OPENNESS IN LITERATURE
is a two-way highway
When you say you have opened the book, this is your first encounter with openness in literature. Well, it’s just a convenient pun but sounds true. Though to open yourself to the world of books, of new knowledge and emotions, you must simultaneously open your mind.
Yet there’s another dimension of openness in literature – viewed from the writers’ perspective. It’s up to them how they actually practice openness in their works or decide to lurk in the shadows. Out of curiosity I have googled the attributes applied to the modern concepts of openness and was astound by their rather brutal denominations: radical, outrageous, encouraging. This, in fact, sounds menacing and frightens me more than attracts, and therefore, call me a boomer, but when I start reading a book I look for what I would define as a humble openness.
Jhumpa Lahiri // photo: Celeste Sloman, NYT
Era soaking in written wisdom in the middle of the Alps.
I mean “humble” in the best positive terms as simple, sincere, relatable, interpersonally dear and comprehensively interactive. To vindicate myself, I must admit I am truly addicted to Vernon Subutex by Virginie Despentes and its perverse openness, but how many detours you could bear in a month? Moreover, I think that the most difficult thing is to keep it simple, therefore to dig up a shine-bright-like-a-diamond literary masterpiece requires a lot more than a bit of luck. But if you keep reading, you get lucky once in a while, like I did last month finding Jhumpa Lahiri’s Whereabouts. This novel is a perfect example of how certain omissions and things unsaid might paradoxically open up the depth of one’s life.
Lahiri writes a story without a story. It centers around an unnamed woman presumably in her forties in an unnamed city. She lives alone, without family, and has occasional relations only with a few friends who also remain nameless in the novel. Throughout the book the reader lives in this woman’s head and hears her daily thoughts, as she marches the streets, visits a grocery shop or buys tickets to the theatre. Those fragments of a lonely life resemble the captures of the moments like photographs and postcards do. There’s virtually nothing going on, except a continuous flow of thoughts in the head of the narrator. But thanks to it, the reader becomes aware of the narrator’s character, her habits, attitude and her desires.
It’s not that plotless idea that is the most compelling but the language itself. It is so simple and universal that seems almost impossible to be considered of a high literary value. Though, in fact, it creates an opposite effect. By avoiding sophistication in language, Lahiri touches the very essence of a human life, naked, unpampered and vulnerable. Because any whereabouts are just generic add-ons you see endlessly floating every day without any meaning or impact.
On the other hand, a thorough research on your chosen subject displayed openly to the world in full detail might achieve a similar result and fully engage the reader like Lisa Taddeo‘s Three Women. The author has documented her communication with three American women over the course of eight years, which then she constructed into three vivid narratives conveying „vital truths about women and desire.“ Desire to love and to be loved.
Despite being a work of nonfiction, the book relies on a figurative stories with many genuine metaphors told from those three women‘s perspective but not in the first person. Moreover, the pages are full of descriptions of sex scenes that Maggie, Lina and Sloane were involved in by fulfilling their dream or at least the notion of it. However, Three Women is not only a sexually entertaining documentary proving the ordinary women to have extraordinary desires. The book also demonstrates how desires might complete your life or shatter it to pieces.
Each book is a proof that openness has many forms and comes in different sizes, and only the writer is to decide on the right dosage. But even the most complicated or obscure read might turn into a straightforward revelation, if you, my dearest reader, never stop being open-minded. Remember, the openness highway in literature is always going two-ways – your‘s and the writer‘s. So make it happen and have a happy reading clash!
Literary Yours,
Lisa Taddeo // photo: Rii Schroer (Eyevine/Redux)
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