The Reading Corner
In her latest issue of the Reading Corner, Pam Stolpman of Trilogy Monarch Dunes has chosen three books that would seem, on the surface, to be as different as three books could possibly be. Set in Auvers, France, in the summer of 1890, Leaving Van Gogh, by Barbara Wallace, offers an imagined account of the final months of Vincent Van Gogh, as seen through the eyes of his compassionate physician, Dr. Paul Gachet. Wallace paints a revealing portrait of this famously tortured artist, whose all-consuming passion for painting was the delicate thread that tied him to life. In the words of the artist, “If I cannot paint, there must be an end to it. There is no reason for me to draw breath.” In C.E. Morgan’s All the Living, we meet Aloma, a young woman who is faced with the stark loneliness of the life she has chosen when she follows her grieving lover, Orren, to the hard-luck farm that he recently inherited. Aloma struggles to hold on to the hope invested in her love for Orren, intertwined as it is with such isolation and sheer hard work The actual moments of joy in this book are rare and subdued, and yet the reader senses the possibility of joy that is present through connection with other people. The setting of the The Patience Stone, by Atiq Rahimi, is a single room in an unnamed country, where a Muslim woman keeps vigil at the bedside of her comatose husband. What could be a time of desperation and hopelessness instead becomes a cathartic experience for “the woman,” who is able, for the first time, to “talk to him about it all, without being interrupted, without being berated.” She tells her dying husband, whom she loves deeply despite years of subjugation, her resentments, her desires and, finally, all the secrets of her life in the hope that by confiding in him in this way, she might leave the weight of her past behind her.
With settings, characters, and plots that are worlds apart, what ties these novels together is something that ties all of humankind together – the thread of hope that keeps us moving forward. This hope comes in different forms for each of us, as it does for each of the characters we meet here. It is what allows, for whatever length of time we can hold onto it, that forward movement to continue.
Please enjoy this latest selection of books from the Reading Corner.
Leaving Van Gogh
By Carol Wallace
268 pp.
In choosing the historical figure of Doctor Paul Gachet to narrate Leaving Van Gogh, Carol Wallace is able to vividly reconstruct Vincent Van Gogh’s life-long struggle between the hope infused in him by his passion for painting, and the final madness that destroyed that hope. Gachet, an accomplished though amateur painter himself, with his own studio at his home in Auvers, was one of the few physicians treating patients with mental illness at that time. He was also a true patron to a small group of painters in Paris then struggling to radically change the world of art. Pisarro, a patient and close personal friend, was the artist who facilitated the relationship between Van Gogh and Dr. Gachet, hoping Gachet might help Vincent find a tranquil setting in Auvers where he could live alone and paint, but be supervised by someone he could trust. Vincent had more than once committed himself to an asylum, fearful he might harm others in one of his “states.”
Gachet readily agreed to help Vincent find a room in Auvers, and felt an immediate affinity to Vincent and his work. He tells us, “I had no doubt at all that I could help this Vincent Van Gogh. I knew all too well that artists put a great strain on their nerves. Their perception of the world is as important as their touch with a brush or their color sense, and it is very easy to overtax this faculty. At the same time, many of them live in terrible conditions, as Vincent had evidently done.” The time that marks the beginning of their friendship coincides with the last time Van Gogh would commit himself to an asylum, just weeks after a quarrel with Gaugin when it is historically accepted that Van Gogh cut off part of his own ear. He came to Gachet at his frailest but perhaps most inspired time, when he found even food and sleep to be interruptions to the canvasses he felt driven to complete. Gachet saw to it that Vincent ate regularly, and he treated him homeopathically with calming herbal remedies. That Van Gogh was happy in Auvers is evidenced by his now well known work from those months, dominated by the myriad yellows of the sun draping itself over the hillsides and fields of wheat in the south of France.
Gachet understood how Van Gogh felt when he suddenly lost the hope that made it possible for him to paint. He, too, had felt stabs of black despair since his wife’s death. Blanche had died of consumption, an agonizing death making every breath a torture. She confided in Gachet that she had helped hasten her own mother’s death from the disease and pleaded with him to do the same for her. He could not, and was forever haunted by the memory of her final needless hours of suffering. Van Gogh’s pain, his excruciating distress, his desperate pleas for help – all of this takes Gachet back to how badly he’d failed Blanche. How Gachet balances his medical decisions in treating Van Gogh against his need to honor their friendship is drawn to a personal, profoundly human scale, and becomes the crux of this wonderfully imagined historical novel.
Excerpt:
(Gachet finds Vincent on his third day in the fields, canvas still blank):
Vincent rummages through his paints, talking to himself as he searches for the single black tube. “Ah, here we are. Black.” He squeezed a rope of darkness onto the palette beside him, the coil invading the blue, then the green. With both hands he urged every last smear of black out.
He knelt and put his right hand squarely onto his palette. He pressed down. The black oozed between his fingers and crawled across the tops of his fingers and crept up his wrist. Then he held his palm out to me. “You see, doctor? This is why you have to be so careful with black, it soon overwhelms everything. So,” he said. “That is the end of that.”
All the Living
By C.E. Morgan
199 pp.
The setting is Kentucky, 1984. Aloma, orphaned early, has followed Orren, her lover, to his family’s tobacco farm. Both are just under twenty and Orren has been recently struck by tragedy: the rest of his family has been killed in an accident, and it is completely up to him to keep the tobacco farm alive and profitable. Once at the farm he retreats into himself and working the land; Aloma knows nothing about cleaning or cooking or feeding chickens, but she learns. Her only joy and real solace, other than the physical and occasional emotional intimacy she and Orren share, is being allowed to practice on the piano of a nearby church, until it becomes clear that the unmarried pastor of that church might want and be able to offer her something her tight-lipped lover cannot. Aloma is torn; she’s angry and confused, and she has no one in whom to confess her confusion. She had “been born into a doublewide of nothing and then spent the better part of her childhood in a school at the sink end of a holler,” and this, it seems is where she’s ended up.
This is the first novel for C.E. Morgan. What makes it compelling is the language, the mix of unusual words with plainspoken ones, the cadence of the sentences. The style of Aloma’s telling makes the story read almost like a parable. All the Living takes its title from Ecclesiastes 9:3 “the hearts of all are full of evil; madness is in their hearts while they live, and after that they go to the dead. But whoever is joined with all the living has hope, for a living dog is better than a dead lion.” Though the author is not completely successful in closing the full circle in the manner of a parable, the reader is nonetheless pulled inexorably into Aloma’s story in the same way as one is pulled into some of the old Protestant hymns; haunting in equal parts with their suffering and hope.
Excerpt:
(Aloma sees the tobacco farm and house for the first time.)
She had never lived in a house and now, seeing this old listing structure before her, she was no longer sure she wanted to. The house cast no shadow in the bare noon light.
The ragged porch clung weakly to the wall of the building, its floorboards lining out from the door, their splinters gray now naked to the elements that first undressed them.
When she tested a board with one foot, the wood ached and sounded under her, but did not move. She picked her way around a mud spattered posthole digger and a length of chicken wire to reach the door, where she found a paper heart taped to the wood. The shape of the thing gave her pause. She read the note without touching it.
Aloma,
If you come when I’m gone, the tractor busted and I went to Hansonville for parts. Go on in. I will come back soon,
Orren
She looked out into the distance where, because she could not will them away or otherwise erase them from the earth, the spiny ridges of the mountains stood. She laughed a laugh without humor. All her hopes, and there they were. Had they been any closer, she’d have suffered to hear them laughing back.
The Patience Stone
By Atiq Rahimi
142 pp.
In Persian folklore, Sang-e Saboor, ‘The Patience Stone,’ is the name of a magical black stone that absorbs sins and woes and delivers those who confide in it from their suffering. As one reads this mesmerizing novel, the title, The Patience Stone, slowly reveals its meaning, ultimately forming the climax of the narrative itself.
The setting is a Middle Eastern village torn by factional violence. The narrative unfolds almost entirely in one sparsely furnished room where a man lies alive, but mortally wounded and comatose, while his wife, known to us only as “the woman,” tends him. She does every task, from monitoring his IV to bathing him, in a gentle, ritualistic way, each step of the process narrated in the same words, several times over in the story, until the written words take on the incantatory tone of a religious devotional. We meet “the woman” on the sixteenth day of her vigil, when she has the sudden revelation that now she can say and do anything to “her man” without fear. And so she pours out her love and her hate, all she has desired from him, and all he has failed to provide. Finally, thrilled by this strange deliverance, she reveals to him her most daring secret; one that would have led to her death by stoning had it ever before been revealed.
Excerpt:
(The woman, her mind now unraveling, tries desperately to recall a myth from her childhood, a story she feels has special meaning to her present state of mind and actions.)
She rests her cheek tenderly on his chest. “How strange this all is! It’s only these last three weeks that I’m finally sharing something with you. I can touch you.” She kisses him on the lips. “Now I can do anything I want with you!” She nuzzles her head into his shoulder.
“I realized since you’ve been ill, since I’ve been telling you everything that I’ve kept hidden in my heart, [that] all of this has been soothing and comforting to me. Because now your body is mine, and my secrets are yours. And that is why you’re still alive. You don’t eat, you don’t drink, and yet you’re still here! It’s a miracle. A miracle for me, and thanks to me. Your breath hangs on the telling of my secrets.” She gets to her feet and stands over him, full of grace. “Don’t worry, there is no end to my secrets.”
Before she has picked up her veil, [to go out], these words burst from her mouth: “Sang-e saboor!” She jumps. “That’s the name of the stone, sang-e saboor, the patience stone! The magic stone!” She crouches down next to the man. “Yes, you, you, you are my sang-e saboor!” She strokes his face gently, as if actually touching a precious stone. “I’m going to tell you everything, my sang-e saboor. Everything.”
To read additional book reviews…
Click here to read The Reading Corner, Issue 10.
Click here to read The Reading Corner, Issue 9.
Click here to read The Reading Corner, Issue 8.