A Certain Slant of Light

As a child, one often has one’s own names for favorite books and movies. In my mind, Barbara Cooney’s Miss Rumphius was The Lupine Lady, An American Tail was Fievel (and A Land Before Time was of course Littlefoot), and Jostein Gaarder’s The Christmas Mystery was The Magic Advent Calendar.

At the beginning of the book, young Joachim finds a handmade advent calendar in the bookstore. The owner lets him have it for free, and when Joachim opens the first door, a thin slip of paper falls out, beginning the story of a little girl named Elisabet who follows a stuffed lamb out of a department store because she wants to pet its fleece.

Thus Elisabet begins a pilgrimage: she is running backwards in time and southeast through space, picking up angels and shepherds and wise men along the way as they all travel, to quote the shepherd Joshua, “To Bethlehem! To Bethlehem!” They are going to witness the birth of the baby Jesus.

As Joachim reads each installment, he becomes convinced that the advent calendar is indeed enchanted: each time he opens a door and reads another installment, he finds new details in the picture on the advent calendar itself. Surely they’re appearing as he meets the characters in the story? As a child I believed this just as much as Joachim, and also loved the suggestion that the story in the advent calendar was true or at least built on truth—that not only John the in-book creator of the calendar, but Jostein Gaarder himself had discovered a series of unusually similar angel encounters throughout history and woven them into a story.

(This was around the same age I had a so-called nonfiction book called The Flight of the Reindeer, which had a serious science-y discussion of the aerodynamics of reindeer antlers which enabled them to fly. Did I believe this? No, not exactly, but the idea so enchanted me that I also didn’t exactly not believe.)

As an adult, I am fairly sure that the picture on the magic advent calendar is simply an example of the magic of art, where the longer you look at a picture the more details you see. I’ve also relinquished the idea that Gaarder built the story from a series of historical angel tales featuring angel processions that all mysteriously included sheep and Wise Men and a little blonde girl.

But in recompense, I’ve come to a greater appreciation of Gaarder’s artistry in constructing a story that functions so perfectly as an advent calendar: it’s exactly 24 chapters long and it really does work best if you read one chapter each day of advent, although it’s hard to stop at the end of each chapter! And I’ve learned a greater appreciation for Elizabeth Rokkan’s work as a translator. I often find books in translation a bit stiff, but this one is supple and fluid, and although I can’t compare it to the original Norwegian, Rokkan has created a lovely storybook rhythm with certain repeated phrases and ideas: Joshua’s aforementioned “To Bethlehem! To Bethlehem!”, or the idea that beautiful things like flowers are “part of the glory of heaven strayed down to earth.”

It also occurred to me for the first time on this reread that this book is extremely Christian. Since our heroes are literally going on pilgrimage to Bethlehem to see the birth of the baby Jesus, one might reasonably ask how I failed to notice. Some of this can probably be chalked up to the general dimness of childhood, but I think part of this also lies in the way the story is told: as a wonder-tale, a magical adventure, which offers postulates about how things work in its magical universe but doesn’t demand that you accept them as general truths in the workday world. It would like the reader to consider that perhaps we as a species should stop killing each other, but also it just wants to tell a fun story about a little girl chasing a runaway toy lamb back through time.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Who just finished Kristin Lavransdatter? ME! *spikes football* It wasn’t always an enjoyable reading experience as I read, but I’m glad to have read it now that it’s done: it gives such a rich vision of medieval Norwegian society that you could almost step into the page and drink ale in the hearth house.

This is not to say that I would go around recommending it willy-nilly, because there are also times when it is a slog (Kristin and Erlend have many variations on the same problem - and you have to give Sigrid Undset this, she comes up with MANY new variations - but it’s always the same basic problem. Erlend is reckless and irresponsible, and Kristin can neither forgive him nor break from him.

I was so close to finishing William Dean Howells’ My Literary Passions last week that it only took me about fifteen minutes to wrap it up, but I’m still sad that it’s over. His musings about the book-reading life are just so relatable! Like this comment, after he confesses to a fondness to some long-forgotten trashy novel:

“Perhaps I shall be able to whisper the readers behind my hand that I have never yet read the Aeneid of Virgil; the Georgics, yes; but the Aeneid, no. Some time, however, I expect to read it and to like it immensely. That is often the case with things that I have held aloof from indefinitely.”

Who among us doesn’t have such a book floating somewhere in our life-time reading plans?

I also finished Paul Watkins’ Stand before Your God: An American Schoolboy in England, and my days of thinking that the English boarding school system sounds like one of the worst things that people have ever voluntarily inflicted on their children are certainly coming to a middle.

What I’m Reading Now

In 1903, Jean Webster visited Italy, and like many Anglophone writers found it impossible to resist setting a novel there. (I can throw no shade; I’ve done it myself.) Webster wrote two: Jerry Junior, a light comic novel, and The Wheat Princess, which is the last book I need to read before I’ve encompassed Webster’s entire oeuvre.

So far it seems pretty solidly second-tier Webster; on par with Jerry Junior, certainly not reaching the heights of Daddy-Long-Legs or When Patty Went to College. But perhaps because it’s her final book for me, reading it has made me sad that she died so young: she has a fairly varied output (which is part of the reason the quality is so varied, probably) and who knows what new and interesting things she would have tried if she got the chance?

I’ve also begun Edward L. Ayers’ The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America, which starts with Gettysburg and will stretch, presumably, through Reconstruction. I’m still in the Gettysburg part, and so far I’m really appreciating the way that Ayers makes battles make sense - not in the sense that he gives you a blow-by-blow of who is charging where, but as an overall part of the war, how battles are shaped not only by generals but by the sheer physical facts of the terrain and equipment and the available amount of food.

In a way it reminds me of Tolstoy in War and Peace (exasperating though it is to praise Tolstoy’s Theory of History in War and Peace) - of his emphasis on the physical limitations of armies. It’s easy to say, in hindsight, that Meade ought to have cut off Lee’s retreat (just as Kutuzov ought to have cut off Napoleon’s), but the fact that this would have been militarily advantageous doesn’t change the fact that an army can reach a stage of such exhaustion that neither its horses or its men are physically capable of going fast enough to cut off another army’s retreat.

What I Plan to Read Next

It’s October, which makes it the right book to read Shirley Jackson, am I right? (All months are the right months to read Shirley Jackson, but October is even more right than most.) The Road through the Wall is the only novel of hers I haven’t read, so I’ve put a hold on it at the library.

I probably ought to read some of her short stories too (at very least “The Lottery”!), but - confession time - I very rarely read short stories. It’s funny, because I love short books (this is one of the reasons I continue to read lots of children’s books), but somehow this has not translated into an interest in short stories.

Life has gotten away from me this week and I'm not making very good time in Kristin Lavransdattar (sorry, evelyn_b!). But I have managed to make my way to chapter 5, and I am happy to report that Kristin does sort of apprentice herself to the witch, although sadly it's a very informal apprenticeship and the book seems set to move away from Possible Witchy Happenings to Kristin's impending marriage to a dude who seems perfectly fine BUT is not her childhood friend who just declared his love for her even though he's nowhere near rich enough for her parents to let him marry her.

Why would you do that, childhood friend? You're just making Kristin's life way more complicated for no reason.

Kristin has also mooted the possibility of entering a convent, which I don't think will happen, although I for one would enjoy 1,000 pages about life in a medieval Norwegian convent. But we'll see! It's hard to know anything about a book this size when you're only five chapters in.