Best book that I read this year, that is. I added it to the big stack of "books to read while rehabilitating" based entirely on reviews on Amazon--all which said something like, "This is my all time favorite book, but I can't begin to describe what it's about. . . impossible to put into words." Again and again the sense that the experience of this book was outside of language, and so I wanted to know what that experience would be like.
I can tell you that it's a dense book. It's about family and generations and the inexorable revolution of the planet and the way that the passage of time dismantles everything--from houses to tradition to beauty and love. . . to memory. But on every page, it's a book about something that it refuses to ever look directly at. It's writing with its eyes averted. It asks the reader to understand out of the corners of their eyes. I can't imagine the writing of it. . . even the reading of it, months later, seems unlikely.
I read it in the deep of my grandmother dying, after my own weeks of pressing fear. . . the stress test, the inconclusive or false test results, the angiogram, the back surgery, and so Little, Big was no doubt heightened by all of those things. But as a kid, my grandmother's house was like Narnia or Wonderland--an amazing house with nooks and crannies, and darkness and warmth on over an acre of green grass. My brother and I talked about it then, a place of adventure without any actual danger. It's weird to think of it now, because it seems so improbable, a place with almost no technology to speak of (I'm old enough, that that wasn't strange at the time), and so the house is a memory of food and games and picnics on the back lawn and reading books aloud. There was a blackboard in the hall off the dining room right next to the radiator, so you had to be careful not to be burned, but the sound of water rush and clank combining with adult voices filtering out from the remains of dinner while I drew in the darkness of the hallway. My brother and I spelunking under the dining room table, light dappled through the crocheted table cloth grandma had handmade years before, confined to bed with rickets. The front solarium filled to brimming with plants like some strange indoor office/jungle. Mozart's bust on the edge of the polished piano. A trunk upstairs on the top floor filled with nothing but costumes and dolls. . . even Japanese platform geisha sandles with thongs made of velvet. The golden starburst clock above the mantel in the living room. Everywhere, rugs of wool that prickled and burned bare feet and knees. Grandma in her night gown, letting me sit on the cool tiles in the bathroom while she unraveled her bun and brushed out her hair--a silver river flowing below her waist,
And this summer, grandma's and my last phone call--me sitting in Grant Park on carved steps next to the riotous gardens of sun and bright and whispering, and her in a bed in hospice in Cincinnati with the phone being held up to her ear. And the two of us just calling out things we remembered from the old house. The swing set. The old apple tree. The vegetable garden. The sandbox. Sheets sewn up on one side to keep kids from falling out. Croquet. Twelfth Night. . .
That was a good thing.
And so that's what Little, Big by John Crowley was for me--the way that families and the places attached to families shape you and break you and put you back together again. It's a magical book--both literally and figuratively. And it will always be a sad, bright spot in the midst of this dumb year.
No comments:
Post a Comment