The Giant's House

I was looking at some diary entries of mine from way back in the day. I can't be sure but I think I wrote this back in first year college, so I was about sixteen. I wanted to post this here because, years later, The Giant's House by Elizabeth McCracken is still one of my favorite books. (I hope my few but dedicated readers pay no attention to my ramblings about Nietzche and Sartre; I was barely out of high school and it was cool, back then, to talk about existentialism and nihilism.)

1.49am. When I was in high school, I used to write book reviews for the paper. The writing club moderator usually murdered the articles that I wrote (particularly this one editorial I wrote, “A Whiff of Grapeshot”. It was published—unbelievably, incredibly, ridiculously—with the title “A Whiff of a Grapeshot”.), but most of the time my book reviews survived the clumsy editing unscathed. Every time I would pick up a book in high school I would ask myself if I could possibly write a review for it; if it were an average book then I would have no interest in publishing a review, since my purpose in writing those reviews was to actually get people to read what I thought of as “sensible” reading material, rather than to accomplish any great feats in literary critique.

Even now as I pick up a book I ask myself the same question. I now wish I could write a review for “The Giant’s House” by Elizabeth McCracken. Today, after our trip to the airport and as my mother went grocery shopping, I bundled off to the local used book shop. (What a find--today I discovered a copy of Monstrous Regiment of Women, which I would have bought for the pure irony of finding a Laurie R. King in a booksale if I had more money.) In the (poorly-organized) stacks I usually find abandoned Agatha Christies and PD Jameses, which I buy and hardly ever read (not that I don’t intend to), as well as anthologies of philosophers’ works. I owe that booksale my Nietzche reader, and today, a surprising find--Sartre's No Exit and Other Plays. Today I also found The Sound and the Fury and an anthology of plays by Bertolt Brecht. All three purchases amounted to 150php; being stingy with money nowadays I recognized this as an extravagant amount, but I couldn’t let myself part with these books because of the possibility that they might not be there when I return. I am already kicking myself for abandoning that battered copy of (one of the translations of one of the versions of) the tragedy of Tristan and Iseult that I saw last week and never saw again.

As the cashier was rounding up my purchases I perused the titles on the shelf behind her, and lo and behold, I found not one but two, hardly-damaged copies of Elizabeth McCracken’s The Giant’s House.

One of my most cherished possessions is my List. It’s the list that I carry around in my head (and in my hard drive) of all the books that I want to read--no, actually, to purchase, since just reading books from the library makes me feel as though I am touching a promiscuous thing, a package not married to a purchaser, an infidel book. I like books that are my own, whether used or not. And while I do buy books on impulse I keep a list in my head. The list, one might be surprised to know, is actually rather short--mostly taken up by boring treatises on Sherlock Holmes and Hawking/Penrose physics and all the titles I don’t already have by Rex Stout, Dorothy L. Sayers, Evelyn Waugh, Terry Pratchett, Nick Joaquin and PD James. Sometimes I see random quotations from books and I feel compelled to include the books in the List. The Giant’s House is one of those books; years ago I read a summary of it, and a brief quotation: “I don’t dream of someone who understands me immediately, who seems to have known me my whole life, who says, I know, me too. I want someone keen to learn my own strange organization, amazed at what’s revealed; someone who asks, and then what, and then what?” After reading that almost-trite-but-not-quite excerpt and the brief summary I was convinced that at some point in my life I had to read this, this incredibly unlikely and promisingly bittersweet pseudo-romance (But I do feel like a traitor, using that description of “pseudo” when I’ve just finished reading it) between a misanthropic librarian and the tallest boy (man? How does one know the difference, really?) in the world.

My mother humoured me and bought the book, despite the fact that it cost 110php (terribly extravagant for a booksale purchase). I wasn’t disappointed. In the past year I’ve given up on what people now commonly call “novels”; mostly I’ve been reading a lot of farce (Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, Wodehouse even), a lot of chemistry with some physics on the side, even an encyclical from the Pope, but I found that I’d grown tired of the sentimental claptrap that seems to permeate even the most respected contemporary novels. I’m tired of the blurbs “compelling” and “powerful” and “tour de force” (this last because it hardly ever is true). So I did feel some trepidation upon picking up GIANT. Now, however, I am surprised and happy to report that Elizabeth McCracken has restored my faith in the contemporary novelist. It’s not a perfect book, but it comes close, it comes close. It’s incredible--in the way that Sylvia Plath made insanity seem almost an everyday experience, something a reader could walk through as though it were as simple and accessible as going to the movies or eating or breathing, Elizabeth McCracken makes the experience of loving a child, a giant, a freak, something more than believable, far more than accessible.

And the flow--how to describe the flow? The writing itself is so fluid, the transitions so very easy, that the reader feels the years bleed into one another, into one a tapestry of feeling and experience. I couldn’t put it down, and this I mean almost literally. I needed to let go of it for the few hours it took to get to church, hear evening mass then come home. But other than that, no separation. This morning at ten am I finished (finally; I’ve been putting it off for days) The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and I thought one book a day would be enough—but then eight or so hours after buying GIANT I finished that as well.

I can’t describe it enough. I know most people wouldn’t feel as passionately for the book as I do, but it’s like I know this rather than believe it. There’s a part of me for whom the idea of anyone not completely relating to misanthropic, pathetic, unhappy, facetious Peggy is inconceivable.

(Taken out of context, the quotations in this entry seem almost trite. But… oh well, there is nothing I can really say to convince the reader that they’re not. The reader would have to meet James--eight-foot-four, kind, dying James--for themselves, to be convinced of that. )

“Every day my heart was broken newly, more efficiently.”
2.24am

Dancing Shoes

This evening, in between bouts of working on our group thesis, I want to burden my few but dedicated readers (Hi mom!) with a book review.

On my birthday, my mom and I finally did something we've been longing to do forever: to relive that scene in You've Got Mail, when Meg Ryan's Kathleen Kelly, feeling bereft because her bookstore shut down, wanders into the competition's store, Fox Books. She sits in the children's section and watches the customers move around in this "homogenize-the-world mochaccino land"--this airconditioned monster of a bookstore--so different from her quaint little shop, which was "valuable, but small" (a metaphor for her life, really). She hears a customer ask a salesperson:

"Do you have the Shoe Books?"

She continues, "My friend told me my daughter has to read the Shoe Books."

The salesperson is obviously clueless, so Meg Ryan, half in tears, butts in: "Noel Streatfeild. [...] Noel Streatfeild wrote Skating Shoes, and Ballet Shoes, and Dancing Shoes... I'd start with Ballet Shoes first, it's my favorite. Though Skating Shoes is completely wonderful--" (and here her voice breaks) "--but it's out of print."

So my mom and I, with a sense of schoolgirl mischief not befitting our respective ages, wandered into Fully Booked and asked the girl in Customer's service: "Do you have the shoe books?"

Well, after a few faux pas (she bought us a collection of fashion books on SHOES. As my generation likes to say... FAIL!), she presented us with this book:

My mom and I were both a little stunned--we never expected the store to actually have any of the Shoe Books--and so, after the fuss we'd both made and the salesperson's repeated trips to the shelves, we both felt a little forced into buying the book. Not that we weren't excited. Kathleen Kelly, we knew, had "excellent taste--she's famous for it"--so we had pretty high expectations.

They weren't disappointed. This is hard to believe about a children's book, but I never knew what to expect next. In the story, two girls--Rachel and her adopted sister Hilary--are sent to live with their Aunt Cora and Uncle Tom after the death of their mother. Aunt Cora is the famous Mrs Wintle, who runs a dancing school and produces row upon row of Wintle's Wonders, little girls who find jobs as dancers for shows, musicals, troupes, you name it. It ought to be the perfect fit for Hilary, who's a dancer who was being groomed to go to the Royal Academy of Ballet, but Rachel (who isn't a dancer herself--not at all!) knows that what Mrs Wintle teaches is the wrong kind of dancing! How will she ever arrange for Hilary to get to go to the Royal Academy, and how will she avoid becoming a Wintle's Wonder herself?

Children's books, we all know, tend to be a bit one-dimensional on the character front. Usually rather plain characters are dressed up with capabilities or super powers and thrust into a wonderful plot. (The first Harry Potter book comes to mind. Harry himself, if we're to trust the narrator, has the personality of a paper bag--it's his situation that gains our sympathy; Dumbledore is all good, and Petunia and Vernon are all bad.) Noel Streatfeild reminds me of Diana Wynne Jones' better books, because each character has a set of flaws and perfections. Rachel and Hilary are not all goodness and sweetness, though you love them because they are really a figure of sympathy; Rachel can be headstrong and stubborn and self-centered, while Hilary can be spectacularly lazy and self-centered too.

The adults--Cora Wintle, Uncle Tom, Pursey who is like a matron figure, Mrs Storm who runs the classroom and gives the lessons--are written solidly and beautifully; Cora Wintle whose devotion to her daughter Dulcie makes her pretty awful, but at the same time sympathetic; Uncle Tom, who may be praised for the way he handles Rachel and Hilary with affection and genuine respect, but who may be faulted for the poor way that he's bringing up his spoiled daughter, queen of Mrs Wintle's school, Dulcie; Pursey, who listens to Rachel and Hilary and who loves them, but who never really takes a firm stand on anything; and Mrs Storm, who loves Rachel but who doesn't understand dancing well enough to know why her ambition is what it is. You just want so much for Rachel and Hilary to be loved and for their dreams to be supported, and sometimes you don't get that consolation because the adults can be sympathetic in this aspect and completely obtuse the next, but these little disappointments are what make the book realistic and substantial. You know, like real life.

I would love to read the other Shoe Books. Including Skating Shoes though, as Kathleen Kelly says with a catch in her throat, "It's out of print!"

Galileo's Daughter

I've just finished Dava Sobel's book, Galileo's aughter.


The book is just so much better than I ever expected--now it's my favorite nonfiction book, in a tie with St Therese of Lisieux's Story of a Soul. I want my own copy. I just stumbled upon this one when Carmela, one of my friends who used to stay in Manila a few years ago but who got reassigned to Cebu, was in our center for a day, during Pentecost. She wanted me to pass the book on to Tina, who had lent her the book a long time ago, but I saw the cover and the summary and couldn't put it down. I'm usually not very interested in Italian history, and even less interested in the dealings of "great men" like Galileo. But the moment that I read that the daughter in question was a nun in a convent--was in fact a "Poor Clare" after the spirit of St. Francis and the rule of St. Clare--I guess I started to think that there was so much more to a man like him than I thought. 

In my head Galileo was this man who thumbed his nose at the Church (though I admit that the Inquisition at the time had made a very great mistake); the book made me realize that this wasn't what happened at all.  

Galileo was a faithful Catholic his whole life--before, during, and after his trial. Descriptions of pilgrimages he made to Loreto for the sake of his health, showing his great devotion to Our Lady, made me smile; seeing how he had to ask to be allowed to wander out for Mass during Easter in Florence, while he was still under house arrest, made me shake my head in shame. The mundane details revealed by his daughter's letters to him--the collars he sent to be starched and the citrus fruits he sent to be candied, and the presents and trinkets he sent along to his daughter, Suor Maria Celeste--made me fall in love with the story even more; it almost feels like someone made this all up, as though the story is too rich and beautiful to be true.  

In the end I know more about Galileo's brilliance than I ever wanted to know--the man seemed to run on curiosity, and seemed to want to study every possible subject under the sun (except comets), and he made valuable contributions to so many new sciences--but what sticks with me the most is the impression I have of him as a sweet, loving Father, at least to Suor Maria Celeste; the other daughter is obscured by the lack of any surviving letters or references about her. He might have been an intellectual giant, but like all men he was immersed in the details of daily living--the plants in the garden, his own bodily illnesses, the search for a partridge to send to his daughter for the sake of a sick nun, the expenses of his oldest son.  

I think of old, blind Galileo in those last few years at Arcetri, working and talking to his new companion Vincenzio Viviani and perhaps to Evangelista Torricelli, all the while missing his eldest daughter with a constancy like the pumping of blood, like heartbeats. I don't think I would have been far off the mark. But it's sweeter to think of him as he was, when he was still allowed to wander outside the house and to walk the short distance between his house at Arcetri and the convent of San Mateo, where his daughter sat waiting for a visit while mending an apron or tending to the sick.  

Requiescant in pace!