do them under extreme conditions? These thoughts are almost too humiliating to admit now.

Then, ten years later, the movie of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly came out and this time I only made fun of the fact that it would have to be a terribly boring movie since the protagonist can ONLY BLINK HIS ONE EYE.

But then I accidently saw the movie and...it was simply amazing. You definitely have to be in the right place in your life to get through the movie. It's an extremely powerful portrait of the once-energetic editor-in-chief of ELLE magazine who suffers some sort of sudden brain trauma and wakes up from a coma diagnosed as having "locked-in syndrome" which he reimagines as being in one of those old diving suits (It's translated as a diving bell, but really it's that big, heavy suit that you can't imagine is very useful underwater). It is a sad and powerful movie and I recommend it whole-heartedly (and not just to atone for my small, mean mind from years ago)

So, now I've read the book. Full disclosure, I read it in the original French so I can't comment on any translations, though I will say the writing was so beautiful, I wanted to read slowly.

Jean-Dominique Bauby spends his mornings unable to move at all, painstakingly composing pages of his memoir in his head until the woman who takes dictation arrives. At which point she starts the chant of a specialized alphabet and he blinks when she reaches the letter he wants her to write. Yes, they write an entire book in this manner.

What I was most surprised by, other than the good writing, is the humor. You don't get much of that in the movie (understandably), but how on earth can this man who has lost everything, everything! Who can not even swallow, find the presence of mind to write humorously about his predicament? The chapter The Alphabet is particularly amusing as he describes the types of people who try to decode for him. There are the careless emotives who make constant errors and throw up there hands at their own incompetence, the professorial who will not even begin to guess at the word until he's painstakingly blinked every letter, no matter how obvious the word--though he comes to appreciate these because the "guessers" cause other problems. Once, he was looking for his glasses (lunettes) and he was asked what he wanted with the moon (lune).

It's also interesting that Bauby can retain his sense of humor when all the casual humor is gone from his life. No longer can he make a quick retort. By the time his guest laboriously transcribes what Bauby is trying to say, the original query has lost all meaning and what seemed so witty is left dangling incomprehensibly on the page. He almost prefers the self-centered who come prepared to talk only of themselves.

And he loves simply watching his children and remembering his life before, and traveling in his mind to places he once visited or wishes he had visited, or remembering the tastes of favorite foods (or any foods). We can only hope to be as patient with our lives intact as he becomes with his.

I loved this book and not just because it was triumph of the spirit in face of adversity, but because the writing is beautiful and the story ultimately moving. It's lovely to see the visual represented by the movie (interestingly, Bauby imagines his story as a play and I can say without a doubt that this would make a terrible play. But don't ask me, I have a pretty sketchy track record making predictions about anything related to this book) and then to read the book to really appreciate Jean-Dominique Bauby's voice.

By the way, thanks to my official "followers". It's strangely good for my ego to know you're out there, though I know there are others who read this too.

The Condition

I'm a sucker for sweeping family stories, and if they involve the so-called intellectual elite of New England, so much the better. It's a familiar, comfortable and comforting image, even when the families turn out to be dysfuntional or vaguely freaky. Jennifer Haigh's The Condition takes place around MIT in Cambridge, MA, Concord, MA, NYC, and takes a quick dip down to "the islands" (I'm too lazy to be more precise). Although it is nominally about Gwen McKotch's "condition", a rare genetic mutation that leaves her a pre-pubescent, it's really about getting old (or older) Reading about the meandering, increasingly meaningless lives of the elder McKotches, Gwen's parents, will probably feed all sorts of unhealthy fantasies in young people who have always hoped their divorced parents would get back together, but it's kind of nice. Frank McKotch, as an older man, should also serve as warning to anyone still toiling as a scientific postdoc past the age of, say, 30... (or to anyone married to a postdoc). And yes, I did skim some of the genetic code stuff that was mostly a collection of captital letters and numbers. (Okay, I kind of get it...)

There are other characters, of course. There's Gwen, a 34 year old woman who apparently looks like a 10 year old boy (and behaves like a sullen teenager), there's the "good son" who is---gasp!---gay! And can't come out to his New Englandy, Yankee "we-don't-talk-about-money-or- emotions" family! And then there's sad sack, loser Scott, who gets to find his footing by, well, pretty much betraying his sister. Oh yeah. and by self-diagnosing his ADHD.

I liked this book, though not nearly as much as I did Haigh's Baker's Towers (fantastic!), but I felt I was kind of in the wrong stage of life to really love it. I liked seeing Frank and Paulette realize that getting old with someone familiar might outweigh the negatives of emotional intimacy. Paulette is a bit shocked when she sees her ex-husband looking so aged but realizes:...she had known him young and handsome, his athlete's shoulders, the square cut of his jaw. In her mind, the two pictures blended together. The result was something infinitely kinder than what a stranger saw. She's also thinking of herself, and how she has aged, when she adds: No woman of fifty-six should have to undress for a new lover. She should be spared that anguish.

Frank, for his part, discovers late what all single moms have always known: basically, it stinks to be sick (or have your car break down, or your kid sick, or your house need a total emergency overhaul) when you're alone.

I thought these two were the most believable characters.

I don't know if I totally understand what someone might see in Gwen, but she finds her own in the end, and I kind of like that she still remains a mystery to the reader and to her family.

Scott goes from annoying little kid to Mr. Responsible (sort of), but he's still a terrible father and Haigh kind of drops that thread of redemption while she tidies almost everything else up, more or less plausibly.

Part I loved:

Scott comes home to find that he's lost his wife to an online chat room participant when she signed in using her maiden name.

Scott nodded thoughtfully, grasping too late the value of the patriarchal tradition, why for centuries women had taken their husbands' names. To guard their virtue in online chat rooms. To keep away horny long-lost stepbrothers, lovelorn since childhood, lying in wait.

Ah, marriage, ah the patriarchal tradition. Wouldn't that just solve everything?

The Abstinence Teacher

I've never read Tom Perrotta's Little Children, which everyone raves about. I resisted it because it didn't seem it could have anything new to say about unhappy people with small children who are trapped in the suburbs. Fair or not, that's why I've never read it.

In The Abstinence Teacher, Perrotta takes on abstinence-only sex education AND evangelicals. Being something of a liberal-minded humanist, (and having seen the movie Election, based on another of his books), I expected complete and clever mockery of both of these issues. What I found instead, was that Tom P. does a pretty good job of showing the reasons people might believe in one or the other (or, more likely, both) of these lifestyles.

The sex-ed teacher is a forty-ish year old woman who's been forced into adopting the abstinence -only curriculum after she tells her high school students that "some people do enjoy oral sex." Ruth tries to subvert the program as much as she can, right down to wearing somewhat provocative clothing, but she's losing the battle, especially when the school's decision is supported by the new evangelical church in town.

Actually, the church doesn't have that much to do with the sex ed curriculum, but Ruth stirs up that hornet's nest when she screechingly protests the prayer her daughter's soccer coach 'forces" on the team.

The coach is a newish convert to the church and he is strangely likeable and vaguely troubled himself with the downsides to being an evangelical (He's not anti-gay, for instance, and he recognizes how lame it is to show up at a poker party with a six pack of...soda), but Tim is a solid believer and this is where Perrotta's success in story telling lies. He really made me believe that you could be a perfectly normal person and still an evangelical. (wow, admitting that I might have thought otherwise doesn't say much about me as a human being). He doesn't portray them as crazed or proselytizing (well, they do, a bit), or lacking in a sense of humor. They're even really into sex...as long as it's between husband and wife.

There's a great bit when Pastor Dennis gives Tim and his new Christian wife a book called Hot Christian Sex. The title isn't really treated as the joke it could be in another writer's hand. Instead, Perrotta lets Tim's own doubts point out some of the bizarre contradictions. Role playing was fine "just as long as the couple was married in the fantasy scenario, a requirement which struck Tim as a little unwieldy: Okay, you're the nurse and I'm the patient...and, uh, we got married just before my hernia operation."

Well, hot Christian sex with his wife not withstanding, we pretty much know that born-again Tim and reluctant abstinence teacher Ruth are bound to end up together, one way or another, by the end of the book. Perrotta is so even-handed in his portrayal of these two very different lifestyles, that I didn't want either character to change his life to "join" the other. When Ruth's friend asks if the soccer coach is cute, she answers: What difference does it make? He's a drunk married Christian." Randall pondered this for a moment. "Nobody's perfect," he told her.

Kissing Games of the World

I didn't really like this book by Sandi Kahn Shelton. I did finish it, so obviously it wasn't terrible, but you could see the end a mile away. Young(ish) single artist mom with five-year old boy is housemates with an old crochety man who dies suddenly. Next thing you know, old guy's estranged son comes home to claim his five-year old boy who'd been raised so far by grandpa. Gee, do you think workaholic guy and down to earth artist end up together?

Shelton tries to throw in some stuff about good parenting/bad parenting and fathers and sons, but really, you're only reading it to see how Jamie and Nate find their way to each other.

Nate is obviously the "bad" parent here, having abandoned his infant years before, but I don't really like reading about clueless parents (and he's pretty clueless, planning to take his kid around to business meetings all summer). Shelton's portrayal of Jamie as the "good" parent didn't drive me crazy as it usually does, but I did kind of wonder where Jamie found the patience to be so good at being a mom. Didn't she ever want to get some sleep or--I don't know--put her feet up and read instead of making teddy bear pancakes at 7:00 every morning?

There were a couple of nice images or lines so don't assume it's not worth reading. Just know what you're getting into.

Nate hates calling himself a widower "with its wind-howling-in-the-graveyard sound to it."

And I love the young cop's attitude when he comes to investigate Jamie over her housemate's death. He, like everyone else in town, assumes Jamie had been sleeping with the old man so her persistent denial is generally ignored. Jamie tries to get him to change 'roommates' (as he'd written it) to 'housemates' because people will misunderstand.

He hesitated a moment, as if this were a distinction he couldn't quite fathom,. Then he sighed and said, "Well, okay," as if people were always making wild requests of him. He crossed out the word roommates and wrote housemates above it, which [Jamie] thought looked suspicious. He should start over on a new page. But no doubt he wouldn't be talked into that.

The Septembers of Shiraz

The other day, I was listening to an interview with a professor living in Gaza who said the real fear is not knowing where the bombs will fall. He said that at first it was easy to know what areas were dangerous--The Israelis were targetting specific places such as police stations, but after awhile, they began targetting individual houses. He said something like, you don't know who the leaders of the cells are, so you don't know if it is your neighbor's house that will be hit.

This statement really struck home because I had just begun reading The Septembers of Shiraz by Dalia Sofer about the overthrow of the Shah and the revolution in Tehran. There is that same sense of not knowing when the danger might come to you. You don't know who will be arrested (and tortured) next and the characters don't know which of their neighbors might turn them in and for what reason. As one character puts it: At least with the Shah, you knew why you were being arrested and tortured.

I found this a very powerful book, nicely paired with Marjan Satrapi's graphic novel Persepolis. Fiction can be a good way to access history or confusing political events and if anything is confusing, it is the Iranian Revolution and the overthrow of the Shah. I was particularly confused about how to feel when I read Persepolis. Okay, so was the Shah good or bad? Clearly the revolutionaries went too far, but were they wrong to overthrow the Shah who seemed to have been a despot, or at least an extravagant and thoughtless leader? In Septembers of Shiraz, it's a little easier to understand because there is less ambiguity to the characters. Isaac Amin is a successful Jewish (?!) family man in Iran when he is suddenly arrested. Basically, the charge is being successful--and having once made some jewelry for the Empress (wife of the Shah). Oh yeah, and being Jewish, naturally he works for Mossad somehow...His wife starts a terrifying journey to find her husband--or news of him-- as well as making forays into this new world where her maid's son has more power over her than she has over her own life. Isaac's daughter starts stealing files from a friend's father in an effort to save lives of enemies of the revolution. His son is moping around in NYC, falling in love, and failing to move on with his life.

This character, Perviz, was an incredibly irritating character. His father is being beaten and terrorized in jail, his mother is lost and desperate to protect her family and lifestyle in a crumbling society, and Perviz can't quite get it together...to pay his rent.

It's interesting that the main characters are Jewish (though non-practicing). First of all, I had no idea that there would be Jews in Tehran. Dumb of me, I know. Second, it's a nice "Outsider" view of the revolution. In NYC, Perviz finds himself attached to an Orthodox family and there are some weird parallels to the chosen life of the Orthodox and the enforced religion of the Revolution. The Orthodox family is very nice, very kind, so it's a little creepy to see some of these parallels.

The father, for example, talks a lot about how he sees his role in the world. His 'job' is to repopulate the Jewish faith after so many have been destroyed over the years. He does not matter as an individual because everything he does is for the greater good of his religion, his people. This is a nice image of believing in something greater than yourself, but it's downright alarming to have that juxtaposed with the revolutionary guards back in Iran telling Isaac Amin that he must lose everything (even if he is a nice man) because he represents all the bad of all the elites. That is, he is the symbol of many and not an individual at all. He pays for the mistakes and perceived cruelty of all.

There are some very hard moments to read in this book, but I found the family quite believable. Yes, they are changed by the end of the book, but just as you cannot really live every day as though it were your last (even if you think you should), so too do the Amins resort to some of their past habits. Farnaz, Isaac's wife is a little bitter because she realizes that her husband now has a monopoly on grief, and she will never again be allowed to complain about something. Isaac is still wealthy (enough) at the end and reverts to caring about material things, though at least he feels guilty now. Perviz, well, I didn't like him enough to figure out if he'd changed or not. I guess he woke up, at least.

This is the kind of book that makes me feel both smarter and dumber about the world and I'm glad I read it.

Now I'm reading a nice, fluffy book, Kissing Games of the World.