A Fair Maiden and a King

I just finished reading A Fair Maiden by Joyce Carol Oates, who continues to be one of my favorite authors. I'm convinced she is not of this earth. Her ghostly photograph haunts the book jacket with eyes that stare out from another century. And I wonder if she is a creature who sleeps. I don't know if there has ever existed an author so prolific or one so adept at being able to write from the inside of her characters--be it a girl of sixteen or a man in his late sixties who is obsessed by her.

This is not a book review. Although like most of her stories, A Fair Maiden captivated me by the middle of the first page. It's Joyce's magic--her ability to hypnotize us into surrendering to her stories. And it's a willing surrender. Her characters leap off the page. They smile and breathe and moan. We feel their sweat, their chills, their sexuality. We come to know them. They are real, so real in fact because we recognize their thoughts, their perceptions. They are our thoughts, our mothers' thoughts, the boys we were attracted to in high school's thoughts. It's as if each of Joyce's books is personalized to speak to something specific in each one of us. And yet it is the same book we hold in our hands that is read by millions of others. How does she do that?

All these people that speak through Joyce. As if she is a medium, a transmitter of lives that make themselves known through her stories. As if she is the purveyor of souls--from now and before.

In A Fair Maiden, what could so easily be construed as 'sick, perverted, unlawful' is instead something incredibly beautiful. It is a love story, in the mode of a fairytale, a story of old. Where a fair maiden and a beloved king interact in a storybook house to the backdrop of the sea and ocean birds. Where soul mates, art, and love intertwine in the rich fabric of something resembling a dream. And it all happens in New Jersey.

The book that is your soul

A new book, or rather an old one that has been stored away in a bank vault in Switzerland, is soon to make its appearance in the public marketplace. It's Jung's Red Book. The review in the New York Times is long and fascinating, and is less a review than the story around the book itself and its publication.

I'm only halfway though the review and found this passage particularly interesting. It is an excerpt from something written by one of Jung's patients. It was Jung's advice to her for how to deal with some of the more frightening things that went on in the far recesses of her mind:

“I should advise you to put it all down as beautifully as you can — in some beautifully bound book,” Jung instructed. “It will seem as if you were making the visions banal — but then you need to do that — then you are freed from the power of them. . . . Then when these things are in some precious book you can go to the book & turn over the pages & for you it will be your church — your cathedral — the silent places of your spirit where you will find renewal. If anyone tells you that it is morbid or neurotic and you listen to them — then you will lose your soul — for in that book is your soul.”

book review--the road

finding the words to describe the experience of reading Cormac McCarthy's the road is challenging, to say the least. because i find myself wanting to get into the same kind of rhythmic/hypnotic movement that captures you on the first page of the book and takes you through the story. you're a willing traveler, because it's more than a story; it's a vision. an astonishing vision of a world that is potentially and dangerously close. when the earth has died, when the few remaining people are scavengers with no taboos. when everything is grey and black. bleakness, smoke, decay for as far as the eye can see. and the characters--the man and the boy--are unnamed. it is only 'the man' and 'the boy.' they walk, trying desperately to walk faster than the oppression of death and surrender that pursues them. the love that is felt between the man and the boy is the purest of loves. they speak simply. so much of what they say is left unsaid, but understood nevertheless. there are no quotation marks throughout the book. and yet the reader always knows who is talking. 'okay.' 'okay.' and you know who said it first.