Briefly, wondrously

Sat my butt down at a coffeeshop. Turned off my auto-guilt mode and put my mombligations on standby. Brought a book on editing fiction and Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Laptop, ready. Coffee, hot. Soul, squashed by a run-in. I was glad for Hubby, who had reached out for my hand and told me to write, to not let a bad afternoon get in the way of writing.

I love you, Hubby.

You too, Oscar Wao. Because the story I had been agonizing over sounds a little better for my having read about you. You see, there’s this story I’ve been wanting to write. It has an incredible premise and a kickass first paragraph. Even I want to read it. But the story just doesn’t fly. The characters are cardboard. This story is in its third iteration, and it’s still as dry as day-old pizza. I haven’t touched it in years. But you make me want to finish it. You–made on paper and of a writer’s dreams–are alive, the way the heart of a book is. Yours is a story that makes me want to create another. To me that’s the best kind.

From our shelf: Questions on life and death

There are books you cannot put down, page-turners that keep you from finishing your work on time.

And then there are books you have to put down, like Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey—for you to catch your breath, for you to pump the air with your fist (quietly, of course, lest The Coach wakes from his slumber), for you to reflect on things beyond your ordinary grasp.

The proposition is provocative: a rope footbridge in Peru, known throughout, breaks in the year 1714, and five people plunge into the chasm below. Brother Juniper who was only a few steps away from crossing the bridge copes with his near-death by grappling with questions—his own brand of catechism: Why these five people? Why spare him? Is it destiny that dictates their deaths? He needs to make sense of the disaster, to find order behind the chaos. He investigates each of the five, chronicling the big and the small of their lives. He mulls: “Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan.” Ironically, the bridge ultimately claims him as its sixth victim: he, with his work, is in the end burned alive for heresy.

Thornton raises questions on “acts of God,” a term I first encountered in law school, sounding to me then severely ominous, like the imprecatory slaying of thousands or the F5 twister. The term, as it is used in contracts, is synonymous to fortuitous events. I remember wondering how lawyers could consider God’s acts—He whom we Christians deem sovereign—as merely happenstance.

Brother Juniper’s commitment to his quest is fueled by his previous, systematic cataloging of fifteen Peruvians who survived and fifteen who died in an earlier pestilence in another town. Brother Juniper rated these thirty people from 1 to 10 on different criteria: each life or soul’s goodness, piety and usefulness. Such calculations were meant to support or counter theological assumptions: do the good really die young? Are the wicked spared from death?

Which, for me, begs another question: is God fair? Did God ordain life to be fair? Our neighbor, truly searching for guidance, accosted me with that question right after the tsunami hit Aceh. We ended up—six of us neighbors—bringing potluck and bibles to our house and discussing the issue further.

God and fair play: what a tricky issue to handle. Something, perhaps, for another day in this blog. Something I’d really like to think about in more depth, too.

I caught the latest film version of The Bridge of San Luis Rey on cable about two months ago but had to let go after some time. I couldn’t continue watching the film. I love Kathy Bates dearly and she is often magnificent in her roles, but in my mind she is not the Marquesa, no. Even Robert de Niro failed to move me. I couldn’t look past their accents and see the book’s Lima, Peru. I’m not sure if that was the film’s fault or mine. Perhaps it would be really difficult to adapt a story wrestling with deep philosophical issues.

From our shelf: Borrowed Finery

Do not read Borrowed Finery like I did: in spurts, while waiting for the elevator or lining up to file our tax return. This book needs to be savored and draw in, like clear morning sunshine or sea breeze. Not that Paula Fox’s memoir reveals a life free of wounds, for there are many of these, more than a young girl’s fair share, no matter how precocious she is.

Paula approaches her past with the same intelligence and sensitivity she employs in her writing. The almost disjointed telling highlights her life as a giveaway child, shuttled from one place to another, as far as Cuba, where there ''was no one who said [her] name for hours at a time.'' Her spare prose does not hold back; it pierces in its quietness, free of judgment or reservation, unabashed. I recoil at the emotional roulette she suffered in the hands of her parents-playing-at-being-parents, easing only when Paula’s humor cuts in, thankfully, as it frequently does.

I love her Uncle Elwood, a minister, the father many of us would wish we had, who took “thinking walks,” who read to her and surrounded her with books, who took her to the grave of Mark Twain, and to the house of Washington Irving to exorcise her fear of the headless horseman.

Though I was bewildered at the sudden fast-forward to the time Paula meets the daughter she put up for adoption, I was quieted by the shades of hope and healing in the memoir’s closing moments. More of that light, please, for Paula Fox, now 78 and discovered and celebrated anew by the literary community.

Some of the luminous lines I enjoyed. There are many more for you to unearth.

Time was long in those days, without measure. I marched through the mornings as if there was nothing behind me or in front of me, and all I carried, lightly, was the present, a moment without end.

...

After downing a few drinks, [my father] would fail in love with his own voice, theatrically honeyed, filled with significant whispers and pauses. He was in thrall to his voice; his thoughts stumbled behind.

...

Could you escape from a divorce the way you could from a marriage? Was it possible to get a divorce from a divorce?

...

I grasped consciously for an instant what had been implicit in every aspect of daily life with Uncle Elwood—that everything counted and that a word spoken as meant contained a mysterious energy that could awaken thought and feeling in both speaker and listener.

* Thank you, dear Polymath, for giving me this book. Your giving was unexpected, and all the more charming and precious for that.

From our shelf: Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman

I snatched Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman by Elizabeth Buchan from the Booksale bin (P70.00) because of its title—as did its one million other readers, I suspect. I settled comfortably on my side of the bed and waited until The Coach fell asleep; it didn’t seem like good manners to brandish such a title in his face as his last memory for the day.

About six hours later, half of me was cheering on Rose—the book’s middle-aged heroine who lost her husband, job, and home to her own young, beautiful assistant—and the other half was sheepish because I had just finished a truly wonderful book by Paula Fox, and I felt I betrayed Fox somewhat by taking pleasure in what had been made into a TV movie, starring Christine Lahti.

Revenge will never be considered highbrow lit, and a few of its de rigueur confrontations with the husband and the other woman made me squirm: oh please, please don’t go melodramatic, and they almost did, teetering dangerously, dangerously so.

But humor abounds, even in the way Rose committed to break down:

If I was going to suffer—that is, more than I was at the moment, and there was no doubt that I would—I might as well do it properly and give myself up to grand and august pain.

Buchan writes intelligently, and by that I mean her writing can be insightful and, while uncertain and a tad overdone in some portions, her language can be beautiful.

Because I am on my way to being middle-aged, I needed to see Rose through her bewilderment and bawling, and on to her choice to live. Rose, who considered herself “the grit in the oyster,” read in her body the life she led:

What did I expect to see? The gleaming bronze of a fountain nymph, whose lines flowed untouched and unmarked? My body had swelled in gestation. It had been stretched, ripped, sewn up. It had carried children, cradled them and, when the time had come, pushed them gently away. It had learned to be endlessly busy, to snatch at repose, to guard its silences in the hot, crowded demands of the family. How could all this activity not be written into the flesh?

Yup, none of that You complete me hoohah. Some of Revenge’s other lines I like…

Poetry hovered on the weightless and was decorated with wide white margins.

...

As an organizational principle, love has flaws.

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Supposedly the past is a foreign country of which we should beware. That was not true: it was oneself that was the foreign country, the unexplored, possibly dangerous side.

...

Life, wrote Virginia Woolf, was a luminous halo, a semitransparent envelope. Oh no, it was not. Not for some. Some of us lived in a plain brown envelope.

…as well as an old Spanish proverb for a great epigraph: Living well is the best revenge.