The Buried Giant

What is it that we keep buried deep within our memories? That is the only one of the themes that The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro explores. In this tale of medieval England, an elderly couple witness a malaise among their villagers, something they call 'the Mist,' which robs people of their memories. It results in strange behaviors and ideas among the people, but it isn't just their village that suffers from the Mist, but the entire countryside. The couple set off on a journey to visit their son and on the way encounter other travelers who are seeking a solution to the Mist problem said to be a result of the breath of an aging she-dragon.

There is more than just the Mist that is a problem for our elderly couple, the wife is suffering from a pain and along the way they stop to consult those who are skilled in the healing arts. The husband, Axl, is clearly worried by his wife's ailment, but with the Mist he doesn't see it for what it is. She has hidden her symptoms from him not wishing to worry him. They encounter a group of widows who warn them of the boatmen who would transport them to a distant island, but only after being submitted to interrogation regarding their memories. Only those who really love each other deeply can be together on the island while others are left to wander its shores alone.

Some argue that perhaps fixing the Mist problem wouldn't be such a good thing. Aren't they happy to forget the past, "Yet the mist covers all memories, the bad as well as the good....You've no fear then, of bad memories, mistress?" (Ishiguro 157). To which Beatrice replies, "What's to fear father? What Axl and I feel today in our hearts for each other tells us the path taken here can hold no danger for us, no matter that the mist hides it now. It's like a tale with a happy end, when even a child knows not to fear the twists and turns before. Axl and I would remember our life together, whatever its shape, for it's been a thing dear to us" (Ishiguro 157).

As they travel, their memories do begin to return - the good and the bad. For their marriage hasn't always been good, there has been unfaithfulness, which has been forgiven. Harsh words spoken. The son they seek to visit is in fact dead and buried. And the pain that Beatrice suffers is in fact a sign of a deeper illness buried dead within.

Eventually, Axl and Beatrice encounter the boatman and he speaks with both asking them about their most treasured memories. Each tells of the good and the bad for each are treasured, each type has contributed to their great love for one another. As they climb into the boat, Axl is told there is only room for one passenger and he cannot travel. It is an ache to read of his pleading to be allowed to come, his refusal to be parted from his wife. Yet in the end he has no choice. None of us do when death comes for those we love.

As I read, I tried to figure out what Ishiguro meant by the 'Mist.' Was it tied into society's dependence on escape from experiencing the good and the bad by distraction with technology or worse the use and abuse of drugs and alcohol. Having recently listened to a young man recovering from a heroin addiction, the depiction of the 'Mist' reminded me of his words about how the drug wrapped him in a blanket blocking out the world and his only desire when he came to was to figure out a way to get back to that state. In our communities today the opiate abuse issue is one of great concern, and I don't understand why anyone would be driven to using such a terrible thing to escape from life.

What else could Ishiguro have meant by the 'Mist?' Perhaps I should take it very literally and that as we age we lose our memories. Watching my love ones age and their personalities and memories erased by dementia is heartbreaking. Disease like cancer can alter brain chemistry and result in personality changes that I witnessed in my father's last days. Friends and neighbors share painful stories of caring for loved ones with Alzheimer's, and I've witnessed what happens to the victims of this disease when I visited my grandmother who spent her last years in the memory care ward of a nursing home.

The 'Mist' could mean many different things to different readers. Most importantly for me was the message that there are those that seek to fight the Mist. The importance of holding on to both the good and the bad memories and that one must have both to have a rich full life. That perseverance is a treasured value in helping to achieve a well lived life.

Summertime and the reading is easy ....

Vanessa Greene's
The Seafront Tearoom

For all my fellow school teachers - rejoice for summer is here! Time for relaxation and getting all the jobs we've put off doing all school year like painting the bathroom, cleaning the basement, making appointments with doctors or dentists, etc. etc. etc. Unfortunately I set myself up for failure and disappointment when faced with the arm's length list for summer chores so I've learned to take each day as it comes and do some little task. Keep the expectations low and you will be pleasantly pleased when you achieve even more.

So far I've spent my first two days of summer vacation tidying up around the house, doing laundry, working in the garden and ferrying a parent to a doctor's appointment. Oh yes - and reading. At first I couldn't settle down with a title - should it be something improving? Work related? Emotional? No - it should be something light and fun and summery. My second experience with Vanessa Greene's tea themed novels,  The Seafront Tearoom, delivered just what I needed. It is a story about women with challenges in their life that had to be faced. Women who needed to decide in which direction did they want their lives to go in. Women who needed companionship and found it in making new friends over a cup of tea.

Greene has presented me with several good themes to ponder at a time of transition in my own life. The end of the school year is always a challenging transition; grateful to have completed a year, a bit run down, a bit disenchanted, even managing to begin planning for the next school year, in much need of a break to regroup. I'm not going to go into a diatribe regarding the misunderstood challenges of teaching here, but I do want to say that between the stresses of a job and home life, regardless of what you do, a break is necessary to recharge the batteries before picking up the daily battle once more. Isn't it lovely that reading can be the conduit for that? Even just a couple of pages a day can bring respite. I'm so amazed when colleagues say they don't have time to read during the school year. I would simply die if I didn't make some time, even 15 minutes, for some personal reading every day. Reading is what helps to keep me sane. My advice - brew a cup a tea and sit with a fun book!

Where do the French go?

In continuing to read stories and memoirs where our hero or heroine picks up their lives and moves somewhere else, which I think I'll call the Peter Mayle effect, I've begun to wonder what this is telling me.  I don't have to wonder, I know - I'd like my life to be different than it is right now. Thankfully I find escape in books and not drugs; the habit is cheaper and doesn't ruin my body or my relationships. But where would I want to go? My last post was by a Canadian woman who moved to Paris via California (Paris Letters) and my newest read is another Brit (like Peter Mayle) who moves to the Poitou-Charentes region of France - Tout Sweet by Karen Wheeler.

I think countries like France and Italy have come up with a great way to get their old run down cottages, farms, and villas renovated and boost local employment of handy men/women - get some foreigner to come in with dreams of bucolic village life, and spend a lot of money trying to achieve it.  Don't get me too wrong here, I think restoring existing buildings is wonderful. I hate seeing the clearing of land followed by brand new construction when there are abandoned properties waiting to be reused. I often wonder why some of these places aren't being used - taxes? death? squabbling families and inheritance? In Tout Sweet and The French House (see post here), the in-comer buys a home that is more hovel than habitable: no plumbing or heating, roofs that need major repairs, flooring that must be put down, walls redone and the list goes on. But they are in love with the idea of what life will be like when everything is done, and because it has turned out well they've successfully pitched the book idea to some publisher.

So where do the French go when they want to start over? I certainly haven't read any of those memoirs, or perhaps they are only available in France. Or is it a mind set of Americans or Britons who need to escape? Are the French all happy just where they are or have they found the secret to living a contented life? As for me, I know that running away from home isn't going to be my solution. Learning to be content with where I am is the challenging lesson for the day.

How much money will it take ....

Paris Letters -
Janice MacLeod and
Cafe tea pot

I was drawn to Janice MacLeod's Paris Letters simply by the first line of the back cover blurb, "How much money does it take to quit your job?" Excellent question! In her case not as much as she thought, but her plan was to take a break for a year and rethink her career plans - I want to retire. I want to be done with working altogether. I'm still a bit young for retirement as I can't start drawing on the IRA monies for at least another ten years.

MacLeod did what many of us dream of, quit the job and go off to explore the world. She ended up in Paris. It seems everyone wants to run off to Europe to end up in Paris, or Provence, or Florence. To have a little apartment or reclaim a farm house and plant a garden. It all sounds so wonderful and I'm grateful to the numerous people who have done it and written about their experiences, but deep down I know it isn't what I want. I want a quiet little place on a lake or a lazy river where I can sit and watch the water flow, hear it lap against the bank, see sun or moonlight sparkle upon it. To set out in my kayak and paddle early in the morning or late in the afternoon as the sun sets. That's what I dream about. Now how much money do I need to make this dream a reality?

Money isn't really the object here, it's the belief that I can make this a reality that is at the heart of the matter here. I need to believe that I can have this dream. MacLeod wrote a lot about her 'old life' of being a copywriter and that it was her dream job but that she had come to dislike it. The dream hadn't turned out to be what she expected. She had been living a life that wasn't authentic. She began to strip things away until her possessions fit in a suitcase and took to the road. At some point she finally gave up one last reminder of her previous life and it was then that "I forgave myself for my prior judgements of not being good enough to be just who I was" (107). There it was - the truth - my truth. My constant daily struggle to be okay in myself no matter where I am. Quitting my job and going halfway around the world will not solve my problems. Accepting who I am is the only solution and discovering what it is that makes me happy and doing it is what's most important now. Everyone wants to travel to see Paris, but deep down in my heart I know it isn't for me. And that's okay. Step one - stop living someone else's dream.

"Write to learn what you know.... First and most obviously was that I had all the inner resources I needed to effectively deal with my situations" (240). Paraphrasing that - I read to learn what I know, and she's absolutely right, I do have the inner resources to deal with my life. I've been learning as I have managed to get through every challenge I have faced in my life. I've simply not given myself credit for the inner strength because I've been waiting for someone else to point it out to me. It's just not going to happen that way. The only person that can pat me on the back for all the hard work I've done is me. With that knowledge, I can begin to plot, plan, and save for rescuing myself from the life I thought I wanted and start living the life I really want. You can too!!

MacLeod, Janice. Paris Letters. Naperville, Illinois: Sourcebooks, 2014.

Curious Stories - Yann Martel

The newest novel from
Yann Martel

I remember when I finally sat down to read The Life of Pi and found myself completely sucked into the story. I was out there in the lifeboat with Pi and that tiger. The daily struggle to problem solve: filter water, catch food to feed himself and the tiger, how to overcome the fear and continue to fight the good fight for survival. The story telling was engaging, I had to keep reading until it was finished. DON'T BOTHER ME I'M READING! was my attitude.

I started The High Mountains of Portugal and once again I was enveloped in the book. This time Martel has written three distinct stories (Homeless, Homeward, and Home) that are intertwined with each other. In each is a man struggling with grief and the ones who love him may have good intentions in assisting, but they must find their own way. It is the theme of journeying to find themselves and their place, their home in the world after the loss of a loved one whether it be lover, wife, child, or parent.

Martel reflected on the importance of story telling in this novel. In the first story there is an old journal written by a priest, which plays a key role. The second is the passionate reading of Agatha Christie novels by husband and wife - something shared in their married life. The last story switches from reading (although there is some) to journaling. In the second story, there is a discussion of faith, of Christianity in particular. "A story calls upon us as God calls upon us, as individuals - and we like that. Stories benefit the human mind" (Martel 155). How profound I thought, how stories help to nourish our souls and that transcends religion and enters the realm of true faith something unique to humanity. Every culture has its stories and it is that which makes us who we are. Each one of us is a story unfolding, and when we were are gone, hopefully, there will be someone to share our story with others.

Using "Big Magic" to get beyond the fear

Most of us know our character flaws. Some are hidden well and take years to find, acknowledge and finally address. Mine is fear. There! San't be too afraid if I announce it to the entire world, but still I haven't come to grips with it. It doesn't drive my life like it used to, thankfully. When fear was in charge nothing happened. I was paralyzed. I kept doing, but I did what I thought everyone else wanted me to do. That's what fear did to me - it blinded me.

I just finished Elizabeth Gilbert's Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear and found it inspiring. Now as a famous writer, she admits to getting lots of fans who tell her how wonderful Eat Pray Love was, and many people have criticized it; I couldn't get through myself (can't tell you why, but there it is) so I can't give an honest opinion but by what she wrote in this book she's perfectly okay with that. That to me is a great lesson; not everyone is going to like everything I do or write, and that shouldn't keep me from doing and writing. The fear of people not liking me or my work kept me from even starting and that allowed fear to stay right where it wanted to be - in charge.

It's that perfectionism streak that does me in, and here's Elizabeth's advice on that: "You must learn how to become a deeply disciplined half-ass. It starts by forgetting about perfect. We don't have time for perfect. In any event, perfection is unachievable" (166). I love that. Someone has given me permission to be a half-ass, which is better than being a no-ass, which is what I was if I allowed perfectionism to prevent me from getting started. Being a half-ass is progress in my book.

Gilbert has peppered her work with many anecdotes and here is one of my favorites. A 70 year old woman told her, "We all spend our twenties and thirties trying so hard to be perfect, because we're so worried about what people will think of us. Then we get into our forties and fifties, and we finally start to be free, because we decide that we don't give a damn what anyone thinks of us" (174). That's where I stand now on the cusp of 50 and I've finally figured out that I just need to be me whether or not anyone else likes that. I've spent way too much time trying to be someone I thought I should be.

Her book is an eloquent pep talk for all those who strive to live a creative life. Creativity comes in so many forms and whether or not I ever achieve fame and fortune, I've learned that I need to live this way. Hiding my creative side was not helping me to be a happy person.  I'm happier and calmer when I'm following a creative pursuit like writing, or drawing, or decorating the house, or working in my garden, or knitting, or... or... or...  There are so many ways that I enjoy being creative and the challenge is that I only get 24 hours a day, which means I better get to work.

Gilbert, Elizabeth. Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear. New York: Riverhead Books, 2015.

Where have I seen this before? #2

Constable on the wall of the
Boston MFA

In my first in the series "Where have I seen this before?" I wrote about mystery plots that had similar plots, that of murder within a group of tourists. Earlier this week I was visiting the Boston MFA, and while walking through the European Art gallery (2nd floor) I spied John Constable on the wall and thought instantly of Ngaio Marsh's Clutch of Constables that I had written about. Pondering the painting more I thought of all the novels I've read that have focused on art as their subject matter, and realized I could compose several blog posts for this series, but I'll start today with just one topic to focus on - smart, talented, young girl used by older guy.

The Art Forger by B.A. Shapiro tells the story of Claire Roth a fine arts graduate student who has fallen in love with her married painting professor and engages in a sexual relationship with him. Isaac Cullion is a modern abstract painter with a case of undiagnosed mental illness (bi-polar?) who has lost his groove, flow, muse, inspiration - you choose what to call it. Claire makes the mistake of trying to egg him on to create a piece of art for an exhibition by telling him they will do it together. She starts the canvas, he directs by instructing her how to use his techniques. A work of art is produced and Cullion signs his name. The critics come to view and are astounded. The MOMA acquires the painting and proudly displays it. Cullion says nothing, accepts the accolades, and then returns to his wife. Claire decides to speak up for her work, but only manages to turn the art world against her - she's the spurned mistress trying to get hers back on her lover.

Several years later, Aiden Markel, owner of a prestigious Boston art gallery comes looking for Claire.  Claire has been making a living working for a firm that specializes in making reproductions of famous paintings, let's be clear they are not being sold as the real thing. Claire it turns out is very good at her job. Markel brings her one of the stolen art works from the infamous Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum robbery for her to forge. His plan is to sell the forgery to a buyer and get the real thing back onto the museum wall. I'll let you imagine how well this will work out for Claire. Sorry no spoilers today.

Amy Gail Hansen chooses a different art form that of writing for her novel The Butterfly Sister. Ruby Rousseau a senior at a fictitious all girls college on the banks of one of the Great Lakes, makes the mistake of starting a romantic relationship with her married professor, the one who will be grading her senior essay. The first sign that things aren't going well is that her notes mysteriously disappear around the time that Ruby's lover admits to sharing some of her ideas in a talk he'd given at a conference (the one he didn't or wouldn't let her attend with him). Must keep our relationship a secret is his excuse. As the semester goes on, the professor starts to grow cool while Ruby works long hours on her thesis. The big day comes - he gives her a D on the paper, she finds him in bed with another woman, and driven to the brink she attempts suicide.

Ruby has withdrawn from school and is working on putting her life back together when she receives the suitcase of a missing fellow student. Looking through its contents she spies a clue that she holds onto before turning the suitcase over to the police who are looking for the missing girl. Ruby begins piecing together the facts that her beloved professor, for she's still stuck on him, is in fact a serial user of students both sexually and for their work. That's right, the man has stolen her brilliant senior thesis and published it as his own work. And she's not the first he has done this to. Read on for I will give no spoiler here today.

Point is both these novels deal with young women who trust the wrong man when it comes their creativity. The men use their work for their own gains whether it be for money, prestige, or job security. Both women never saw it coming that the men that they loved would steal their creations and pass them off as their own. Plagiarism is a huge crime on the intellectual level, but these men also committed the crime of psychological and emotional abuse by using a sexual relationship to get what they wanted. Both women were immature when it comes to relationships and they gave themselves whole-heartedly to these men. Their hearts were abused, as well as, their minds leaving them with the task of learning to trust again and hopefully to love again. But more importantly having the confidence to create again.

Hansen, Amy Gail. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2013. Print
Shapiro, B.A. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2012. Print.