Vanity Press
Tuesday, April 27, 2010 at 02:14PM I find a particularly great thrill in those moments when your adventures—whether through some strange universal coincidence, or through a loose reading of a text—coincide almost exactly with the adventures of a fictional character in whatever book you happen to be reading at the time. It's enough to make you think that this world was created just for you, right down to the books that have been placed in it. (If I were to be diagnosed with a single disorder, it would most definitely and regretibly be solipsism.)
Today on the train I was in the middle of Mary McCarthy's The Group, reading the bit about Libby, the Vassar grad who wants to work in publishing. As I turned the page*, I came to a passage that made me smile.
This put the bee in her bonnet of talking to him about doing translations[…] Libby should use her foreign languages—particularly her Italian, having lived there—to carve a field for herself. She should offer to do a sample chapter free, then, if they liked it, translate the book, setting aside an hour a day for the purpose. The literary exercise would be good for her style, and meanwhile she would be becoming an expert—a kind of technician. Other publishers would send her Italian books to read and editors would come to her to review Italian authors; she would meet scholars and professors and become an authority. In a technological society, Harald said, it was all a question of having the right tool.
Oh, Mary. You have written me into your book, haven't you? And protected my identity by making it Italian instead of Latvian? It doesn't bode well that poor Libby's stumbling block in this ambitious career in translation comes in the form of a novel written entirely in the Sicilian dialect. What will my downfall be? Latgalian?
It wasn't just this book; yesterday on the recommendation of a friend I read Meghan Daum's 1999 essay "My Misspent Youth," and couldn't get over how many parallel lines could be drawn. That same night, maybe spurred on by some sort of warning I saw in that essay, I paid the remaining balance on my credit card.
Do we purposefully read ourselves into the story? Or does the story somehow manage to find us at the right time? Do we relate to Miss Brodie because we too are in our prime? If we had read the same book at sixteen would we have found more in common with Sandy Stranger? Do I often want to say goodbye to all that because Joan did? Or am I already on the verge of saying goodbye, and her essay is just giving me the necessary shove?
Perhaps this is not the case for those who exclusively read hard-boiled detective fiction?
*Accidentally grazing the pate of a man's head with my pinky when trying to regrasp the subway pole; you have no idea what a bizarre and disarming thing it is to touch the top of a stranger's head with your pinky until it happens to you.
© Zan McQuade. All rights reserved.
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Reader Comments (3)
I read The Group a few years back! Sarah N. gave it to me for Christmas. I also have MD's book of essays and read them before I moved to New York. I always think about all that talk of NPR pledging for the tote bag.
I think I'm always reading myself into the story, like some tuning fork looking for resonance... or maybe it's a result of that sentimentality mentioned in MD's interview with Joan Didion...
I can be objective enough to admit that I probably carry one too many rosy misconceptions about long-term living in New York, so I hope I can have the foresight to pull the plug if/when that time comes...
Sarah - Ms. N has good recommendations; she recommended The Group to me as well. I trust her implicitly from now on. And is it strange that I'd never heard of Meghan Daum before yesterday? And that she went to Vassar? How was I not informed?
Sam - You should definitely stay positive! I still love New York for a lot of things, I just know I'm getting closer to being ready to leave it. I think that time never comes for some people. And I love image of you as a tuning fork... if I could draw like you do, that would be in my sketchpad.