Two Books

Melodrama warning:  This is about the two books that saved my life.

I should so not be writing a blog post right now.  It's late, and I have a lot of work to do tomorrow (and tonight, still!), but I assembled a shelfie on Dan Savage's instructions and put it on Facebook, and now I can't stop thinking about these books that saved my life, so now you're going to hear about them.

I read them both the same summer, when I was living in Thessaloniki and ostensibly doing research on the relationship between Greek Jews and Greek Christians during the early 20th century.  That research ended up requiring fluency in Greek, Hebrew, and Ladino (or Judeo-Espanol), and it became clear to me quickly that I'd bitten off more than I could linguistically chew.  I spoke no Hebrew or Ladino, and my Greek was conversational at best.

I still made an attempt -- I recorded some interviews (the content of which I didn't come close to understanding) and I volunteered at the Jewish History Museum, nervously translating Greek into English and probably getting a lot of it wrong.  It was hot, I was lonely, there were riots, and I was depressed.

I was also desperate for books in English.  I found one lonely Terry Pratchett in the international bookstore.  Because it was the summer that the fifth Harry Potter came out, I also had a semi-embarrassing kerfluffle involving a) Amazon UK, b) the Greek postal service, and c) my inherent impatience and distrust of both those entities, which ended in my reception of not one, not two, but THREE copies of said volume, not including the one that was delivered to my parents' house in Ohio.

But let's face it, it only takes about four or five hours to read a Harry Potter book, and a Terry Pratchett is no different.  I was in Thessaloniki for two months.  I needed more.

The first book I read that saved my life was Cannery Row.  My father had sent it with me to Greece, along with the Log from the Sea of Cortez.  I know it's one of Steinbeck's shorter works and often  dismissed as fluff, but for me it's as real as it gets:  Mack and the boys, spinning in their axis; Our Father, who Art in Nature; the poem, the stink, the grating noise, the dream.  His sentences swirled me out of the disgustingness of my sweaty boarding house room, away from my twin bed and mini-fridge and the fact that the only meal I'd eaten for three days was Honey Nut Cheerios (breakfast and lunch and dinner and breakfast and lunch and dinner and breakfast and lunch). 

I felt a kinship with Mack, with Doc, with Hazel (a grokking, even, if you want to talk like Heinlein).  Cannery Row -- the book, not the place, though that too, I guess -- felt like it had existed in my bones before I'd even read it, and when I did, I saw my roots spreading through the pages, anchoring my body to the world, to my family, even to the stinking, sweaty air outside my window.  I felt real again.

The second book was Franny and Zooey.  (I know.  For a feminist advocating for equity, it's a little screwed up that my two favorite books are by dead white guys.)  I bought that one at the same international bookstore at which I'd found the Pratchett; in fact, they'd been sitting side by side on the lonely little English language shelf.  The last time I'd been in Greece, when I was eighteen, a fellow student had harassed me to read Franny and Zooey, so of course I hadn't wanted to.  This time, it was Salinger or Nora Roberts, so Salinger it would be.

I still can't describe what I found so moving about Franny and Zooey.  I mean, there's the obvious -- Zooey is kind of the ultimate boy you really want to date but REALLY shouldn't, the one who calls you buddy and holds forth rather than converses and looks like the blue-eyed half Jewish, half Irish Mohican scout who dies in your arms at the roulette table in Monte Carlo.  I mean, who wouldn't fall in love with Zooey Glass?  Certainly I did.

But while I loved Zooey in that hopeless fictional character way that you love when you're a reader, it was Franny that I identified with.  At first, she frustrated me.  She was having a breakdown, and she didn't even seem to know why.  Her reasons were idiotic, inadequate.  How dare she not appreciate how good she had it?

But then I finished the book, and for some reason -- again, stretched out on my twin bed in the heat of midday -- I immediately flipped back to the beginning, and continued to read.

This time, I wasn't as angry at Franny.  Something at the end of the book -- something about Seymour's fat lady, or Zooey with a handkerchief on his head as he talked to Franny on the phone, or Bessie's kimono, or something -- had made me more willing to read her without judging her.  The same thing had made me feel that against all odds, it was all right.  Everything was going to be okay.  I was going to be okay.

I read that book three times in a row that first afternoon, and twice more the next day.  During the days that followed, I continued to reread it, taking it with me wherever I went. 

Through those two books, I'd somehow become rooted in the world again, as well as rooted in myself.  And now those books are as much a part of me as my bones, my synapses, my atomic structure.  That's how books work -- the good ones, anyway.

I gave my kids a reading in which was written the following:  Literature doesn't disappear once we consume it.  Literature accretes.  And thank heavens for that.