BiblioAddict The First Step on the Road to Recovery

On being stubborn, the over-hype syndrome, and the tales we weave:

Yeesh.  My end of the year is turning out to be a bust for blogging.  I don’t know what it is, but no matter what I do, I just can’t get back into the swing of things.  I’m trying though, folks. I’m trying.  And, simply because I absolutely refuse to give up – just last week, a palm-reading cab driver told me I was stubborn, so there you go – I’m at it again.

If my blogging life has been messy (okay fine, nonexistent), my reading life is getting cleaner and cleaner.  First, I’ve called a moratorium on buying new books.  I’m sure I do this about twice a year, but this time it’s not because I’ve become inundated with unread books (that’s always the case).  It’s because I have decided that my wardrobe is in serious need of an update.  I’ve reached the point at which it’s depressing to gaze into my closet every morning and see nothing but the same stuff I’ve been wearing for years.  I’m sure this new concern with my wardrobe has something to do with the fact that I’ve moved to one of the most fashionable cities in the country (Manhattan, New York City) and work in the one of the most fashionable parts of said city (Soho). There’s nothing like living and working among the fashionably dressed to get a girl gazing critically at her own garbs.

So, no new books!  Just in case you’re inclined to feel sorry for me – don’t.  I don’t deserve it. I have over a hundred unread books sitting on my shelf and all of them are crying, begging me for some attention.  Plus, I don’t have any place to put new books anyway.*  In fact, that’s another thing I need to buy: a new bookcase.  But, that’s for later.  For now, I won’t be buying any new books for at least a month and a half.  That should give me a little time to at least look as if I’m tackling my TBR shelf.

In related news, I’ve also begun cleaning up my “currently reading” list by finishing off two books which I’ve been “reading” since about mid-summer: Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout and The Hakawati by Rabih Allemeddine.  They were both very good, although very different from each other.  One is set in Northeast America and follows the lives of the residents in a small town, focusing on the later life of the title character Olive Kitteridge.  It’s a deep and considered study of loneliness and getting older.  The other is a magical, Mideastern romp through popular biblical stories and Arabic fables intertwined with the stories of a modern-day Lebonese family.  Although, it’s tone is a bit more tongue-in-cheek than Olive Kitteridge, The Hakawati is also a deep and considered novel specifically concerned with stories and how they shape countries, families, and people.

For me, I think Olive Kitteridge suffered from a bit of the ‘over-hyped’ syndrome.  I thought Olive Kitteridge was good, but I didn’t think it was that good.  I think because it won the Pulitzer Prize I was expecting to read something that would blow me away or leave me breathless.  Needless to say, Olive didn’t really do that.  I know it’s hard for any book to do that, but that’s what I was expecting and when I didn’t get it, I was left a little disappointed.  But, don’t get me wrong, I really, really liked Olive. Every time I finished a chapter, I wanted to turn to the person nearest to me and say, “I love you,” a thousand times over.  I also really admired and enjoyed Strout’s writing.  It was lyrical without being distracting or overly wordy.  I also appreciated the compassion Strout displayed for her characters.  I think one of the great feats of this novel is that it gets readers to sympathize with a woman who, on the face of it, doesn’t seem very sympathetic.  Strout effectively shows with this novel that one aspect of a person’s character is not the entire person; there is no such thing as a completely despicable human being.

Which brings me to the reason why Olive didn’t touch me as much as it could have: I found it almost uniformly depressing.  Where’s the happiness?  Where’s the laughter?  I’m not arguing that all books should be happy all the time.  What I am saying is that I find it hard to believe that the characters who appear in Olive Kitteridge have nothing about which to laugh or smile, unless I’m to believe that all of the characters in Olive are all clinically depressed.  Maybe there were jokes peppered throughout the novel, but if they were there I didn’t catch them.  At the end of the novel, Olive thinks to herself that she isn’t ready to leave this world, that she isn’t ready to die.  My question is: why?  Why is she so attached to her life?  Nearly every story about Olive is about how yet another bad thing happens in her life. What about the events in between those bad events that made her happy and laugh?  Where’s the stuff that makes you think, yeah, life is hard with disappointments and misunderstandings but I want to stay and live because I derive joy out of these things too.  I suppose the point that I’m making is that while Olive Kitteridge was studied and insightful, it was also, to my mind, a little unbalanced.

The Hakawati, on the other hand, was just about everything I could want in a novel.  I know that it’s kind of cliche to say that a novel is about stories (aren’t all novels?), but with The Hakawati it’s really true.  In fact, the novel begins and ends with the words, “Listen… Let me tell you a story.”  And does he ever.  There are stories within stories within stories within stories.  There are stories with evil genies, diabolical emirs, generous but silly kings, magical goddesses, brave and pious soldiers, loyal slaves, and wily imps.  There are also the stories that follow the lives, intrigues, lies, secrets and love of a modern-day Lebanese family.

At the beginning of the novel a young returns home to modern-day Beirut to be at his dying father’s side.  The family gathers at the hospital to preside over the dying man and, while mourning, they also eat, laugh, and retell family stories.  Here, I think, is the balance I thought was missing from Olive Kitteridge.  The family members express grief, anger, and worry.  Yet, they also find time to laugh, smile or joke.  In The Hakawati, death is a difficult and unhappy event (to say the least), but life does and must go on even in the face of despair.  The other stories in the novel – the evil genies, the diabolical emirs, and the magical goddesses – all work to illuminate some aspect of the family story, although those side stories eventually become just as interesting as the family stories.

If I’ve said ’stories’ about a thousand times it’s because there’s no way to talk about this novel without doing so.  Towards the end of The Hakawati one of the characters says that what happened is never as important (or as revealing) as the stories well tell about what happened.  The Hakawati is about how we use stories to shape our identity and our place in the world.  It’s also about how we use stories to elicit laughter, educate, entertain, or express a desire.  If I thought Olive Kittridge was over-hyped, I think The Hakwati is criminally under-hyped.  If your head doesn’t explode when you read novels with multiple story lines, then this is definitely the book for you.  The Hakawati is an easy book to love and hard book to hate.  I think it’s safe to say that, of the two, I liked The Hakawati more and I highly recommend it to just about everyone.  As with any good story, I didn’t want it to end.

So there you have it.  Another day, another start at this thing we call blogging.  I’m still trying to make it to 50 books – 39 books so far, and counting… – so I’ve got to put in some serious reading time over the next two months.  I’m also tossing around doing a solo readathon since I missed the last one (*sobs*), but I’ll let you know when and if I do that.  Until then, happy reading all.  May each day of reading be better than the last.

Popularity: 5% [?]