The Joy of Reading

The best thing about commuting by public transportation is the opportunity to read.

I am, once again, utterly enamored of Michael Ondaatje.  When I first read The English Patient back in the early 1990s, I remember thinking, on the very first page, “this man is a expletive deleted poet.”  I soon learned that he is a poet as well as novelist, and immediately read one of his books of poetry, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid.  

 Ondaatje’s interests range wide through the human experience, and his focus and dedication to his subject draw his readers into the stories he writes, and along whatever pathways he chooses.  We are powerless to do other than follow along, listening and watching.
 
I recently read two books from my “still unread” stack, both by Ondaatje.  The first was The Cat’s Table, about a child’s journey from Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) on a ship with a few other children and a wide range of adults, to England, where the narrator would grow up to be a writer.  Ondaatje dips into the present, then goes back to the past, and introduces us to characters with such depth we believe we know them, and hope to know them when the narrator grows up.  Seeing the world through the eyes, and heart, of Mr. Ondaatje's young and adult narrator is an education and a joy.

 It’s a riveting piece of work, which I relived with delight at a friend’s apartment whose bathtub shower curtain is a world map!  I could follow the route from Colombo across the Arabian Sea to the Gulf of Aden, Red Sea, and through the Suez Canal and into the Mediterranean.   I love maps almost as much as I love books.

The next was Divisadero, a story of a fractured family, some blood-related, some not, their lives together and apart.  The continuing stories of Claire and Coop over decades in the western United States are obliquely contrasted with the life of Anna, who ran away from a family tragedy, winding up in France studying a French poet in the house he lived in for his final years. I believe the most wondrous thing about Divisadero is that, although I’d never heard of the French poet Lucien Segura, I assumed he was real.  Then I looked him up and every reference to him on the internet was in Mr. Ondaatje’s novel.  While this was disappointing, in that I could not read the poetry, it was far more hilarious that a character in a novel had seemed so real to so many readers that internet search engines continue to explore the world wide web in vain to find Lucien Segura outside Mr. Ondaatje’s novel.  Beyond the poet, though, scenes of the other characters’ lives, their connections, broken and unbroken, continue to step forward to the front of my consciousness even when unbidden.

Today I was gathering together all the slips of paper and post-it notes on my desk, hoping to consolidate them in some kind of order.  One of the slips of paper was a post-it with numbers and words.  Just looking at them, I could readily deduce that this had been my bookmark for Wolf Hall.  It is apt that I’ve just re-discovered this post-it (and will look up all of these words, names, phrases again) since I’m now reading Hilary Mantel’s sequel to Wolf Hall,  Bring Up the Bodies.  I am thrilled to read that this is intended as a trilogy, so I have yet another to look forward to once I’ve finished Thomas Cromwell’s and Henry the VIII's and Anne Boleyn’s adventures in Bring Up the Bodies.

When I read Ms. Mantel’s work, I feel I’m reading history, even while fully aware that her work — told from the point of view of Thomas Cromwell — is fiction.  Just so with Mr. Ondaatje’s prose.  I believe it’s all true.  This is the power of finely wrought fiction.  These are the joys of reading good books.

 Next:  to dip into the stack of non-fiction books awaiting my attention.

~ Molly Matera, readily ignoring the laundry and mopping that I really intended to do this weekend.