The Night Circus — Erin Morgenstern

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Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus is really weird. The book is a series of linked vignettes, strung like a one-of-a-kind necklace from odd beginning to jarring end. The real name of the circus, which opens at dusk and closes at dawn, appears unannounced in an empty field and is colored entirely black and white,  is Le Cirque de Rêves—the circus of dreams. The entire story might be a dream—it certainly makes the point that the reality we apprehend is a construct of mind and that we can alter the dream at will or be captive of the nightmare that plays across our closed eyes when we sleep.

Near the end of the story, Morgenstern quotes Shakespeare’s Prospero; the passage would have been too instructive to include earlier in the book:

Our revels are now ended. These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits, and

Are melted into air, into thin air:

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on; and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.

How to re-cap this tale? Celia is the child of a magician who masquerades his skills as an illusionist. He trains her from age six to wage a challenge against the protégé of another magician, binding her to the wager with a silver ring that burns a permanent brand into her hand. The other magician plucks a boy, Marco, from an orphanage—apparently in late 19^th-century England orphans can be selected like groceries—and trains him in the ancient ways of magic from books. Celia is an intuitive and can manipulate matter. Marco creates fabulous structures out of formulae and spells.

The circus is the brainchild of a wealthy entrepreneur who specializes in the highly iconoclastic and throws midnight dinner parties for a select group of collaborators. None of these characters is as straightforward as they might seem. The circus arrives without warning. It seduces, delights and subverts lives. It contains the most amazing and unimaginable acts. It is unlike anything anyone has ever seen—as improbable and fascinating as the richest of dreams. Within it, lives unfold, performances astonish, magical children are born, wonders never cease. Outside the black and white striped tents and the iron perimeter fence, lives unravel, people grow old, some die, fans exchange stories and travel the world to find the circus and bask in its glow for a few nights. Celia is the illusionist of the circus, performing nightly; Marco is the assistant of the circus owner, living in London. Both are essential to keep the fantasy of the tents and performers alive.

Meanwhile Celia and Marco discover that each is the other’s competitor. They also fall in love. This is a complication that was not in the script. It will wreak havoc with the careful plans of their puppet-masters. And the contortionist and the fortuneteller have their own agendas; magicians perform acts that go horribly wrong and leave them evanescent—not gone but not quite there; a boy who climbs apple trees takes a dare to break into the circus in the daylight and changes his life. No spoilers here—it is impossible to summarize this story without telling the whole thing.

The language is mesmerizing, the premise is hypnotic; the conceits are captivating. I liked the book but I did resist the forecast forced combat that promised to end badly and I am really unfamiliar with this brand of fantasy—it’s something like an extended drug-induced hallucination from the 60s.  I would read it again to puzzle it through more diligently. The Night Circus may be the most unusual book you read any time soon. Despite, or maybe because of, its episodic construction, it has the power to hold your attention.

The Night Circus   Erin Morgenstern | Doubleday  2011

The Winter Solstice – John Matthews

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The Winter Solstice is a big book stuffed with glossy color plates and an encyclopedia’s worth of information about the origins of the solstice celebrations, Yule traditions and instructions for Yule logs, wishing trees and ceremonies, solstice animals and birds, and classic recipes for eggnog and wassail bowls.

John Matthews has written numerous books on Celtic subjects but this one is subtitled “The Sacred Traditions of Christmas” and there is a lot about the holiday we know and how influences from Druid mistletoe to Coca Cola have shaped it. Santa, with his red coat, big belly, rosy cheeks and white beard, is fairly modern image from an illustration publicized by the Coca Cola Company in its late nineteenth century advertising. The pagan Green Man is said to have challenged Gawain in Arthur’s court when Camelot traded its Druid spiritual customs for a Christian celebration. The first mention of Christmas trees comes from 1605 in Germany but the ancient Romans decorated their houses with evergreen boughs every year in early January.

You may infuse a solstice observance with symbolism from many cultures and Matthews tells you how. Mithras, a Persian deity with a life story remarkably like Christ’s, can be invoked with a golden circle or disc. Dionysus, god of wine and merriment, gets a pine cone. Holly branches and strands of ivy hark back to the folk tradition of a ritual battle between the Holly King and the Ivy Queen. The two plants, which remain green, produce bright red berries and are decorative in winter, were also part of Greek legend and represented for Christians the crown of thorns and the purity of Mary.

Matthews details the Twelve Days of Christmas with history for each day and suggested activities. But he lists as well the unique architecture of the pre-christian people who built New Grange and Stonehenge and other sacred sites aligned with the winter and summer solstice sun. An interesting tidbit is that Bronze Age and Neolithic shamans climbed down ladders into the fires and smoke of the underworld to retrieve soul bits or to discover wisdom. They were precursors of the reindeer-driven gift-giver who climbs down the chimney to reward good boys and girls with their heart’s desires.

The Winter Solstice is a better reference book than a straight-through read. I would add an index to make it easier to recover specific information without having to flip through pages. And I did find the content much more Christmas-centric than solstice-focused. But the book does link some of the older celebrations with the feast days and festivals that were layered over them. The Romans tried to remake a pagan world that revered the life-giving return of the light each year as the season turned. They may have co-opted solstice but evidence of it is still everywhere, if you know how to look.

The Winter Solstice: The Sacred Traditions of Christmas   John Matthews | Quest Books   2003

On Books and Barbarians

Books destroyed in the raid on Zuccotti Park. Photo courtesy of the Occupy Wall Street People’s Library

I was planning to muse about what it feels like to read a book a day but events derailed that idea. It seems that a free public library in a park needs to be dismantled in the dead of night by riot police and carted off by the Sanitation Department. And then, after more books are donated and some few damaged volumes are salvaged, the free library should be trashed again. Very nice. Not exactly my utopian idea about a whole city that becomes a library. Not really defensible unless we are the barbarians after all. Once upon a time I thought that marching and protesting—and even voting–could change the world. These days I read obsessively to change myself.

OWS new mobile People's Library--police won't let the books back into the park so they've taken to the streets with the protestors. Photo Courtesy of Occupy Wall Street.

As I keep on opening books and turning pages, I have discovered that I’m still tempted to abandon a book midway if it isn’t a pure joy to read. By finishing books, I find a few treasures and some memorable ideas or characters or plot twists. I still feel guilty about reading as there is so much work to do and not enough work for pay and I always think I should be marketing more, hunting for jobs to apply for (exercise in futility but guilt assuaging), doing the laundry at the dismal, overcrowded Laundromat. (Glamorous Gotham is full of romantic prewar brownstones with no laundry facilities whatsoever and none allowed in individual apartments.) Everything, it seems, could take precedence over reading a book, which must be an act of pure self-indulgence. How can reading a book be essential?

The OWS People's Library - Mid-October 2011

My answer to myself is that, in a society of barbarians, how could anything be more essential? Books capture the past, the present and the future. Books tell stories. Books create worlds. This one is slightly insupportable at the moment. So I can search for a better world, or ideas about how to make this broken world better, in every book I open. Reading is an exercise in hope. 

Reading a book a day takes time. So does blogging about the book. I spend more time than I mean to writing posts and more time than I want to loading the posts into the blog template and adding all the bits. I like the whole process, though. Immersing myself in a sea of printed words is a good feeling. I pay more attention to book news. I read more tweets from literary types. Occasionally I get the chance to interact with an actual reader about booklolly. No one ever says, How can you possibly do this? They know it’s doable. What they say is, I could never do that. And I silently substitute “would.”

Haul away all the books you like in dumpsters. Scatter the pages of books like leaves in autumn. Convince yourself, as I did, that you don’t have time to read and dash on madly in your busy lives. Or let the laundry pile up now and then, serve cereal for supper, and feed your starving soul with the rich repast of a good book. It will give you something worthwhile to talk about over the cereal. A book might be your best weapon for keeping the barbarians at bay. It might change your life. It might give you hope.

My library--part of the China section

Falling Man — Don DeLillo

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Before I started booklolly in earnest, I experimented with a few days of reading and blogging to see if I could read a book a day. It was tough but definitely doable and, being the sort of person who heads right into the thick of a guerrilla war to discover the truth about it, I created a blog and sat down to read. This book is one of the early experiments–saved it because the book is interesting and the read was relevant to its location and the day I read it. 

I grabbed Don DeLillo’s Falling Man from a display shelf at the library, thinking it would be the perfect novel to read on September 11^th. I confess to my own hardcover copy of Underworld, spine cracked but never really started due to single-parent-small-child-around-house-who-has-time-to-read-huge-books-? syndrome. It isn’t getting read for this challenge either because there aren’t enough hours in one day and DeLillo is worth reading slowly enough to savor. That said, Falling Man was probably not the best choice for 9-11.

Everyone has their story about where they were and what they were doing on that day, at that moment, and most particularly when the towers came down. I have mine. I have the futile attempt to protect a four-year-old from too much knowledge, too burning a memory of that day. I have the images—the man in a suit, clutching a briefcase and covered in white ash, trudging up Central Park West hours after, not looking, not seeing, just walking. He might have been DeLillo’s Keith, minus the glass shards and the blood.

What was ripped apart on that day was the fabric of the world we imagined we lived in. Just ripped like the old canvas of a circus tent, ripped right across your heart. The grief was sharp, personal and inexplicable—meaning I could never explain it and still can’t. Meaning certain sights will always bring tears to my eyes and shadows hover not far out of sight, ready to cast a pall. Sadness and loss are tangible things; they drain all the energy from the day and from your body. September 11^th, ten years later, spun the wheel backwards and it was as if the planes veered out of the blue into black smoke, flames and everything falling  just yesterday.

So, Falling Man. Very very beautiful and true in its detail and a potent reminder. Keith walks down the stairs, away from the buildings, out of the mushroom cloud of debris and dust, to the apartment of his estranged wife who is sure he died in the towers where he worked. In some way, he did. In the same way, Lianne stops feeling safe, moves in a dream through the streets to the emergency room, accepts the husband who reappears in her life by accident and then cannot leave. Lianne is haunted by her father’s Alzheimer’s and his refusal to watch his memory fade. Lianne’s mother is deliberately fading before her eyes. Lianne’s child, and Keith’s, Justin, is self-composed beyond his years and has his own stories about what happened on 9-11. He takes binoculars on playdates to search the skies out the window for planes.

Even those who escaped the inferno and the collapse never escaped from that moment and that day. DeLillo’s people replay their memories like an endless tape loop, revisit their own minds for what they can’t remember, don’t bother to reinvent themselves, seem incapable of moving on. There is healing from events so huge and so terrible that they stop time but this nation did not choose healing and these characters can’t find it. There is loss that saturates everything it touches and lingers in the air. Falling Man slowly collects the fragments of that day and holds them up to the light. Bits and pieces surface and fade back into the rubble of memory. Lives bob, float and swirl in the eddies. Desolation seeps into the soul and stains it forever.

9-11 was a game-changer. From that day forward we began to live in a different world. There are many ways of falling. DeLillo captures the brief angels spilled from a hundred stories up, the performance artist dangling in his suit from hotel balconies and railroad trestles, the tower survivors who walked away but did not really survive, the witness in thrall to an altered landscape, half understood. Falling Man is a beautifully wrought book and very sad. I wish I’d chosen to read it on some other day when the ghosts of loss hovered farther back and the consolation of small, normal things was not so overshadowed.    

Falling Man: A Novel   Don DeLillo | Scribner  2007

Tales of the City — Armistead Maupin

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All I can say about how I missed Tales of the City in the 1970s is that I was living in the South at the time and trying to get out. So little filtered down there—even reading Bruce Chatwin was extremely cutting edge for Florida. I would have been a solid groupie of Armistead Maupin’s book then, though, because that’s who I wanted to be—adrift and aloft in the bubble of San Francisco, up to my neck in free classes at Berkeley, discovering the world outside my sheltered niche and trying everything. I wouldn’t have lasted a week.

Maupin’s characters fare somewhat better. They mess up their messy lives chapter by chapter but they—most of them—manage to survive and evolve, inch by painful inch. And they are witty. My favorite thing about this book is the dialogue. I would be supremely happy to deliver sharp, funny repartee like Maupin’s that rattles the page like an automatic weapon. It’s part of what keeps Tales moving, although it’s part of what keeps Tales the tiniest bit tough to follow as well.

The chat is so smart and whip-like funny that I concluded it was Maupin’s own voice. Characters I wouldn’t have credited with that much wit have it in spades—more credit to them but not enough differentiation for each to have a singular voice. Every time I picked up the book again I had to rethread the needle with Mona, Connie, Candi, Michael, Mouse, Brian, Beauchamp (well, maybe not Beauchamp), Mary Ann, Prue, Oona, et al. Moral of story: read it straight through.

The book is a compilation of a newspaper series of tales, Dickensian in serialization if not in content. It deals with Mary Ann Singleton from Cleveland who escapes to San Francisco on vacation and never goes home. She ends up renting an apartment at 28 Barbary Lane, in a funky house on Russian Hill populated by a clutch of tenants from central casting.

Anna Madrigal runs the house and delivers a welcome note taped to a joint to new tenants. She has a deep dark secret that isn’t revealed in this first book in the series but it’s possible to guess at it and come fairly close. I found her the most interesting, humane and delightful character but Edgar Halcyon, wealthy businessman with caricatured society wife is very very good, too. Michael “Mouse” Tolliver lacks a truckload of self-confidence but is an extremely attentive listener and a considerate, if unemployed, roommate. A few marquee names like Liz Taylor get anonymous but unmistakable cameos.

The gay scene in San Francisco, before AIDS decimated a population and leached all the joy out of uninhibited shacking up and swanning around, is well-chronicled. The in-love-out-of-love sagas are believable, if a little exhausting finally. It’s hard work to be free-spirited, pharmaceutically-enhanced and constantly on the prowl. And Maupin’s world is a small one—these people are all connected and woven in and around each other’s lives in improbable but deliciously compelling ways.

Tales of the City spawned equally popular sequels, a musical, a TV series and a few more iterations. It was fun and a little nostalgic to read. People had so much hope then, such options for reinvention. It was a real era captured by an entertaining writer, an evanescent time that seems more like a novel someone dreamed up now that it’s gone.

Tales of the City: A Novel (P.S.)  Armistead Maupin  Harper Perennial 1994