{"id":196,"date":"2009-07-09T13:44:27","date_gmt":"2009-07-09T13:44:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/president\/reading_0809\/"},"modified":"2013-04-17T10:08:50","modified_gmt":"2013-04-17T15:08:50","slug":"reading_0809","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/president\/reading_0809\/","title":{"rendered":"President David R. Anderson’s Bookshelf (IV)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"A<\/a>She\u2019s Not There: A Life in Two Genders<\/b>
\nBy Jennifer Finney Boylan
\nBroadway Books, 2003<\/p>\n

She\u2019s Not There<\/em> is a memoir. I was drawn to it by several things: I love memoirs, it was written by an English professor, and it addresses a difficult, private, timely topic: what it means to be transgendered.<\/p>\n

The 18th-century writer Samuel Johnson, my hero, once wrote, “I have often thought that there has rarely passed a life of which a judicious and faithful narrative would not be useful; for not only every man has, in the mighty mass of the world, great numbers in the same condition with himself, to whom his mistakes and miscarriages, escapes and expedients, would be of immediate and apparent use; but there is such a uniformity in the state of man, considered apart from adventitious and separable decorations and disguises, that there is scarce any possibility of good or ill but is common to human kind” (Rambler # 60)<\/em>. Johnson was right. We are held together by our common humanity, and every one of us has something to learn from the story of the life of another person. That\u2019s why memoirs are such an important part of the human story.<\/p>\n

But at another level the story of a person, born male, who always felt foreign in the male body, who struggled for years to make peace with the discord between inner identity and biological assignment, is so foreign to the experience of many readers that we might be tempted to dismiss it as unique, eccentric, inapplicable to our own lives.<\/p>\n

You won\u2019t have that experience reading this fine book. Jennifer Boylan\u2019s telling of her story is compelling, funny and profound. An English professor at Colby College in Maine, she is close friends with the novelist Richard Russo, and there is a point in this book in which the two writers are lamenting one of the challenges of comic novelists: that their genre requires them to produce prose that seems effortless, despite the fact that extraordinary effort is required to make their prose seem effortless, so that readers tend to dismiss their craft, thinking, “I could have written that.” The prose of this memoir seems effortless. It might be best to call it “transparent”: it reads like a conversation in which Boylan recounts the path that led her from boyhood to college to graduate school to marriage and a family to a breakdown of sorts that convinced her to change genders. It seems honest, insightful, unpretentious and clear-eyed.<\/p>\n

The artfulness of this book is perhaps the greatest challenge to reading it. It seems to me that the story it tells is so extraordinarily wrenching for her personally, and the effects of Jennifer Boylan\u2019s decision to change genders so devastating for her friends and family, that you might expect to see some element of that struggle reflected in the prose. But you don\u2019t. The narrative is, as I said above, compelling, and it opens windows from time to time into the sadness, confusion, joy, and other emotions that mark the writer\u2019s journey. But at the end of the day it is artfully smooth. The most poignant moment of the book for me occurs about two-thirds of the way through when the author and his wife (this is before the gender shift) speak about what lies before them. His wife, who is presented with love and gentleness in this narrative, says quite plainly, “Every success you\u2019ve had as a woman is also a loss for me. … All of that success for you just feels like failure to me. … All of the good things that have happened to you… to me, they all just mean one more thing I\u2019ve lost” (p. 217). This is a powerful moment. I wish it had gotten more attention.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re interested in this book, I invite you to read Crossing: A Memoir<\/em> by the distinguished economist Deirdre N. McCloskey, my friend. She also began life as a man and changed genders. It\u2019s another memoir of the same journey that Jennifer Boylan took, but it is told not by a practiced creative writer but rather by a working economist. The outlines of the story are, in many respects, similar. The experience of reading them is quite different. It was more fun to read Boylan\u2019s book; McCloskey\u2019s seemed more authentic.<\/p>\n

\"Hornets<\/a>Heat<\/b>
\nBy Bill Buford
\nVintage Books, 2007<\/p>\n

The full title of this book, Heat: An Amateur\u2019s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany<\/em>, gives you a sense of what it\u2019s like as a read. The author, formerly a staff writer and fiction editor at The<\/em> New Yorker<\/em>, embarked on a food odyssey that began when the celebrity chef Mario Batali came to dinner at his house and ended with him working as a butcher in a small town in Tuscany. The full title of the book enumerates the stages of this journey, and there is a logic to it: to get ever closer to the intimate connection \u2014 in an ideal world \u2014 between us and the food we eat. Buford articulates the logic of his journey very well near the end of the book:<\/p>\n

For millennia, people have known how to make their food. They have understood animals and what to do with them, have cooked with the season and had a farmer\u2019s knowledge of the way the planet works. They have preserved traditions of preparing food, handed down through generations, and have come to know them as expressions of their families. People don\u2019t have this kind of knowledge today, even though it seems as fundamental as the earth, and, it\u2019s true, those who do have it tend to be professionals \u2014 like chefs. But I didn\u2019t want this knowledge in order to be a professional; just to be more human. (p. 313)<\/p>\n

The first part of this book, which tells the story of Buford\u2019s experiences cooking in Mario Batali\u2019s restaurant, may remind you of another fun book about cooking, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly<\/em>, by Anthony Bourdain. It depicts the same frantic, desperate, profane kitchen culture that Bourdain depicts. It\u2019s exciting to read, it\u2019s funny, and it makes you want to apply for a job as a line cook just to see if you could do it.<\/p>\n

As this book progresses, however, it becomes more than just another chef\u2019s memoirs about being slammed with too many orders and becomes instead a thoughtful meditation on our connection to what we eat. In many ways it ends up at the same place as In Defense of Food: An Eater\u2019s Manifesto<\/em> by Michael Pollan, but it\u2019s much less polemical and, frankly, Buford isn\u2019t as much of a sorehead as Pollan. Buford argues eloquently for the virtues of \u201csmall food,\u201d food made in small quantities, by hand, by cooks who personally select the ingredients, use family recipes, and work from a memory of the tastes they grew up with.<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t a recipe book, but there are some discussions of certain dishes that will send you to the store right away to assemble the ingredients and try for yourself, including how to cook short ribs, how to make ragu, what makes the perfect spaghetti alla vongole<\/em>, and a whole discussion of gnocchi that is quite amusing.<\/p>\n

Heat<\/em> is just plain fun to read if you like good food, if you\u2019re interested in Italy, or if you think of yourself as a cook. You can enjoy it in bits, like a good meal. I hope you do.<\/p>\n

\"Italian<\/a>Italian Shoes<\/b>
\nBy Henning Mankell
\nTranslated from the Swedish by Laurie Thompson
\nThe New Press, 2006<\/p>\n

Henning Mankell is best known as the author of the Kurt Wallander detective novels, which I have read with pleasure. This is a very different kind of novel. It will challenge you and make you uncomfortable, but it will reward you with a moving narrative about redemption.<\/p>\n

The novel is narrated by Fredrik Welin, a surgeon who retired early after he made a horrible mistake in the operating room. Ashamed and guilt-ridden, he has retreated to the island where his grandparents had lived. He is the only inhabitant, except for two pets, a dog and a cat. He receives no telephone calls, neither writes nor receives letters, has neither internet access nor a television. During winter the island is surrounded by ice, which aptly characterizes his inner life as well as his outer life. Each winter morning Welin walks out to the sea, chops a hole in the ice and jumps in the water, just to assure himself that he\u2019s still alive. His only human contact is the postman who stops at his island every other day, whether there\u2019s mail or not.<\/p>\n

It gets worse. As a young man, Welin had been in love with a woman named Harriet, whom he cruelly abandoned for reasons that he never fully explains \u2014 perhaps because he does not understand, or is not willing to admit, them himself. Here\u2019s another source of guilt.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a miserable life. Welin defends himself from the pain he has caused and the guilt he feels by freezing himself inside or, to use another metaphor in the novel, by closing all the doors to his inner life. Only his care for his animals and his daily ice baths offer any suggestion that he has the capacity or the need to change.<\/p>\n

Then one day Harriet, dying of cancer so advanced that she can only move with a walker, appears on the frozen sea at the edge of his island. The postman has dropped her off and gone away. Thus begins Welin\u2019s reawakening and, ultimately, his redemption. Harriet demands that he fulfill a promise he made when they were young to take her to visit a pool in a forest that Welin visited with his father as a boy. That journey leads to a shocking discovery and then to a series of people and events that ultimately dissolve Welin\u2019s inner frost and open his inner doors, but not before he suffers gains and losses, behaves well and badly, and comes to a deeper understanding of himself and his own past.<\/p>\n

Welin is not necessarily a person you would want to know, and he is a difficult narrator to warm up to. On the other hand, only sinners need redemption, and he sorely needs it. I said this book would challenge you because it requires the reader to observe the painful journey toward redemption by a flawed narrator surrounded by other flawed people who inhabit a flawed world. But redemption does come.<\/p>\n

This is a fine novel about aging, family dynamics, guilt, and self-knowledge. Even in translation it is often lyrical. And it is very powerful. I recommend it.<\/p>\n

\"Deaf<\/a>Deaf Sentence<\/b>
\nBy David Lodge
\nViking, 2008<\/p>\n

David Lodge is a British novelist and literary critic best known for his very funny satires of academics, especially Changing Places<\/em> and Small World<\/em>, two novels I highly recommend. He writes academic novels, but his fictions are more universal than that designation suggests. He is a novelist of manners who happens to set many of his novels in academic settings. You might also call him a novelist of the midlife crisis, since some of his best work portrays protagonists trapped at middle age in jobs, marriages or relationships \u2014 or all of the above \u2014 that seem to be dead ends. His examination of that dynamic is both piercing and tender.<\/p>\n

Deaf Sentence<\/em>, Lodge\u2019s most recent novel, tells the story of Desmond Bates, a retired professor of linguistics at a university in northern Britain. Desmond is married to a young, energetic, successful woman (a former student). She is still working, a fact that\u2014compared to his retired lifestyle\u2014tends to emphasize their age difference and make him feel somewhat ineffective and pointless. Then there\u2019s Desmond\u2019s father, who is cranky, eccentric, and independent, and is showing signs that he may no longer be able to live independently. But the key fact about Desmond Bates is that he is going deaf, and it\u2019s his deafness that to some extent isolates him from others, emphasizes his age, and undermines his confidence. The novel studies his evolving relationship with his wife, the increasingly paternal role he must play for his father, and portrays the results of his increasing deafness on every aspect of his life.<\/p>\n

The Times Literary Supplement claimed of this novel that, \u201cProbably no other work of fiction (and possibly no medical account) has described so successfully the multiplicity of confusions, frustrations and social stratagems deriving from deafness.\u201d I don\u2019t know enough about the literature of deafness to evaluate that claim, but I can report that Lodge portrays Desmond\u2019s deafness with exquisite feeling and insight. Sometimes the deafness is hilarious, sometimes it\u2019s embarrassing and awkward, sometimes it\u2019s sad. It is always interesting and moving.<\/p>\n

This is a fine novel that displays keen insight, gentle humor, and generosity of spirit. I recommend it to you.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>A Book of Ages: An Eccentric Miscellany of Great and Offbeat Moments in the Lives of the Famous and Infamous, Ages 1 to 100<\/b>
\nBy Eric Hanson
\nHarmony Books, 2008<\/p>\n

This is a fun book by a fun Ole. Eric Hanson \u201977 has gleaned from a vast array of scholarly and popular sources a bookful of facts about things that happened to famous people at a certain age in their lives. A Book of Ages<\/em> is, thus, organized chronologically by year: things that happened to famous people when they were one year old, five years old, 50 years old, and so forth, all the way from age one to age 100. (The temptation, of course, is to turn immediately to your own age, but I don\u2019t advise that: it\u2019s discouraging.)<\/p>\n

This is an artfully created book. The author first had to find out all these facts, then select the ones that are most meaningful, then order them to best effect, and then express them just so. The result is a book that is at times hilarious, at others poignant, at others brilliantly ironic. It\u2019s probably not a book that you will read in one sitting. More likely, it will rest on the table next to your favorite chair and give you hours of pleasure as you dip into it over time.<\/p>\n

Here are some examples of what you will discover in A Book of Ages<\/em>:<\/p>\n