The Shape of a Story
recommended readings from the library of jackie littman
2013
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
Michael Chabon
2000
Invisible Cities Italo Calvino
Thrilling and suspenseful, this novel combines the action and pacing of a comic book with the gorgeous language and character development of literature. I got very emotionally attached to the characters; when Sam Clay had a bad day, so did I.
1972
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In Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the city’s life, the inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses, white or black or gray or black-and-white according to whether they mark a relationship of blood, of trade, authority, agency. When the strings become so numerous that you can no longer pass among them, the inhabitants leave: the houses are dismantled; only the strings and their supports remain. From a mountainside, camping with their household goods, Ersilia’s refugees look at the labyrinth of taut strings and poles that rise in the plain. That is the city of Ersilia still, and they are nothing. They rebuild Ersilia elsewhere. They weave a similar pattern of strings which they would like to be more complex and at the same time more regular than the other. Then they abandon it and take themselves and their houses farther away. Thus, when traveling in the territory of Ersilia, you come upon the ruins of abandoned cities, without the walls which do not last, without the bones of the dead which the wind rolls away: spiderwebs of in-
I love to lose myself in the dozens of imaginative cities described in detail throughout the book. Calvino has created an alternative approach to thinking about how cities can be, not limited by the laws of physics or the limitations of modern urban theory.
magical
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Approaching the Williamsburg Bridge—not really certain of how he had managed to find himself there—he experienced an extraordinary moment of buoyancy, of grace. There was a lot more traffic now, but his shifting was smooth and the sturdy little car was adroit at changing lanes. He launched himself out over the East River. He could feel the bridge humming underneath his wheels and all around him could sense
the engineering of it, the forces and tensions and rivets that were all conspiring to keep him aloft. To the south, he glimpsed the Manhattan Bridge, with its Parisian air, refined, elegant, its skirts hiked to reveal tapered steel legs, and, beyond, the Brooklyn Bridge, like a great ropy strand of muscle. In the other direction lay the Queensboro Bridge, like two great iron tsarinas linking hands to dance. And before him, the city that had sheltered him and swallowed him and made him a modest fortune loomed, gray and brown, festooned with swags and boas of some misty gray stuff, a compound of harbor fog and spring dew and its own steamy exhalations. Hope had been his enemy, a frailty that he must at all costs master, for so long now that it was a moment before he was willing to concede that he had let it back into his heart.
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All the Pretty Horses Cormac McCarthy
1992
The first volume of McCarthy’s border trilogy makes made me long for a world of rugged borderlands, majestic horses, and stoic cowboys. I find myself feeling nostalgic for a lifestyle I have never experienced. The plot is straightforward, yet gripping, and spotted with moments of natural beauty and human resolve.
magical
introspective suspenseful
romantic
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tragic racy
night he dreamt of horses in a field on a high plain where the spring rains brought up the grass and the wildflowers out of the ground and the flowers ll blue and yellow far as the eye could see and in the dream he was among horses running and in the dream he himself could run with the horses and coursed the young mares and fillies over the plain where their rich bay and rich chestnut colors shone in the sun and the young colts ran with their s and trampled down the flowers in a haze of pollen that hung in the sun powdered gold and they ran he and the horses out along the high mesas e the ground resounded under their running hooves and they flowed and ged and ran and their manes and tails blew off of them like spume and e was nothing else at all in that high world and they moved all of them in a nance that was like a music among them and they were none of them afraid her horse nor colt nor mare and they ran in that resonance which is the d itself and which cannot be spoken but only praised. » 4
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He awoke each morning with the desire to do right, to be a good and meaningful person, to be, as simple as it sounded and as impossible as it actually was, happy. And during the course of each day his heart would descend from his chest into his stomach. By early afternoon he was overcome by the feeling that nothing was right, or nothing was right for him, and by the desire to be alone. By evening he was fulfilled: alone in the magnitude of his grief, alone in his aimless guilt, alone even in his loneliness. I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over, I am not sad. As if he might one day convince himself. Or fool himself. Or convince others—the only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad. I am not sad. I am not sad. Because his life had unlimited potential for happiness, insofar as it was an empty white room. He would fall asleep with his heart at the foot of his bed, like some domesticated animal that was no part of him at all. And each morning he would wake with it again in the cupboard of his rib cage, having become a little heavier, a little weaker, but still pumping. And by the midafternoon he was again overcome with the desire to be somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else. I am not sad. »
Everything is Illuminated Jonathan Safran Foer
2002
Told from multiple perspectives, this is a story of searching for the past to understand the present. A Ukrainian translator narrates in broken English; a writer, Jonathan, chronicles his search for the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis. My favorite moments are pieces of a novel within the novel—mythical descriptions of Jonathan’s grandfather’s shtetl.
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Comparison of Novels
magical Invisible Cities Italo Calvino
racy
introspective
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay Michael Chabon
All the Pretty Horses Cormac MCCarthy
Everything is Illuminated Jonathan Safran Foer
tragic
suspenseful Let the Great World Spin Colum MCCann
The Corrections
Jonathan Franzen
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle Haruki Murakami
witty
romantic One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel Garcia Marquez
nonlinear
Let the Great World Spin
Colum MCCann
2009
Philippe Petit’s tightrope walk between the World Trade Center towers connects the disparate lives of ten New Yorkers in 1974. I was charmed by McCann’s endearing characters from all walks of life, united by the chance collision of their worlds.
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Those who saw him hushed. On Church Street. Liberty. Cortlandt. West Street. Fulton. Vesey. It was a silence that heard itself, awful and beautiful. Some thought at first that it must have been a trick of the light, something to do with the weather, an accident of shadowfall. Others figured it might be the perfect city joke—stand around and point upwards, until people gathered, tilted their heads, nodded, affirmed, until magical • all were staring upwards at introspective ••••• nothing at all, like waiting for suspenseful •••••• the end of a Lenny Bruce gag. romantic ••••• But the longer they watched, nonlinear ••••••••• the surer they were. He stood witty •• at the very edge of the building, tragic •••••••• shaped dark against the gray of racy •• the morning. A window washer maybe. Or a construction worker. Or a jumper. Up there, at the height of a hundred and ten stories, utterly still, a dark toy against the cloudy sky.
magical
introspective suspenseful
romantic
The Corrections
Jonathan Franzen
2001
nonlinear witty
tragic racy
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This novel follows the dysfunctional members of the Lambert family as their lives unravel and spin out of control. While emotional turmoil, depression, selfsabotage and dementia throw the characters into a storm of disorder, Franzen’s devilish wit keeps me hanging on and hoping for resolution.
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co u l The Madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through. You could d s k y a, a feel it: something terrible was going to happen. The sun low in the sky, minor light, a cooling star. Gust after gust of disorder. Trees restless, tem-d peratures falling, the whole northern religion of things coming to an end. n y s ia No children in the yards here. Shadows lengthened on yellowing zoysia. h Red oaks and pin oaks and swamp white oaks rained acorns on houses witht no mortgage. Storm windows shuddered in the empty bedrooms. And thee ow drone and hiccup of a clothes dryer, the nasal contention of a leaf blowo er, the ripening of local apples in a paper bag, the smell of the gasoline l in e i with which Alfred Lambert had cleaned the paintbrush from his morning nng painting of the wicker love seat. Three in the afternoon was a time of danger in these gerontocratic suburbs of St. Jude. Alfred had awakened in the great blue chair in which he’d been sleeping since lunch. He’d had his nap p and there would be no local news until five o’clock. Two empty hours were er e a sinus in which infections, bred. He struggled to his feet and stood by tthee h s Ping-Pong table, listening in vain for Enid. » e 9
I spent most of the book wondering what was going on, what was real, and where the whole thing could possibly be headed. Meditative and subtly disturbing, this book tossed me out on the other side with more questions than answers.
rice pudding mix in a bowl in the microwave and push the button, and you take the cover off when it rings, and there you’ve got ricing pudding. I mean, what happens in between the time when you push the switch and when the microwave rings? You can’t tell what’s going on under the cover. Maybe the instant rice pudding first turns into macaroni gratin in the darkness when nobody’s looking and only then turns back into rice pudding. We think it’s only natural to get rice pudding after we put rice pudding mix in the microwave and the bell rings, but to me, that is just a presumption. I would be kind of relieved if, every once in a while, after you put rice pudding mix in the microwave and it rang and you opened the top, you got macaroni gratin. I suppose I’d be shocked, of course, but I don’t know, I think I’d be kind of relieved too. Or at least I think I wouldn’t be so upset, because that would feel, in some ways, a whole lot more real.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle Haruki Murakami
1997
magical
introspective suspenseful
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tragic racy
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One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel Garcia Marquez
1967
This book introduced me to magic realism, which became my favorite genre of literature. When Marquez uses supernatural elements in the story, he tells it flat, the same way his grandmother talked about ghosts and magic to him as a boy. I reread it in English and in the original Spanish.
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On rainy afternoons, embroidering with a group of friends on the begonia porch, she would lose the thread of the conversation and a tear of nostalgia would salt her palate when she saw the strips of damp earth and the piles of mud that the earthworms had pushed up in the garden. Those secret tastes, defeated in the past by oranges and rhubarb, broke out into an irrepressible urge when she began to weep. She went back to eating earth. The first time she did it almost out of curiosity, sure that the bad taste would be the best cure for the temptation. And, in fact, she could not bear the earth in her mouth. But she persevered, overcome by the growing anxiety, and little by little she was getting back her ancestral appetite, the taste of primary minerals, the unbridled satisfaction of what was the original food. She would put handfuls of earth in her pockets, and ate them in small bits without being seen, with a confused feeling of pleasure and rage, as she instructed her girl friends in the most difficult needlepoint and spoke about other men, who did not deserve the sacrifice of having one eat the whitewash on the walls because of them. The handfuls of earth made the only man
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Bibliography
Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities (p 45–76). New York: Harcourt, 1974. Chabon, Michael. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (p 604). New York: Random House, 2000. Foer, Jonathan Safran. Everything is Illuminated (p 47). New York: HarperCollins, 2008. Franzen, Jonathan. The Corrections (p 3). New York: Macmillan, 2001. Marquez, Gabriel Garcia. One Hundred Years of Solitude (p 63). New York: HarperColins, 2003. Originally published in 1967. McCann, Colum. Let the Great World Spin (p 3). New York: Random House, 2009. McCarthy, Cormac. All the Pretty Horses (p 161– 162). New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1992. Murakami, Haruki. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. (p 460–461). New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997. 12