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A favorite summer read serves as reminder of value of savoring a story.
When I finished Kiran Desai’s luscious “The Inheritance of Loss” this summer, I stayed in the damp, moldy and decaying villa where the bulk of the story is set. I stayed in the shadow of Kanchenjunga, the peak between India and Nepal. I sat with the book’s character, Sai, as she pondered her life with a crotchety grandfather. I let the torrential rains soak me and I inhaled the forest and listened its noise.
The space between books used to be much smaller for me. Now, I’m not in such a rush to devour books. I sit with the book’s plot, its ending, the place it transported me to for a while.
I think about how the author did things to get to the ending. Perhaps it’s a product of getting older that I’m in less of a rush. I even read slower and I’ve gone back to my college habit of underlining passages and annotating them on the inside of the cover. Why? I’m no longer in an English class discussing the book. I suppose I do this in case I want to return to the book.
Here’s one I underlined (Sai was reading a National Geographic article about squids):
“No human had ever seen an adult squid alive, and though they had eyes as big as apples to scope the dark of the ocean, theirs was a solitude so profound that they might never encounter another of their tribe. The melancholy of this situation washed over Sai.
“Could fulfillment ever be felt as deeply as loss?”
I had an instructor in college in art classes, which I took along with English classes, who used to call out “negative space, negative space,” when we drew pictures of jumbled up random still life objects, like old tricycles and umbrellas. It took me some time to figure out exactly what she meant – that the space without lines or shading or cross-hatching was just as important. It set things up, rounded out the image, defined the boundaries. I thought of that expression — negative space — when I closed Desai’s book. I needed some negative space that I could fill with thoughts about the book, to appreciate the author’s good work and also shape what I would need next.
The time between books is a time to think or let the book flood over you. I read “Commonwealth” by Ann Patchett after “The Inheritance of Loss” and the same thing happened. When I was finished, I was struck by her technique, how it was structured and the mechanics of the plot. I thought about the scene-setter in the beginning — a christening — and how one act can affect the rest of many lives. That scene’s movement through rooms played like a movie in my head. Later the characters move back and forth across fields, the country, bars, dinner tables.
When I finished “Commonwealth,” and I finished thinking about it and I was ready to move on, I picked up a more recent book, “Educated” by Tara Westover. That’s where I am now – in the shadow of another mountain but this time in Idaho.
And I know just with the first chapter that I’ll have something to think about later when I’ve finished reading this book.