On Running, Writing, and Intention

After yesterday's Boston Marathon bombings, the BBC News quoted Dr. Peter Fagenholz, of Massachusetts General Hospital: “The injuries are not otherworldly,” he said. “But it’s just depressing,” he kept repeating. “We see injuries all the time, but this…this was intentional.”

I spent the weekend thinking and writing about what it might mean to be intentional. To be intentional seems to mean taking distinct action based upon definitive promises made to oneself. To start with the word and then to move beyond it into activity. To make our words mean. To say what we mean and mean what we say. No meandering. But what about an act like terrorism? It might be called the most intentional act of all.

            I’ve heard frequent comparisons of novelists to marathoners. The idea is that, as a novelist, your work is long and arduous and, in some sense, otherworldly. Especially for the aspiring novelist, who has no guarantee that her years of words will ever be read. Running 26.2 miles might, similarly, be called an otherworldly feat. Unnatural, even. Where resides the desire to push one’s body to such an extreme? What is the reward? Though I have never managed to run the length of a marathon myself, I have known others who have; I imagine the intention to run, the mental act, driving the painful first fifteen miles. Soon thereafter, a euphoria akin to Zen is achieved, where it is no longer about why one began running in the first place, but simply that one is still running. I’ve heard my father describe experiencing a transcendent sense of joy and pure being around mile eighteen, falling out of his workaday worries, his sole intention to take each, next step.

            Such ideas about running are what led me to take it up last month, March, when I turned 30. Many lifelong runners have to hang it up around age 50 or so, or far younger, due to the grating effects upon knees. Though I have inherited my father’s sturdy, indomitable legs, the act of flinging oneself into the elements the way running requires could easily be called sadistic. Unnatural. Otherwordly. That first week, my upper back ached, a small fist formed just below my left breastbone, to punch me repeatedly from within. Though I ride my bicycle up and down the unforgiving hills of Southern Indiana on the regular, running made my chest heave manically; breath fled my body the way a locomotive loses steam. Eventually, drenched in sweat, my arms swinging painfully, my intentions failed. I ground to a breathless halt.

            But then, the next week, out of town in Northern Indiana, I stopped off at a wooded area near the Dunes National Lakeshore, an expanse of clustered woods and winding paths called Coffee Creek Watershed Conservancy. I decided to try running again.

It was a cold, blustery day in early March; the sky was letting fall little stinging swords of rain. Most of the dirt and clay paths had turned to slush; I took them. Frigid wind made my face a mess of water and snot. I wore a pair of old, gunked-up shoes, with about as much back support as a piece of plastic. I knew I would ache; I didn’t care. The silence and expansiveness of the park, usually filled with couples and babies and dogs, demanded reverence. It was the sort of day that opened itself like a fresh wound—requiring care and time and to be addressed with exactitude. Even if it hurt, I would try to run.

            Without anyone around to watch me, with the weather so dreary and pocked with the scars of late winter, with the sky hanging low and grey, it was easy to let myself go. I churned over the red clay the rain turned dark and hard, buried my feet in cold puddles of water. I forced myself up hills as the music in my ears melded with the rhythm of my steps. I began to feel in tandem with some universal order. I discovered I could steady my usually jaunty shoulders and chest and stabilize my hips to let my legs do most of the work. Letting my arms hang slack at my sides, I stacked my posture, pushed my chest forward at a slight angle. The pain in my back released. I felt that sensation of being able to run forever. I must have taken those pocked hollows and ravines for two hours. More.

            Yesterday, the day of the Boston Marathon bombings, I learned I hadn’t received a trip to a writers’ seminar in Bulgaria. Traveling to Eastern Europe has been a perpetual dream of mine: my grandfather came from Macedonia; the novel I’m writing is set in Eastern Europe. I worked very hard on the application. I did the best I could. And yet, as is typically the case with writing, I received another rejection. “Is it that you’re just applying for things that are too competitive?” my mother asked me over the phone. “Everything in this field is too competitive,” I answered. “That’s this field.”

            Which is perhaps why running provides such a sweet reward. There is an ending; there is, always, the sense of completion. Regardless of how well a runner performs, there is the inevitable moment of having to return to the other-world, to unlace one’s shoes and step into the shower.

            Which might be why, despite the global repercussions and insidious, looming horror at the fact that someone would intentionally harm strangers, this was the first thought I had upon hearing of the bombings: what about the reward of having finished a marathon? Those people who died or lost limbs or sustained other injuries at the finish line—what happened to their sweet sense of completion? We perceive in others’ pain the breadths of our own. I yearn for completion. Such a pure, simple reward was stolen from those runners yesterday.

As a writer, though I have been at it for more than a decade, I feel I have completed very little. I have rarely experienced the sense of happily unlacing my shoes or stepping into the shower. The computer is always on; the notebook is never closed. Writing is a constant state of agitation and fret: you’re not working hard enough, you’re not sending your work to enough journals, you’re not cultivating enough opportunities. You need to read more. Write less. Often I feel that this decision to write is an interminable marathon, the finish line facetious. One of my teachers in my MFA program told us: “Let writing be its own reward.” I’m beginning to think, if there is any joy to be gotten from this, he must be right.

Whatever intentions we make: let them be far from explosive and cruel. Let us will ourselves to be pure and simple: like footsteps, like words.

BREAK-IN

Lydia pushes and retracts the metal tooth of her key, sliding and sawing, but can’t catch the lock of her apartment. 87 degrees outside, even hotter in the vestibule. She’d stopped for a chocolate-rhubarb waffle cone when she’d gotten off the bus. She shouldn’t have: the cream has glommed to her fingers, making opening her door nearly impossible. 

It had been a hard day at the elementary school where Lydia is a lunch aid. As had become the new regular: the kids wouldn’t drink their milk. Lydia had stood before the first grade picnic table under a greenish light and held a straw between her lips. Slowly, she sipped from a milk carton. Swallowed. Smiled. Mmm, she sang. Still, the children would not drink. Moon-eyed, curly-haired Samantha had raised her straw to her lips, but immediately spat it away, proclaiming the contents poison. Then the rest of the kids had started yelling and flinging their plastic noodles and spooly hamburgers in Lydia's direction.

Yet, the milk had formed a cool, mossy plate over the surface of Lydia’s throat. She liked the way it tasted, and couldn't understand why the children avoided it so. Milk was natural, after all, wasn't it?

In the vestibule, Lydia nips her sweet, sodden cone. Still, she can’t catch her lock. Harder, she wedges key to gristle. She takes a gratuitous lick, smearing the edges of her mouth and one cheek. A rainy glob melts into the cotton of her blouse above her left breast. 

Lydia gets a sudden whiff of an earthy smell. She remembers the ice cream stand, a group of teenagers talking: there was a black bear, they'd said, on the run from the city zoo. 

And just like that, Lydia's lock gives. 

Reclining on the carpet of her studio apartment is a black bear. In one giant mitt it clutches her gallon of milk. Lydia hadn't realized black bears could open fridges. The bear has pierced the jug's plastic with its teeth. A fine lid of white coats its cone-shaped maw, drips upon its meaty thighs.

Lydia is down to the dregs of her chocolate-rhubarb. She feels her cheeks rose, her chest and neck hair prickle, her armpits moisten. Softly, she works her way up to the slurping bear, sits beside it on the rough carpet. The bear lowers the jug to its lap, then turns to look deeply into Lydia. Chalky rivulets sled down its neck and over a star-shaped patch of white chest fur. Lydia leans her nose close to the bear’s mouth. The bear, motionless, waits. Gently, Lydia brings the tip of her tongue to the v of the bear’s upper lip. Licks one gleaming drop. Sighs. Swallows. Lays her head in the bear’s milky lap.

HOW TO WRITE A DYSTOPIAN NOVEL

-Avoid considering absolute worst-case scenarios. Absolute worst-case scenarios are science fiction.

-A dystopian novel is that cell phone tattoo they were talking about on the radio. Some scientist saw a world where people walked around with ringtones implanted into their skins. Vibrating pores. This is dystopia. Just close enough to be real. What’s more, the skin-tones are customizable. Grandma: three rapid pearls; lover: urgent, staccato ellipses felt all through the elbow. In that metallic knead some part of us tips up to full and over time resigns to that vibration being one of the ways people touch now. The dystopian novel is that patent going through.

-A nice way to start thinking about a dystopian novel is to consider a rupture between the natural, “benevolent” order of things (things are going “well”—good weather, marriage, etc.) versus a bizarre, hypothetical world: the dissonance between an actual threat and what seems like a threat but in fact is not.

-Make what is already known refract and repeat itself. Make excess of caterpillars, hair, machines, people. Copy things. A dystopian novel ought to make sense in the context of the world. In this way the dystopian novel brushes up against what might be called horror.

-A dystopian novel is the film version of The Shining, where Jack and the Overlook Hotel unite in their deterioration.  

-Give the main character of a dystopian novel some arcane, throwback hobby, a cultural referent to which we can all relate. Beethoven for Alex in A Clockwork Orange. Some obsession that repeats throughout the book and which sympathizes us to the character, which can somehow come in towards the resolution to underline the arc of the character’s yearning.

- The end of a dystopian novel should serve as a reminder that the future is not so bad.

-When deciding on the sex of a dystopian novel protagonist, err on the side of “female.” It should be clear to the dystopian novelist why this makes the most sense.

-People in their forties and fifties are more interesting than people in their twenties and thirties, so the dystopian novelist should write about them as often as possible. (On the subject of the elderly: the time will inevitably come when the dystopian novelist will have no choice but to write about them, so why rush it.)

-There is the argument that the dystopian novelist should write about young people because the chances of relating to the reader are the greatest here because all will have already lived through this age. (Actual young people shouldn’t be reading this kind of a book anyway, so let’s just assume they’re not.) A narrator around fifteen or seventeen years of age could be particularly relatable. Then again, there is always the question of whether relating to one’s audience is a valid concern for a dystopian novelist.

-Names are important. A character could always just be “she” or “her” or a letter with a line after it like Hesse used, or a concept, or unnamed, or a symbol. She could have two first names or no first name at all. She could be a horse. She could be a mosquito.

-Make it about something more than love. More than some woman trying not to turn out like her mother and so being more and more like her mother by the day.

-Avoid the “preferred” ending, the utopic ideal. Avoid absolutes, avoid resolution. Avoid the “this is mine and this is what I want to say.” In essence, fight the urge to be an author.

-Begin with the mundane.

-On setting: In the city, always. Some deplorable housing situation. Some eruptive excess of an already existent problem. Think of a problem in a major urban area that hasn’t totally gone off the rails yet but is on the verge of doing so. Make up the how.

-On form: take pleasure in the unknown.

- Do not compare the dystopian novel with any other novel. Allow it to stand entirely as it its own particular, impenetrable world.

-Do not go about navigating daily life with any mind still hovering in the dystopian novel. Doing so assumes a relationship between the world of the page and the world of the real, a dangerous association: the imaginary and the concrete operate under wildly different terms.

-Write a dystopian novel in an unexpected place: in a hallway, on a staircase, beneath a beehive.

- Such an alliance between fiction and fact simply cannot be made.

The Orange

I was standing at the edge of the ocean when a pale woman with dark hair pleating her back in heavy crescendos offered me a basket of fruit.

            The basket was teeming over, bloated with the weight of so many pears, apples, oranges, grapefruit, and cherries, muskmelon, a hint of the skin of a honeydew from beneath the pile. How the woman, tall, yet gaunt, could hold the basket without shaking, made no sense. She formed a stark opposition to her abundant offering, airy as she was, in a powder blue sundress, with flowers, slightly wilted, pinned into her long hair, whose petals became caught in a burst of sea air and disappeared.

            The basket of fruit sharpened its hold upon me, and I felt its need to be taken from, as a nursing mother’s breasts ache to be sucked.

            I reached for an orange, bright and glossy as the artificial kind set in glass baskets in fine homes. When I held it in my hand, though, I discovered that this gloss was instead beads of the orange’s own moisture. Yet to the touch it was cool. Its roundness was intoxicating in its flawless completion, and at once I did not want to ever loose it from my grasp.     

            “Wherever you go, remember always this sensation,” the woman spoke. Her voice rang clearly, resolutely, supported by a fortitude foreign to her meager body.

            Then she said, “Peel it.”

            I hesitated, as stripping the fruit of its skin felt like an act of sacrilege, attached as I had become to its wholeness. I pleaded to the woman that she allow me to maintain the purity of the orange. I feared what would happen if I punctured its perfect skin.

            The woman shook her head and spoke, “Now.”

            I began to cry as I carved out small incisions with the nail of my thumb, the citrus spraying the bare skin of my chest. I thought of a baby spitting up. I tore off the skin, pulp clumping beneath my fingernails. The work was slow and I could only remove small pieces of rind at a time. To my surprise, I began to enjoy the act. I enjoyed feeling the woman’s eyes upon me, and the approval they sent. She set down her basket and stepped closer to watch me, and I could smell her rosy sweat. She drew so close that a wisp of her hair tickled my face. When I looked up to her I was surprised to see she was annoyed. She said, “Give it to me.”

            Sheepishly, covetously, I handed her my barely stripped orange. In several seconds she had peeled it completely.

            She handed me the bare fruit and said, gently, “Now we can go to the water.”

            She picked up her basket and we walked to the lip of the sea and wet our feet. After several minutes of stillness, our faces cocked to the waves, the woman said, “Throw the orange into the water.”

            I held the orange to my chest and began to cry again. Its juice mingled with the oils of my skin, and I felt at once a wave of attachment rip through my body. I wanted nothing more than to keep the orange with me forever. I felt that I could not live without it.

            The woman gestured to the basket teeming over with fruit, which she had set next to her on the sand, an occasional reverberation of a wave lolling over it, increasing the fruits’ glisten, and said, “But there is plenty of fruit here, plenty of oranges, even. Why favor that one?”

            “But I chose it. It’s mine. I peeled it,” I said. “It knows me.”

            “So what?” the woman said. “Every one of the pieces in the basket could be given a similar treatment, and would respond in kind. Every one of them has a peel that takes care to remove, and holds juice that can spray upon your chest. There is nothing special or unique about the fruit in your hand.”

            “But I chose it,” I said, now sobbing.

            “I offered it to you to be chosen,” the woman said firmly. “Let it go.”

            And so I used all of my physical strength to heave the white flesh of my orange into the roaring sea. I watched it bounce and lilt over the surface of several foaming waves, then disappear in one fervent crest.

            “Good,” the woman said, and took me in her arms. Her hair smelled deeply of orange oil. “Now you are wise.”  

On Drifting

Why favor a bed over a mess of hay, empty park bench, railway car gunny sack? The idea of never sleeping in the same space twice jumps my stomach, hollows out my learned home-devotion. For whatever measured tedium afflicts those who know daily of the same place to return, I long to live like a wild horse. Adrift in some misty animal country, by my wits.

At a festival in a remote location, I bathed in a lake and forgot about mirrors. Though I sprouted smells the likes of which I hadn’t realized my body capable, I had a plane to catch. My cell phone was dead, but it was only a matter of time until I’d find an outlet. We festival people had nowhere to actually ramble. We had homes and bills. All these people with my same fantasy, engendered from films, maybe, or fairy tales. Creative types prone to whimsy, make-believe. Adults who played alone a lot as children.

A bare-chested man stood outside my tent at dawn, lathering my bar of ivory soap. He made a bowl with his hands and I filled them with water from my plastic jug. I watched his sunburnt back as he walked away from me, never to be seen again.

Though traveling has led me to the backs of cars, the dreggy carpet of airports, I have never slept an entire night in an alley or on a park bench. I have spent the majority of my adult life living on credit cards and student loans. I have a house, a stove.

Yet my drifting fantasy comes on very strong. At this point in my life it has something to do with a man wearing a hat with a feather, being comfortable going without shoes. Human odor, toothpick-lips. A woman seated at a campfire, breast exposed, feeding her infant. Jutting stream-rocks used as laundry washboards.

Six years ago, Pierrick, an eighteen-year-old blonde, crawled through my window. He handed me roses, my then-boyfriend a baguette, both recently scavenged from dumpsters. My boyfriend was always meeting people in cafes and on the street, though it had gotten even more frequent in Southern France, where people had more time and less fear of strangers. We were eighteen too, on the verge of dropping out of the language class we had spent a year saving up for by working in restaurants. In our hut-like home, my boyfriend cooked pasta with olives while Pierrick sat at our kitchen table sketching in the pad I’d left there. When he got up the plastic seat of his chair was smeared with something sticky. Against the sounds of his gargles and hacks in our bathroom, separated from the one room that comprised our house by a thin shawl, I glanced at the pad where he’d been sketching. “FUCK HUMAN RACE” was written in all caps, surrounded by glyph-like stick figures in various postures of dejection.

Later in the evening, my boyfriend, heady on wine and his expatriatism, contrarian and idealistic, asked Pierrick why he wasn’t doing more with his freedom. Certainly his lifestyle bespoke a rebellion that should be spread beyond the constraints of his single personhood. “What do you know!” Pierrick shouted in his mangled English. “You living in your little castle of stove and bed and petite woman!” “You’re lazy!” my boyfriend shouted in French, as Pierrick raged out the door to meet the unleashed black dog always at his side. 

I don’t mean to idealize the legitimately homeless, or displaced populations forced to flee their homelands due to atrocities of famine and war. Fortunately, Pierrick was none of these things. His parents had cut him off, but would bring him back into the fold if he agreed to go to University. A few weeks after he had stormed out, I saw him standing in the shell of a phone booth, shouting heatedly. Something told me it was his mother on the other end of the line, though I have no way to prove it.

            

Yet it begs the question: drifters still have to eat. Even if I were to find a way to shirk home-space steady, finger-sift free time and space, I’d need cash. Without a job, where would I find the money for the fabric and the needle to make the sheer apron I’d wear as I languidly grazed the unowned earth?

Recently in Denver I watched a band on tour, drifting through the country in an old schoolbus they’d refurbished with loft beds and a sink. One of the musicians, an accordion player, formed a sculpture ship from cardboard while singing a cappella a song about pirates. He wore a long beard, mustache. A red handkerchief wilted from his high-waisted jeans. There was the feathered hat. “These are my people,” I thought. One of the women in the band played a flute, the same instrument I’d played in middle school before dropping out because I cared what people thought of me. Maybe this was where it was all leading. I am twenty-nine and unattached and childless. There’s still time to join a band.

And yet I like a good night’s sleep, showers. I have not yet found a rival to the mystical feeling that sets in on late afternoons in early autumn, the slight chill in the air and leaf-crunch underfoot sending me into some low-lit corner store. I buy apple cider, cinnamon, candles. At home there is a couch, a blanket. What cannot be replicated outside of the home is the particular sensation of looking out a window, watching someone approach. 

Book O(ates)' The Week

            Joyce Carol Oates' 1967 novel A Garden of Earthly Delights is a Novel: scroll-like, spacious, like the books I read when I was young, before I ever considered writing one. A book I took with me everywhere last June, in all sorts of bags and on all kinds of tables and shelves and maybe brought close to certain kinds of water. The book beside me all the time. Inevitably, the book colored my life; I would come home on certain nights and something would’ve happened and in order to fall asleep I would read the book, and so always I would remember the two together, the memories and the book.

There is such spaciousness in a novel; but Oates uses that spaciousness like a collector filling every tiny crevice of a mansion. There is a great bulk of text, and all of it worthwhile in bearing direct relevance to the thrust of the entire novel. Every word a horn, a violin, fundamental to the symphony.

            The way Oates follows her characters over the spans of entire lives has affected me just as much as her utility of language. A Garden of Earthly Delights begins with Clara Walpole’s birth: her parents, in a truck full of migratory workers, collide with a car “on a country highway.” The final scene is Clara, paralyzed in her mid-forties, in Lakeshore Nursing Home. The stamina required to follow a character through this vast expanse is no small feat; to follow along in a manner as unabashed and honest as Oates’ does not happen nearly enough in contemporary fiction. Maybe I’ve been reading too many short stories, where (excluding long pieces that rest very closely on one character throughout, like Roberto Bolaño’s “Anne Moore’s Life”) I end feeling to have gripped people quite shallowly, murkily, the story’s allure having come somewhere in style or situation and less on unflinching dedication to years of brutal rendering of character. We are humans, after all: there is something to be said for witnessing the passage of time, whether on the page or in the world, it is how we ourselves know we are here.

This novel sent me back to one that impressed deeply upon me when I was sixteen, Madame Bovary. Flaubert’s dedication to character implicates the reader in cathartic, instantaneous friendship. Oates’s writing brought on the realization that I am ready to move beyond the idea that has grown like a crag into my recent writing life, that an excessive focus on character implies overwrought sentimentality, and remember what it is I think a novel should be.

In Oates’s novel, fathers and husbands, husbands and fathers, share an eerie allegiance. What precipitates Clara’s running away from home: “Clara noticed a man with blond hair at one of the back tables; her heart gave a lurch, she thought it might be her father” (103). She gets into his car, her escape route from her violent father: “Clara smelled whiskey around him; it reminded her of Carleton” (105). Just being on the road away from him, in the car of a man who resembles him, leads her to call him “Carleton.” Already his status is fading in her mind.

            After years of pining for him, Lowry sleeps with Clara. This is the scene that precedes it:

But she stepped out of the water and onto the dried rocks, which had a curious texture now beneath her cold feet, like cloth. She spread her toes on the whitened rocks as if they were fingers grasping at something. Then she saw, between her toes, a dark filmy soft thing like a worm. “Jesus!” Clara said, kicking. She jumped backward and landed on the other foot and kicked again violently. “Get it off, Lowry!” she screamed. “Lowry—help—a bloodsucker—“ (187).

Rather than taking her blood from her, Lowry eventually makes Clara pregnant, then

abandons her. The way that Oates rendered this shift in Clara’s identity, as she becomes a wealthy man’s mistress, living alone with her child in a remote country house the man has given her. When she finally becomes a wife, her identity continues to rupture, and by the time Swan is old enough to shoot a gun and kill his step-brother, Clara seems as luxuriant and idle as a well-tended housecat. Oates frequently compares Clara’s features or movements to those made by cats—I appreciated the way this strong, directed symbology recurred consistently throughout the novel, and seemed fitting for the insular, cared-for quality of Clara’s life at the novel’s end.

I have to say a word for Oates’s dialogue, particularly the way she lets it weave through the text of a paragraph, rather than setting it apart, characters’ speech as direct and unquestionable as the narration. Like this:

“You’re lying. I can see in your face you killed something already and you’re going to kill lots of things.” Lowry’s own face twisted into something ugly that might have been there all along, through the years, without him or Clara knowing of it. Clara saw how his mouth changed, how his grayish teeth were bared. “I can see it right there—all the things you’re going to kill and step on and walk over.” (281)

Similarly, Oates chisels Lowry, Clara’s earnest, non-committal rambler, into utter authenticity:  “‘You’re a sweet little girl but look, look, I never fooled you, did I? I never lied to you. I told you all along how it was. Okay? Are you okay?’” (212).

           

There is a lot of lore surrounding Oates' ability to "inhabit" her characters in a way one might call telepathic. A book like The Garden of Earthly Delights seems the result of such invocation.

Book O'The Week

Fleur Jaeggy’s Sweet Days of Discipline brought on my yearning for Europe. Silent trains. The reverent mundane. In Europe a slice of bread is holy. The miracle of a towel drying on a line. Such subtle, taut delicacy, especially when read surrounded by wild American country.

Sweet Days of Discipline: A boarding school, the Bausler Institut, in the Appenzell.

Regulations, codes, discipline. Switzerland: the narrator, adolescent, possesses an old woman’s hands. At no point does the girth of the prose open to drop in what someone else might call out to her, say, as she trudges back from one of her daily 5 am walks, “looking for solitude, and perhaps the absolute” (2). Our narrator adopts the phrase “senile girlhood” on p. 70, deems the boarding school world one in which “time was out of joint” (46). Girls, supported by parents spread all across the world, are kept in the confines of the Appenzell like delicate creatures, like plants: “Though one can hardly speak of human beings in a boarding school,” our narrator writes on p. 41. A narrator who never names herself.

The authorities allowed us to use a key. It was a symbol. A symbol was part of the expensive fees. But there was no point in insisting on symbols, they’re gratuitous. I never used my key. Not because I disdained the symbol: just as I had no past, so I had no secrets… I possess nothing. (36)

            Instead, from page 2 she fixes her attention elsewhere, upon a newcomer to the school, Frédérique, whose “looks were those of an idol, disdainful. Perhaps that was why I wanted to conquer her. She had no humanity...The first thing I thought was: she had been further than I had” (3). A transcendent “further,” excelling beyond the confines of the boarding school: “At school—she was top in everything. She already knew everything, from the generations that came before her.” Frédérique: a wise, decaying nihilist: “It was as though she talked about nothing” (39). Frédérique, mirroring the boarding school landscape, which “seemed to protect us, the small white houses of Appenzell, the fountain, the sign Töchterinstitut, it was as if the place hadn’t been affected by human distortions.”

And yet, Frédérique’s pristine remoteness begins to disquiet the narrator, who asks, “Can one feel disorientated in an idyll? An atmosphere of catastrophe covered the landscape” (65). So Frédérique, in her void, is the perfect vessel for the narrator to empty her own congealed, cloistered nothing.  

A paragraph at the precise midpoint of this taut novel reveals the formal-thematic interweave that I find to be the heart of this work, and whose hypnotic lyricism makes it one of the best paragraphs I’ve ever read:

When it rained we would all be kept in the same room. We listened to the radio. Some girls read. A Krimi Roman. Others stared, lost, misty. The older girls, Germans, cooked. Bavarian lace makers. Mater Hermenegild kept guard. She kept guard over liberty. Those who weren’t enjoying themselves idled away the hours. The bathrooms looked out on a narrow, dark alleyway and a wall. The water had already been run for us. Very hot. I felt as if I were getting into it with my clothes on. There were two churches, Catholic and Protestant. We had freedom of religion on Lake Constance. Just for a change I went to the Protestant one. Even though the order from Brazil was: Catholic. She orders, I obey, she steers me through the terms, it’s all written in letters and stamps, bells with no sound. Dispatches.

The way that the sentences move, the subject of one spilling over to become the subject of the next, but thicker this time, more defined, like a lash: “Mater Hermenegild kept guard.” Go on. “She kept guard over liberty.” And yet the narrator offers the possibility that in this cordoning off, for some, there is still the possibility of easy amusement. Easily sated girls, like the narrator’s Bavarian roommate, languishing in the stupefaction of her mind, even primping before bed, as though she might cross over into some enchanting, other world.

But for the narrator, there is no such reality beyond the emptiness of the school, the coolness of Frédérique. And though it can rain outside, the girls go to showers looking out on a “narrow, dark alleyway, and a wall. The water had already been run for us. Very hot. I felt as if I were getting into it with my clothes on.” And yet, “We had freedom of religion on Lake Constance.” When orders are given over mail, words are “bells with no sound” words sent through the mail, orders in writing, which cannot replace the body. “Just for a change I went to the Protestant one. Even though the order from Brazil was: Catholic.” An announcement, the narrator’s whole life in letters and stamps: “Dispatches.”

The pleasure of disappointment…I had been relishing it ever since I was eight years old, a boarder in my first, religious school. And perhaps they were the best years, I thought. Those years of discipline. There was a kind of elation, faint but constant throughout all those days of discipline, the sweet days of discipline. (72)