“We construct reality in our own image. Our desires always multiply as our ideas do.”
-Ugo Foscolo
The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis
Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled
In Kazuro Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled, passageways are ever present. The main character, Ryder, is constantly being led through long, elaborate passageways, no matter where he goes. Even the simplest, most closest place requires much travel. What’s interesting is that most of these elaborate passageways seem to lead Ryder to different parts of the same place. And, with each “road” that he travels, another and another one comes about, almost as if they were planned as such, though they seem to be a matter of mere coincidence.
With that also comes memories, slivers into Ryder’s past and present. Ishiguro uses the physical passageways that Ryder travels through as mental ones that stream through his mind. In fact, one can even pose the idea that the hotel where Ryder is staying at, and therefore the center of all his journeys, could be a physical representation of Ryder’s brain, and all the passageways that he embarks through, the signals that his brain is sending out in order to try to mend what is clearly a disconnect. At first, the memories that Ryder obtains are sporadic and shallow, but as the novel progresses these memories come at a more frequent pace and are much deeper in caliber.
Ishiguro is a master storyteller, and although many have expressed the opinion that this novel is not one of his best, I disagree. The Unconsoled should be considered a brilliant work of fiction. Ishiguro weaves us around and around in the same circle, except that with each familiar turn we learn something new and unexpected. We come to expect the unexpected, although the transpiration is never predictable. Some of the paragraphs are dauntingly long, spanning for pages at a time, but that sort of adds to the character of it.
The point of reading this novel is not necessarily for the end result, but rather the experience of it and that’s what those who find this novel a disappointment do not seem to understand. It teaches you a new way to read and enjoy, and at the same time leaves you with a satisfaction that is insurmountable.
“I stood waiting with some concern. Then finally she turned round and looked at me. Not unkindly, oh no, but she looked at me, it was a particular look. The look of someone confirming with her eyes what she had been thinking. Yes, that’s what it was, and I knew then that she had finally seen through me.”
– Kazuo Ishiguro
The Unconsoled
Work-less Work Day
After a long weekend and previously short work-week, I came into the office this morning, latte in hand, ready for a ton of emails and voicemails to get back to and loads of work. Of course I ignored the fact that I haven’t received an office email all weekend except for a rather weird one asking if anyone was in, on Thanksgiving no less…I was after all home, where cell phonage is sporadic at best. But, upon sitting at my desk, I found that nothing was working. No emails, no programs, not even the internet. What’s a girl to do?
At first I thought that it was of course my computer and I tried restarting, but to no avail. Then, since it was rather early in the morning I took out my book and started reading at my desk. It felt weird, but seriously, how am I to do any work when the whole server is down? So, I sipped my latte and read a few pages of my book, that I truly had thought I would have finished over the holiday weekend so I could write about it and loan it to a friend. Alas, I ended up being busier than I thought I would be. Not a big deal, it will be finished by the end of this week and if not, then on my train ride to and from Philly where I will be partying with my girlfriends. Then I will start on my Vogue :).
After a bit I realized that this network problem would take longer to resolve than I had at first anticipated, so, I decided to grab my gear and make a run for the gym. Nothing like a good workout early in the day (I usually prefer gyming early anyway; there’s no crowd and you can actually get a good workout in). Also, I hadn’t been to the gym in two weeks because last week was shortened and the week prior to that I was out of commission with a sinus infection.
I walked over to the gym, which is really just on the other side of Third Avenue and half a block north. After changing and filling up my water bottle with, to my disappointment was warm water out of the fountain, I set off for the treadmills. Now, I injured my knee in the middle of January and sillily kept working out on it for six months until finally going to the doctor to have it checked out, so I can’t run on the treadmill, but I can power-walk…well sort of.
I got onto the treadmill and started walking and soon realized that my knee wasn’t bothering me today. I decided to speed-walk for three miles, call it a day and go back to the gym tomorrow to hit the weights. I ended up doing only half a mile less than my goal which was good, and my knee still was okay, but I, myself was exhausted.
I took my time showering and going back to the office and the network still was down, which at that point was just frustrating. What is the point of being at work if I can’t get anything done? I decided to confer with one of my friends (the one who is waiting for my book) and sat in his office for a good twenty minutes before making myself a cup of tea and trudging back to my desk in hopes that the status of my computer would have changed. I tried opening on program…and it worked, so I tried another and another. They all worked and the internet works again too. My email is still down though.
Going Home
There’s something nice about going to your hometown for the weekend, being amongst family and old friends, staying in the house that you grew up in, sleeping in your old room that, although has changed a lot since you lived in it, still enfolds you in its walls and welcomes you in. You don’t quite resume the role that you did as a child or adolescent, but you don’t quite keep your independent adult self either. You sort of become an in-between.
You have meals with someone other than yourself, you cook together, you set the table together, you clean up together. If you feel like having a drink, there’s someone to do that with too. When you wake up in the morning, you sit in the living-room that, in the colder months boasts a view of the bay, with someone drinking coffee or tea, talking, reading or just staring out at that spectacular view.
You forget about the world that you live in for those few days. You go about everything in a relaxed manner and the outside world doesn’t seem as important as it usually does.
For me, going home for the weekend is like a getaway. It’s easy to take myself out of the world because it seems so isolated. Maybe because my house is on its own separate hill, up a steep, almost cliff-like driveway, where cell phone reception is so horrible it’s not even worth picking up the phone if you hear it ring. I, who am attached to my phone, ok addicted, kind of love that feeling of detachment from it, maybe because that’s the way it’s always been there and I have no choice.
Of course the horrible reception didn’t matter so much when I was a teenager because I didn’t have a cell phone. Anyone who wanted to contact me either could do it when I was online (remember aim) or by calling the house phone. No one calls the house phone for me anymore, but I will use it to call people back…if I want to speak to them.
Then, the real world calls you out of your contentment and the weekend is over. You travel back to your apartment filled with the memories of the last few days, nostalgic because even though it’s nice to visit, it’s not your life anymore. You take your key out and unlock your door. You step inside, close the door, turn on some lights. You throw your overnight bag on the floor and you stare at your apartment just for a second. You take in the familiar silence and inhale deeply, slowly letting the air out. You know that you can always go back to the home that you just left, but you know that you belong in this one.
You’ve come home twice this weekend, both familiar in their own ways and both completely different. One fits your past while the other is your present. The outside world comes back to you in full force. You are no longer able to ignore it.
“He smiled understandingly – much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced – or seemed to face – the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself”
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby
My Love for the Detective Novel
I never thought that I would be one to love reading detective novels. Sherlock Holmes comes to mind, the author James Patterson, to name a few. They always follow the same formula. There’s a good guy and a bad guy (though, sometimes the who-is-who, is not always established from the beginning) and there is a crime that was committed that needs to be solved. I am also not a fan of the main-stream novels, you know the ones that everyone reads by those authors that just seem to be able to crank out an innumerable amount of stories. When I was younger I was envious towards them. I couldn’t understand how they were able to write so much when I had trouble finishing most of the things that I started. As I read more and more of these novels though, I came to realize that I didn’t envy them after all. Their bodies of work were plentiful, but they were mediocre at best. They were all practically the same with slight variations. If you’ve read a few books by any of these authors, you’ve read them all. I realized then that I didn’t want to be one of those writers; I’d rather spend half my life cranking out one great story than to mindlessly author many.
That was when I became a book snob. Aside from reading Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, which was widely popular in its day and truly brilliant, I set out to read novels that weren’t so well known or read. I can pretty much guarantee that if you were to name all of the books on the most popular list of the moment, I have maybe read one. Not to say that they are terrible and should not be read, I just feel that there are more that are far better that are hardly known.
When I was in college, out of all of the English classes that I took, there were only two that I loved. They were both very different in their content and approaches to learning, but they both gave me something that, had I never taken them, I might never have discovered that I loved. The first was a class on Victorian literature. There, I learned that that was my favorite time period of literature. I loved reading the long descriptive paragraphs about life back then; just the way that the words were used; I cannot to this day find anything as appealing to me. The second one, entitled simply Dreams, I loved far more. The literature in that class wasn’t focused on a specific time period, but rather pairing great works of fiction with dream theorists and of course Freud was there. Instantly I fell in love with Freud. I didn’t necessarily agree with most of what he wrote, but it was the way he wrote them. The novel that I am currently reading, Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled, is a leftover from that class that has been sitting on my bookshelf for a few years. It’s a psychological mystery, which I will go into at length when I have finished it.
It was in that Victorian literature class that I came upon the first detective novel ever written, The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins. It is told through multiple narrators, where the reader learns little bits and pieces until finally the conclusion comes. Who knew that with one great work of fiction, a whole genre would be spawned. Although most people may not have heard of him, we all have Collins to thank for this.
Another thing to know about my book snobbiness is that I am not a fan of American literature. There are a few pieces that I do love, for example F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, most of American literature I find boring.
A few years back, a friend of mine at work handed me Tana French’s debut novel, In the Woods. He loved books just as much as I did and with the exception of a few that I couldn’t focus on enough to sit through, he hadn’t steered me wrong. In the Woods is of course a psychological mystery (aka a modern phrase for the detective novel, a sub-genre if you will). It starts off with a group of kids that went into the woods surrounding their community one night and only one of the three made it back. The other two disappeared, never to be seen again. Jump forward decades into the present and that one kid works on the murder squad and there is a murder in those very same woods. French is brilliant at creating this energy that really grips the reader insofar as to clench at your core. When the main characters were overcome with sadness, I cried…when they were scared out of their wits, I screamed. Needless to say that when I found out that Tana French had come out with a second novel, I flew to the bookstore and purchased it immediately; the same went for when she came out with her third.
I have never had a story effect me so much as I did with Ms. French’s. I would literally come home from work and plop myself on the couch, staying up way past the time that I should have, just to read her words. I would wake up in the middle of the night screaming, my heart pounding rapidly in my chest and my body in a cold sweat, turning all of the lights on in my apartment because my mind had continued to subconsciously circulate the passages that I had just read. The same thing would happen the next night and the next until I had finished each novel. I laughed at myself for having such a strong reaction.
The other two of Tana French’s novels are entitled The Likeness and Faithful Place. These, along with In the Woods, are brilliant works of fiction that should be read. I am anxiously awaiting her fourth novel, which has yet to surface. Did I mention the French is an Irish author?
Autumn is Finally Here
I don’t know about you, but from time to time I get bored with my wardrobe. Don’t get me wrong, I love the clothes that I have, but after a while, they lose their awe and I’m stuck wearing the same outfits over and over again. Sometimes I find myself running for the bus in the morning on the way to work because I had been trying to put together a new look with my old stuff. Needless to say, when I am running for the bus, more often than not, I always end up wearing something that I didn’t want to wear.
I love getting dressed in the summer mainly because it’s so easy. All I have to do is throw on a dress, or skirt and tee shirt, cute sandals and I’m good to go. It’s a carefree attitude that leaves the minute the first crisp day appears. I had thought that after the snow we had at the end of October, the end of warm weather was upon us, but it is not until now that I think fall has officially arrived.
Gone are the days of sundresses and sandals; scarves and gloves are on the horizon. No more bare legs…its stockings all the way. I never used to be a fan of stockings. Either they were too bold or too plain, but they are finally making ones that are just right. You can get them in so many different patterns, it’s just uncanny. Even my plain sheer ones have a thin seam that runs down the back that gives them a retro look. You can literally buy stockings almost anywhere, but I like to shop for mine at The Limited. Even though it is primarily a clothing store, and primarily hard to find for that matter, their stocking quality is fabulous. My favorite stockings from them are my argyle ones. I think that they’re a sexy spin off of the classic, preppy pattern. Plus, when it is raining out, like it has been a lot lately, wearing a dress or skirt with rainboots and a cutely patterned stocking can add cheer to your day. So, until the warm summer comes back to me, I will not be discouraged.
“The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for.”
-Ludwig Wittgenstein
Wine…A Love Story
When I started drinking wine I had wanted to love it. I thought that there was nothing as classy or sophisticated than to have a glass of wine in hand, whether out with friends or in the company of your own home. There are only really two beverages that you can curl up with and I believed that wine was one of them. In fact, when I moved to my current apartment, my very first purchase was a set of wine glasses. I hunted for months for them and one day I walked into Pier1 and there they were; perfect size (oversized) and shape. They came in a few different colors, although I can’t quite remember what they were. I ended up with green hued glasses. Green is not really the color that I ever would have seen myself choosing, but there it was…the best color. I bought white and red wine glasses, and champagne flute…four or each sounded like a good number to me. I also purchased two different sized sets of drinking glasses during that visit (four of each of those too). It wasn’t until after I walked out of the store that I realized that I had two really heavy bags to cart home via public transportation all the way to my little suburban area of Queens, but they were worth it. Sadly, after a freak accident a few years later, by someone whom I won’t mention, the champagne flutes are no more. They have since been replaced by beautiful Waterford Crystal ones which add a nice dimension to my still in tact wine glasses, but every so often I find myself missing my old ones.
The first wine that I tried was an Australian Merlot. And I have to admit, I wasn’t too keen on the taste. My mouth puckered at those first few sips even though Merlots aren’t really known for having tannins. It was then that I realized that loving wine was something to be acquired, kind of like how some people feel about reading Shakespeare or seeing the opera. (Neither of which I agree with, I have always been a fan of Shakespeare and, although I have only been to one opera, I loved it.) After the Australian Merlot I graduated to the California Cabernet and that was when I first fell in love with wine. I couldn’t get enough of the inviting fragrance or the way it danced on my tongue. I also didn’t mind the fact that my mouth still puckered at the first few sips.
For a while, Cabernet’s were all that I would drink. I have a picture of myself that was taken at a New Years’ Eve party a few years back and I’m sad to say, my lips were slightly stained red.
I started drinking Chardonnay with my aunt during our sporadic dinner outings for a few reasons. First, I wanted to drink the same thing as her because I thought that she was cool and that would in turn make me cool. I also believed that to really love wine, you had to be able to diversify your palate. And a third reason, which I hadn’t yet come to realize, was that whilst ordering wine by the glass at a restaurant is a fun way to try new ones, ordering red by the glass can be a bit more tricky (at least if you’re me anyway). I cannot stand red wine that has been open for more than twenty-four hours. I do not care how good it was the day before or how expensive. Even though it has only slightly oxidized and is still completely drinkable, I cannot enjoy it and therefore am known to pour, what some might say, perfectly good bottles down the drain.
Then last summer, everything changed. I reconnected with an old high school friend, who is now a sommelier. At the time, he was studying wine and instilled his knowledge upon me. I guess that one way to learn about wine is to do one country at a time and, for the most part, he was studying French wines. For years I had been saying that I hated Pinot Noir, but when I took my first sip of a Burgundy, I was hooked. (For those of you that don’t know, all wines from Burgundy are Pinot Noir; unless they are white…then they are Chardonnay.) Since then, I still have the occasional California Cab, but for the most part, I only drink French wines. There is just such a difference in the way that these Old World wines are made as opposed to the New World Ones (i.e. Australia, California, etc)…they’re just simply amazing.
elizabethsara 