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.

Phantom Limbs, Anne Michaels

In honor of the next book selection .... I spent the day haunted trying to recollect my connection with Anne Michaels. Then I remembered (well, I searched my journal) and found from 1998 the poem below, which I love.

Patrick

Phantom Limbs, Anne Michaels

So much of the city
is our bodes. Places in us
old light still slants through to.
Places that no longer exist but are full of feeling,
like phantom limbs.

Even the city carries ruins in its heart.
Longs to be touched in places
only it remembers.

Through the yellow hooves
of the ginkgo, parchment light;
in that apartment where I first
touched your shoulders under your sweater,
that October afternoon you left the keys
in the fridge, milk on the table.
The yard - our moonlight motel -
where we slept summer’s hottest nights,
on grass so cold it felt wet.
Behind us, freight trains crossed the city,
a steel banner, a noisy wall.
Now the hollow diad
floats behind glass
in office towers also haunted
by our voices.

Few building, few lives
are built so well
even their ruins are beautiful.
But we loved the abandoned distillery;
stone floors cracking under empty vats,
wooden floors half rotted into dirt,
stairs leading nowhere, high rooms
run through with swords of dusty light.
A place the rain still loved, its silver paint
on rusted things that had stopped moving, it seemed, for us.
Closed rooms open only to weather,
pungent with soot and molasses,
scent-stung. A place
where everything too big to take apart
had been left behind.

War is a Meaning Forced Upon Us

Easy read, some good insights, too quick of an end: too pat. Love is all you need doesn't work after the prurient voyeurism of violence that makes up most of the book. It did make me go find my copy "War Music" and "All Day Permanent Red" by Chistopher Logue, so that was a good thing. The Illiad is still one of the best war books going. I loaned out my copy of Hedges so I am going to just give a few general comments. Hedges spends a large amount of time cataloging the horrors of the wars he has encountered, doing little to justify his conclusion, other than God I hope Love is the answer because hate sure is nasty. I liked the differentiation of Mythic and Sensory view of war and war reporting. His idea of Mythic reminds me of the "magic' idea of glamour: a dazzling that makes others believe what is really not there. I guess it is that desire to be a part of something bigger than yourself that attracts us to the "myth" of war, because no one really wants the reality of war in their part of the neighborhood. Blood is messy.

The End and the Beginning

by Wislawa Szymborska


After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won't
straighten themselves up, after all.

Someone has to push the rubble
to the side of the road,
so the corpse-filled wagons
can pass.

Someone has to get mired
in scum and ashes,
sofa springs,
splintered glass,
and bloody rags.

Someone has to drag in a girder
to prop up a wall,
Someone has to glaze a window,
rehang a door.

Photogenic it's not,
and takes years.
All the cameras have left
for another war.

We'll need the bridges back,
and new railway stations.
Sleeves will go ragged
from rolling them up.

Someone, broom in hand,
still recalls the way it was.
Someone else listens
and nods with unsevered head.
But already there are those nearby
starting to mill about
who will find it dull.

From out of the bushes
sometimes someone still unearths
rusted-out arguments
and carries them to the garbage pile.

Those who knew
what was going on here
must make way for
those who know little.
And less than little.
And finally as little as nothing.

In the grass that has overgrown
causes and effects,
someone must be stretched out
blade of grass in his mouth
gazing at the clouds.


Reading the introduction of "War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning" made me think of this poem.

The Berlin Wall Fall Anniversary

Wow. We read Niebuhr, discuss his anachronisms re. communism on Sunday, then hear today of the 20 year anniversary of the Berlin Wall Fall today. Poignancy.