I have read Tayeb Salih's novel, Season of Migration to the North, more times than any other non-children's book - four or five times by my last count. I first read it in college (it may constitute my only academic take-away from those years), and my ardor was instantaneous.
In a sense, my devotion to Season of Migration to the North is odd because, even now, my understanding of the story is limited. But from the beginning, I grasped that Season of Migration to the North was a book to be read when resiliency was needed, and that its author, Tayeb Salih, was a person of immense wisdom and deep understanding of human behavior and society. That I never met him (he died last year) is one of the few regrets of my life.
Season of Migration to the North recounts the story of a young man (unnamed) who returns from studying in London to his native Sudan, where he takes a job as a civil servant in the newly-independent country's Ministry of Education. On a trip to the remote village in which he was raised, he meets a newcomer to the village - Mustafa Sa'eed - who has a mysterious past.
Like the young narrator, Mustafa Sa'eed also studied in London and lived there for 30 years, a sojourn that culminated in tragedy and imprisonment. After his release from prison, Mustafa Sa'eed returns to Sudan, where he settles down to the life of a farmer and marries a local woman, Hosna. Confiding part of his backstory to the young narrator when they first meet, Mustafa Sa'eed soon dies and entrusts guardianship of his wife and sons to the young narrator.
Some years later an elderly man, Wad Rayyes, in the village decides that he wants to marry Hosna. The young narrator is called upon to act - by Wad Rayyes, who wants the narrator to convince Hosna to marry him; by Hosna, who wants the narrator to marry her so that she can be protected from suitors; by the narrator himself, who is in love with Hosna.
Only after unearthing a more comprehensive version of Mustafa Sa'eed backstory than had been originally disclosed is the young narrator able to act. The choice he makes is simultaneously inadequate to the demands of the situation and momentous, a polarity that Salih urges us to accept and embrace as implicit in the human condition.
Season of Migration to the North unfolds non-chronologically and impressionistically, allowing its story to emerge through juxtaposition of memories, conversations and scribbles. From Salih's expert (and concise - the novel is a mere 169 pages) use of this technique, a kind of magic results. The book is a page-turner and a prose poem, an analysis of all the major power dynamics of modern times (East/West, male/female, black/white, Christian/Muslim), as well as an affirmation of the human capacity to reduce such dynamics to irrelevancies. Symbolically reenacting the confrontation of cultures wrought by colonialism, Season also contains stunning depictions of the destructive potential in sexual passion between individuals. The novel additionally features some of the most haunting descriptions and quotable phrases I have read (in Denys Johnson-Davies' superb translation).
To this list of achievements, add another: Season's power is so visceral that it compels action. "[H]alfway between north and south . . . . unable to continue, unable to return," the novel's narrator rejects paralysis and embraces volition. (p. 167.) This reader has never been able to read the book without doing the same.
For this reason, Season of Migration to the North is indispensable. I have a copy with me anywhere I live, and I am confident that - given the life span - I will yet read it many more times.
Opening Jeanette Winterson's Weight, the first of many prefatory pages was about the series, The Myths, of which Weight - a refashioning of the myth of Atlas - is a part:
Myths are universal and timeless stories that reflect and shape our lives - they explore our desires, our fears, our longings, and provide narratives that remind us what it means to be human.
Who could argue? But as a description of a series of modern retellings ancient myths, the statement fails in its explanatory purpose: if the very power of myths is their enduring relevance, why commission their retelling, as opposed to returning to the originals?
In Winterson's Introduction, the third prefatory passage in the book (by the Intro, I was antsy for her to get started already), Winterson attempts an answer:
My work is full of Cover Versions. I like to take stories we think we know and record them differently. In the re-telling comes a new emphasis or bias, and the new arrangement of the key elements demands that fresh material be injected into the existing texts.
Weight, p. xviii.
Retelling stories is a common impulse. Shakespeare (who used commonly available plots) did it; Tom Stoppard returned the favor in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead to fantastic comic effect; and other examples across high and low fiction abound, from Mario Vargas Llosa's The Bad Girl to Anita Diamant's The Red Tent.
But a new emphasis or bias doesn't necessarily deepen the literary (as opposed to sociological, historical, anthropological or psychological) value of the work; and an injection of fresh material doesn't necessarily enhance the old story line. New for the sake of being new is as gratuitous as the "[r]eality TV or the kind of plodding fiction that only works as low-grade documentary" that Winterson condemns in her Intro (p. xix).
In the case of Weight, Winterson ends up aping that of which she claims to disapprove. After calling herself a "writer . . . who believes in the power of story telling for its mythic and not its explanatory qualities" (p. xx), she litters her retold myth with explanations:
Autobiography is not important. Authenticity is important. . . . I
believe there is always exposure, vulnerability, in the writing
process, which is not say it is either confessional or memoir. Simply,
it is real.
p xix. And:
When I was born my mother gave me away to a stranger. I had no say in that. It was her decision my fate.
Later, my adopted mother rejected me too. And told me I was none of her, which was true.
Having no one to carry me, I learned to carry myself.
My girlfriend says I have an Atlas complex.
p. 97. And:
I am good at walking away. Rejection teaches you how to reject. I left my hometown, left my parents, left my life. I made a home and a life elsewhere, more than once. I stayed on the run.
p. 98. And:
That's why I write fiction - so that I can keep telling the story. I return to problems I can't solve, not because I'm an idiot, but because the real problems can't be solved. . . . The more we see, the more we discover there is to see.
p. 137.
Save it for counseling, Jeanette! This irrelevant content is the same kind of "'true life' account[] that occup[ies] the space where imagination used to sit" that she criticizes, "explanatory" rather than "mythic" writing. Coming on the heels of all her protesting against such dross, her own "mythic" contribution seems pretentious.
In Weight, Winterson's feather-light achievement is to illustrate, not the "universal" and "timeless" aspects of the myth, but the self-absorbed, victim-centric obsessions of the moment. For an "explor[ation of] our desires, our fears, our longings, and . . . narratives that remind us what it means to be human," read the Greeks.
If I'd been allowed to choose the title for Claudia Roth Pierpont's book, Passionate Minds: Women Rewriting the World, I might have selected, The Arduous Lives of Women Writers: Failure, Imbalance and For What? In her selection of essays, originally written for The New Yorker, about twelve women writers, Pierpont depicts an ambition - being a writer - so remote from feasibility that none of the women under examination have been able to achieve it without gross and debilitating sacrifices.
Of course, everyone knows that being a women writer makes for a hateful life - between the constant rejection, poverty, needing the room of one's own, dying of Addison's disease and all that, it could hardly be otherwise. But I forget. The way my mind works, I'm liable to connect my languishing in the purgatory of yet-to-be-published with the general pattern of unfairness and injustice in my life - another of the never-ending side-effects of having been less preferred to my obviously inferior brother - instead of, like, the normal state of affairs. Pierpont's book was that "knock knock" message we all need at various times in our lives: hello, dumbass, what you're attempting is so hard that geniuses can't do it without suffering.
Which is not to say that Pierpont's book is solely - or even primarily - about geniuses. Indeed, one of the most fascinating aspects of her book is the number of hacks she profiles. Pierpont can scarcely veil her disdain of
Anaïs Nin's writing ("For the reader able to escape the solitary confinement of these endless pages [of Nin's Diary] through the mere act of closing a book - such a simple deliverance - relief is dulled only by a shuddering pity for the woman who lived all her days trapped inside." (p. 79)). For Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, Pierpont reserves the terms "vulgar," "blatant, commercial," and "blundering colossus." (p. 130-131.) Pierpont makes no claims for Ayn Rand's work beyond Rand's admission of writing "propaganda." (p. 200.) Talentless (or talent-limited) dreamers, no less than the geniuses, suffer for the ambition of making their living from their writing.
But the suffering is extreme for such a minor crime. Zora Neale Hurston, the writer in this collection with whom I identify most closely - and whose fate I think most likely to be a foreshadowing of my own - worked as a maid in her old age and died in a welfare home, a lonely end that the critic Darwin Tuner wrote was "eccentric but perhaps appropriate" - so deeply was Hurston misunderstood.
This unhappiness that, without exception, characterizes the lives and careers of Pierpont's passionate subjects reminded me of an article Malcolm Gladwell wrote about late blooming geniuses. Largely a book report on David W. Galenson's Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity, Gladwell's article contains this gem: "This is the final lesson of the late bloomer: his or her success is highly contingent on the efforts of others," whereupon Gladwell details the support provided by the patrons of Cezanne and (less established, but still warranting the label "late blooming genius" in Gladwell's inventory) Ben Folds. In other words, artists who have a long development period need support if they're going to make it.
Guess what the women writers of Passionate Minds lacked?
Whether support would have made a self-destroyer like Mary McCarthy or a battle-ax like Mae West happy is an open question; my vote is "no." (Astonishing levels of support did seemingly little to improve Cezanne's happiness quotient.) Still, support might have enabled these women and others - Marina Tsvetaeva, Doris Lessing, Eudora Welty and, of course, Hurston - to succeed more readily and more sustainably; and both the support and the success - one could easily imagine - would have improved their lives.
This problem of support - or lack thereof - seems to be what, in the end, makes realization of the ambition of being a woman writer so difficult. Whether a woman has to marry into the support (prostitution), rely on her family (manipulation, co-dependency), or work another job (exhaustion, distraction, no time for writing), finding the money to support her writing is so miserable a hustle that, among Pierpont's twelve subjects, not one survived it on any but the most abject and usurious terms.
As Pierpont sums up the situation, "These are lives in which success is hard won, retreat and even breakdown are common, love is difficult, and children are nearly impossible, lives in which all that is ever certain is that books and plays and poems are being written." (p. xiii.) The sacrifices are so great, and the rewards so meager and long-coming, that the effort doesn't look - even to one engaged in the attempt - to be worth it; and yet the compulsion to continue remains.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry dedicated The Little Prince to Léon Werth, a Jewish, leftist, writer friend in hiding in France during WWII. "I ask children who may read this book to forgive me for dedicating it to a grown-up," writes Saint-Exupéry. "I have a[n] . . . excuse," he continues. "This grown-up lives in France, where he is cold and hungry. He needs a lot of consoling."
Why The Little Prince would console anyone is an interesting question. It's a book about loneliness, exile and homelessness. The book is filled with unanswerable questions: why did the Little Prince leave the flower and his home planet? Why did the Little Prince ask for a drawing of a sheep, when what he needed was an actual sheep? Why did he need -- want -- to die? And, although on a strictly rational level, the story isn't fleshed out enough for full comprehension, on a visceral level the book's clarity is searing: the story pulsates with loneliness.
Reading The Little Prince -- for the first time, three days ago -- I ached. I didn't feel lonely reading it, but rather I remembered my own lonely childhood. My empathy for the Little Prince was the vehicle through which I could empathize with my own past self without shame, condemnation or the reflexive defensiveness that normally allows me to think of that time with a cold impassiveness. I wondered why no one had given me the book to read when I'd been a child.
Why would I have wanted to have read it as a child? Because it would've consoled me. As counter-intuitive as it might seem, a book that pulsates loneliness is balm to the lonely. You aren't alone, The Little Prince says to a child. You aren't as lonely and helpless as you were when you were a child, The Little Prince says to the political subversive in hiding underground.
But the consolations of The Little Prince go deeper than its message. The book itself is like a ritual of, if not resurrection of the dead, at least restoration of the missing. Everyone involved in The Little Prince misses someone: the pilot misses the Little Prince, the Little Prince misses the flower, Saint-Exupéry in exile in America misses Werth in hiding in France.
For Saint-Exupéry, the remedy for this pain of separation was writing. He wrote to Werth -- not just The Little Prince, but also the elegiac Letter to a Hostage. Saint-Exupéry's characters also write. The pilot, of course, "writes" The Little Prince and urges child readers to write in turn. The last line of the book is "write quickly and tell me that has returned . . ."
Writing, for Saint-Exupéry, is not merely psychologically soothing, but a means of working a physical return of the lost -- that greatest consolation of all.
I love reading novels for three reasons, primarily. The first is relief of boredom. The second is the pleasurable stimulation I experience when I'm engaged in a story. And the third is the comfort I derive from novels. Learning from Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, for example, that the contours of generation struggle have changed remarkably little since the nineteenth century made me feel wonder at the consistency of human travails throughout time and the support we can find in the written records of our forebears.
That said, I didn't expect to find comfort in novels for the irritation and insecurity occasioned by the current state of the publishing industry. The decline in reading rates, the competition from the Internet and video games, the market preference for memoirs/how-to's/biz books, the current economic downturn -- these harbingers of the death of the novel I took to be burdens I'd have to shoulder without aid from authors of an earlier era. How often I'd thought my publishing woes would be solved if only I'd been writing during the heyday of Grove Press, in the years of Max Perkins . . .
But Jane Austen set me straight. "[I]f the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard? I cannot approve of it. . . . Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body," Austen writes, taking her stand in Northanger Abbey. "Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried. From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes are almost as many as our readers."
Ah me. To be assuaged with such thorny balm -- the assurance that writing novels would be a miserable pursuit whenever I'd be born; to be comforted with the knowledge that reports of the death of the novel are greatly exaggerated -- and have been so for some two hundred years; I can only love reading novels even more.
I have read Tayeb Salih's novel, Season of Migration to the North, more times than any other non-children's book - four or five times by my last count. I first read it in college (it may constitute my only academic take-away from those years), and my ardor was instantaneous. 
