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The Malaisian's Life

OK. I liked this one, too: Christians talk about the horror of sin, but they have overlooked something. They keep talking as if everyone were a great sinner, when the truth is that nowadays one is hardly up to it. There is very little sin in the depths of the malaise. The highest moment of a malaisian’s life can be that moment when he manages to sin like a proper human.

Favorite Quote from The Moviegoer (with the exception of Kierkegaard's at the beginning)

"What is the nature of the search? you ask. Really it is very simple; at least for a fellow like me. So simple that it is easily overlooked. The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life."

Worth a Look: We are all Living in a Collaborative SF Novel

This web site here was left in a comment on my blog. It is interesting enough to spend 10 minutes of your life on.

review of The Winter Vault

First, when I started reading this book, I knew that most of the rhetoric would be profoundly saturated with beauty and delicacy. It started out as such, being taken away to some foreign continuum where people and places can perceive language and complexity beyond the surface. The gossamer dialogue betwixt the two lovers conveyed insatiable desire for each other throughout their lives together, as well as apart, this Jean and Avery. Throughout this book I was taken to war-torn Poland, romantic Canada, and in the archeology and arcana of the Nile River. What made this rhetoric transcend these romantic concessions was that it was all part of one vein, one filament – and that was to make connections with the world. When you live, make connections with those that want to hear you intimately or indirectly, and give way to those that judge you. In death, make connections to what has been provided for you, your friends, your experiences, your surroundings, so that your burden becomes a part of you.

The Winter Vault took us beyond the regularity of life, and transposing a world where every detail is an explosion of meaning. Even in setting, at one moment we are finding the love of Jean and Avery, followed immediately with the experience of living in the Congo – with life and death in this tragic venue. Michaels adds spectacular insight to flora and biology to combine nature and imagination to this beautiful story. Now don’t get me wrong, at times, the weight compounds with the losing track of the story because of the language, and you can become frustrating – the sinews of her syntax breathes very heavy at times. Once that happens, take a break from it. Like Yeat’s Byzantium – it is a place where you are welcome, once you accept your welcoming. This winter vault, where the dead rest, will be remembered for some time.

Overall, I did enjoy this book – but it’s a type of book where mood plays a major role. The story takes a back seat to the encapsulating, blossoming world that the characters are weaved in. The tangential tone is that much more fulfilling, and the language plays a vital part. Can you dig it? I knew that you could!

Waiting to be Buried

"No two facts are too far apart to be put together." (p. 123)

Throughout The Winter Vault, Anne Michaels lays down the facts of the stories the characters tell in an intricate mosaic where by the end a larger tale of memory, Identity, Loss and Love emerges. As Avery explains in one of his stories about his father,

"Every object,' my father used to say, 'is also a concept.' If you place two or three or ten things next to each other that have never been next to each other before this will produce a new question. And nothing proves the existence of the future like a question."

The question the novel poses is how do we create meaning with the life we are given and the losses we suffer. The answer, Michaels, provides, is: we create it together. "We teach each other how to live" (p.324).

We are more than our personal narratives, of where we are born, who our parents were, our jobs, the broad sweeps of history we have experienced. We are all of these things in complex powerful ways, but we are also all of the people we come into contact with, and the stories we tell each other. All of these things intermingle "until it was impossible to tell them apart, the memories that belong to me and the memories that didn't, as if by virtue of collective loss they became collective memory" (p.305).


There is of course much more going on in this novel than my brief discourse. I wallowed in this book, the language was stunningly beautiful. The ideas and the way she played with those ideas were a joy. One of the better books I have read in years. "Just by living . . . we change the world, and no one lives without causing pain" (p.333).


I also found it interesting how almost all of the books we have read could be found in this book, from Bhabha and liminal spaces, to Lewis and belief, to Hedges and the force of war to give meaning. We have read some good books. Thanks to all of you for reading with me and letting me listen to you think.

War is a Force: Just the Sound of Birds

Since Richard brought up Vonnegut on Sunday, I thought this passage from Today's Writer's Almanac was still valid for the last book:

It was on this day in 1944 that the Battle of the Bulge began. It took place in the Ardennes forest, a snowy mountainous region of Belgium, France, and Luxembourg and lasted for more than a month. It was the last major German offensive, and it was the bloodiest battle of World War II for Americans troops. While estimates about the number of American casualties differ, the U.S. Defense Department lists 19,000 killed, 47,500 wounded, and 23,000 missing.

Among those taken as prisoner of war by the Germans was a young infantry scout named Kurt Vonnegut. (books by this author) He'd only been in the front lines for five days when he got trapped behind enemy lines and taken prisoner. Within a month, he was sent over to Dresden and put to work in a factory producing vitamin-enriched malt syrup for pregnant women. He and his fellow American prisoners were detained in and slept at an underground warehouse in Dresden that had been a meat-packing facility and storage locker before the war. The building was marked "Schlachthof-fünf": "Slaughterhouse-Five."

Then, in February 1945, about two months after the Battle of the Bulge began, British and American forces started firebombing Dresden. The firestorm created by the massive Allied bombings killed nearly all of Dresden's residents, but Vonnegut and other POWs survived because they were three stories underground, in that meat-storage locker.

Vonnegut published his novel Slaughterhouse-Five in 1969, a quarter century after he was captured at the Battle of the Bulge and a witness to the Dresden firebombing. In it, he wrote:

"It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds.

And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like "Poo-tee-weet?"

The Battle of the Bulge ended on January 25, 1945, after Hitler agreed to withdraw German troops from the Ardennes forest. Less than two weeks later, Allied leaders met at Yalta to discuss occupying post-war Germany.