Monthly Archives: October 2018

Staff Pick: I Don’t Think of You (Until I Do)

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Rebekah recommends I Don’t Think of You (Until I Do) by Tatiana Ryckman:

Tatiana Ryckman’s voice radiates from the pages of her 2017 book I Don’t Think of You (Until I Do). Her musings on the emotional turbulence of a long-distance relationship are authentic, honest, and raw. For those who have gone through a long-distance relationship, this book is a heartfelt commemoration of that experience, a comforting blanket of solidarity. And for those who haven’t, the narrator’s emotions are so deep, so human, so universal, and so elegantly expressed that they will captivate from the start. Unafraid to give voice to the smallest, to the pettiest, to seemingly insignificant and foolish feelings, Ryckman absolutely nails the exploration of the human condition in all of its facets––its inconsistencies, its weirdness, and its beauty.

For the entirety of the novella, Ryckman never specifies the genders of the lover and the loved. By leaving her characters pronoun-less, Ryckman erases any potentially distracting gender markers, establishing a closeness and inclusiveness that blurs the boundary between book and reader. Suddenly, a story and an experience that seemed to belong to Ryckman’s narrator becomes the reader’s as well. The feelings emanate from the text, uninhibited by specifications and labels. The genderless narrator could be anyone; the emotions are everybody’s.

It is rare to find a book that approaches emotionality with such a frankness and willingness to delve into the nitty-gritty. Ryckman rejects the embarrassment that many authors feel when dealing with private emotions and the visceral ways in which they physically manifest. Grappling with the emotional roller coaster of believing that a distance, no matter how large, could never defeat love while simultaneously being forced to face the insurmountable loneliness of day-to-day life causes the narrator to engage in behaviors that might seem strange. But human beings do odd things when confronted with harsh realities. Things like distractedly watching porn to reconstruct a missing sense of intimacy, fabricating an imagined imposter who steals the lover’s affection away, or mapping associations with the lover onto everyday objects, like hairbrushes, become coping mechanisms. In all of their abnormality, the narrator’s actions never seem contrived, and this is where Ryckman’s talent really shines.

Ryckman returns time and again to religious terminology to accentuate the depth of the narrator’s infatuation. The narrator essentially worships at the altar of their love, trying to keep it alive and to imbue it with some sense of tangibility as its lack of physical immediacy constantly threatens its existence. In an early moment of reflection, the narrator states, “I prayed at the foot of my memories,” memories so firmly rooted in the past yet colored by a yearning for an imagined ideal future. Insecurity, jealousy, and a perpetual fear of the end become pleasurable. They become ways to keep the flame of something so distant burning. In order to preserve their desire, the narrator elevates the beloved to the level of a god while self-transforming into a martyr.

Ryckman’s musings do not follow a traditional story arc in the conventional sense of the word, but it’s still possible to trace a progressive development in the narrator’s self-perception as they navigate the ever-increasing muddiness of their relationship. At the beginning, the relationship essentially consumes the narrator: “I hadn’t thought of you as The Other, only as The. As Me. So much so that I could not delineate between my image of you and the parts of you that had inserted themselves into my image of myself.” The alternative version of their beloved, desperately created to fill the void caused by their physical absence, swallows the narrator’s individuality. However, progressively over the course of the text, Ryckman subtly shifts the way in which the narrator talks about their lover. Barely perceptible at first, it becomes apparent that the narrator, with the healing passage of time, is slowly beginning to reclaim their identity, with all the pitfalls and relapses mandated by the process of letting their partner go. In one of the most empowering lines of the book, the narrator says, “I remembered that just because you weren’t there, didn’t mean I was alone” (77). More than just a testimony to the difficulties of long-distance relationships, Ryckman’s novella details the sometimes painful and sloppy yet inspiring journey of self-discovery.

Keeping Austin Weird—And Well-Read

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When one of our favorite writers and customers, the brilliant Edward Carey, gives us—and Fernando!—a shout out in the Boston Globe, well, we can’t help but boast just a little. You can read the full interview here.

BOSTON GLOBE: What are you reading currently?

CAREY: It can be a bit tricky reading for myself while I teach, but what I’m enormously excited about is Tears of the Trufflepig by Fernando A. Flores. I know him. Fernando is keeping Austin weird. His novel is sort of futuristic. It’s just bonkers.

BG: Is that typical of the kind of novel you like?

CAREY: No. I don’t really read that much futuristic stuff. The best book I read over the summer is The Hospital by Ahmed Bouanani published [for the first time in English] by New Directions. It’s one of the top 10 books I’ve ever read. It’s so strangely brilliant. Bouanani’s no longer with us, but he left us a few books.

BG: How did you come across that book?

CAREY: I’m always impressed by whatever New Directions puts out. We have amazing bookstores in Austin, including Malvern Books, which specializes in smaller presses. They have incredible displays of things you might miss, and this was there.

Photo credit: Tom Langdon

Staff Pick: Fires

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Celia recommends Fires by Marguerite Yourcenar:

The first line of Fires is, “I hope this book will never be read.” This isn’t an accident—in her introduction to the novel’s English translation, Marguerite Yourcenar reaffirms her desire that no one should read it, and acknowledges that writing an introduction under such circumstances seems preposterous. Why should you read this book that wasn’t intended to be read, then? Because it’s the deeply personal account of a doomed love affair, in which Yourcenar weaves the ancient past and the troubled present of Europe deftly together. Because it’s a love story about falling out of love, and going on with life. Because it’s an incredibly impassioned, complex vision not just of a single unhappy love affair, but also of the relationships between men and women, between women who love one another, between the past and the present, and between the individual and her destiny. Because I am obsessed with Marguerite Yourcenar, and I’m fairly sure that you, dear reader, ought to be as well.

Marguerite Yourcenar is best known for her erudite and layered historical novels, Memoirs of Hadrian and The Abyss. These books reconstruct the ancient world so thoroughly that, reading them, it seems that Yourcenar has a direct line into the past, which allows her characters to speak through her. And, indeed, Yourcenar very much conceptualized her relationship with her characters this way. She told one story in which, having taken Zeno, the hero of The Abyss, into a bakery with her, she accidentally lost him and had to return later to pick him up.

Fires, however, is an early novel that has the seeds of these later books, but also uses history in a way that is all its own. Written in 1936, under the shadow of the Second World War, Fires is ostensibly the chronicle of a doomed love affair, a kind of psychomachea, in which Yourcenar, embodying various characters from classical history and myth—Phaedra, Achilles, Clytemnestra, Sappho—examines the various facets of love, desire, and despair. It is a book that asks us to think deeply into the past, and particularly into the stories of classical women, and bring them into conversation with the present. Over the Trojan War looms the impending shadow of the Second World War, the receding shadow of the First. The story of Antigone becomes a very modern story of civil war. And Phaedra, descending into Hades, finds it transformed into the modern day hell of the subway system.

As much as each story is a record of a particular moment in a love affair, they are also an exploration of the difficulty of establishing oneself in a gendered world. So, for instance, Achilles, pictured disguised among the women of Skyros before the Trojan War, is torn between his love for his companion, Deidama, and a passion for the newly arrived Patroclus. The violent conclusion of this love triangle is also a crisis of gender: will Achilles remain among the women, disguised as one of them—will he become a woman—or will he depart for the Trojan War and become a man? This isn’t only a question of gender identity in the strict sense, but of the role he will play in society. When one of his female companions leads him out of the palace on Skyros, she contemplates, momentarily, taking his place: “since,” Yourcenar writes, “the most discerning of gods or butchers could not have distinguished this man’s heart from her own.” But ultimately, she does not go. She remains a prisoner, buried, Yourcenar says, alive.

I tend to suspect that Yourcenar found the constraints of her gender equally restrictive. In her personal life, she was a bisexual woman who had a reputation for falling passionately in love with gay men (Fires is said to be inspired by her break with her editor in France, who admired her work deeply, but, to her distress, was not interested in women, and by the beginning of her relationship with Grace Flick, an American academic who would become both Yourcenar’s translator and her long-term partner). As a novelist, she developed a reputation as a “masculine” writer, a woman who captured the voices of men so well that, critics wrote, one could forget her gender entirely, so uninterested did she seem in the domestic lives of women. But in Fires, as in much of her early work, she is intimately concerned with what it is to be a woman dying to escape the constraints of gender—to love another woman, to be a hero, to stand on equal footing with men and be accepted by them, to stand against the workings of an unjust government.

It would be a mistake if I managed to end this review without including at least a little bit of Yourcenar’s extremely beautiful prose. Here is Sappho, transformed, in Yourcenar’s telling, from a poet into an acrobat, performing along the Mediterranean between the two World Wars:

With one pull, she brings herself to the last support her will to die will allow: the trapeze bar swinging in midair transforms this creature, tired of being only half woman, into a bird; she glides, sea gull of her own abyss, hanging by one foot, under the gaze of a public which does not believe in tragedy. Her skill goes against her; no matter how she tries, she can’t lose her balance; shady equestrian, Death has her vault the next trapeze. She climbs at last higher than the spotlights: spectators can no longer applaud her, since now they can’t see her. Hanging onto the ropes that pull the canopy painted with stars, she can only continue to surpass herself by bursting through her sky.