Triangulations, by Lorine Kritzer Pergament

This volume, released in March, 2022, contains the novella Triangulations and a handful of short stories by Lorine Kritzer Pergament. The novella reveals the lives of several generations of women in one family, linked through artistic ambition, love, and tragedy. Protagonist Susie wrestles with her reluctance to have children, and as we follow her journey of learning more about her grandmother, a cousin of that generation, her own mother whom she never knew, and her sisters, we come to empathize with her hesitation. 

Pergament moves through time, sometimes inhabiting characters, sometimes viewing them through Susie’s imagination, prompted by stories her older sister is able to conjure from photographs. Their grandmother Fannie survived the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911 in New York’s Lower East Side, in a single day meeting the love of her life, and losing her best friend to the inferno. And fire continues to plague the family – Fannie’s daughter, Sylvie, suffered burns in a kitchen fire, with her baby – Susie – delivered a month early while she died from her injuries. Susie’s father won’t speak of Sylvie, and the young caretaker he soon marries, Clarisse, only came into the family after her death. She must turn to her older sister to learn more about their mother. 

Susie is a novelist, and her longtime boyfriend, Zach, who’d like to marry and start a family with her, is an up-and-coming painter. While she loves him, and cherishes their creative connection, having children is a fraught subject. The splintering of her own life renders her wary, and as she delves into the histories of her grandmother, and her grandfather’s cousin, Berta, she doubts a woman can both raise children and sustain a career. Even as she admires their accomplishments, she wonders how much more they could have done, without family demands impacting their ambitions. 

Reading Berta’s diary about living in France from the end of WWI, through Nazi occupation and into the decades beyond, Susie is struck by her predecessor’s adaptability, and her perspective. When she and her husband return to Paris after WWII, they find his optometry shop utterly smashed and burned. She writes: “Charles is despondent. He created that business from nothing, but is trying to be philosophical. We are all alive. What’s left are details.” Susie riffs on this: “We are all alive, the rest is details… Was having a child just a detail? Is being alive all that really matters?” While she appreciates the differences between Berta and Charles’ precarious situation and her own more secure one, she’s not prepared to write off the importance of her creative work as some mere “extra” – to thrive is steps beyond “we survived,” and represents more acutely her dilemma. 

Yet she also grasps the depth of Berta and Charles’ love, and how central that was to who they were. She finds resonance in Berta’s description of Charles as her “other half” – it’s how she feels about Zach. But, as he makes clear, that fundamental disagreement over having children will end their relationship. When we reach points in life where everything seems to be working, we want to make time stop. We know we can’t, but the desire to prevent change is our deepest self-deceit. Susie, recognizing this, has to abandon the version of life with Zach that fit so comfortably, and make a choice. Learning about the courageous women who preceded her, she’s better grounded to be fair to herself, and to Zach. 

Pergament writes with assurance about both the interior world of relationships and the larger sphere of events we cannot control, offering her readers plenty to ponder. 

Her short stories reveal the tensions and pitfalls in relationships. In “What Goes Up” we see a young mother at the end of her tether. In “Smell the Roses on Your Own Time” we watch a marriage unravel. “A Unique Package” surprises the best friend and confidante of a woman who has just died. And “Lost” visits the world of dementia from the inside. Pergament invests her women with humor, curiosity, and iconoclasm in contrast to the often straitlaced world they inhabit. People around them may find their behavior surprising or inappropriate, but this writer is in their corner showing why they live as they do, challenging her readers about our tendency to judge those who step outside the lines.

To order a copy of this book, visit https://publerati.com/triangulations-by-lorine-kritzer-pergament/

The Power of the Dog, a novel by Thomas Savage

This 1967 novel, recently made into a film, is truly Western, and if you don’t know what that means, this is a good place to start. Writers such as Wallace Stegner, Ernest Hemingway, Annie Proulx, Willa Cather, and John Steinbeck are quintessentially Western – and so is Thomas Savage. He draws heavily on personal experience, growing up in Idaho and Montana on ranches, observing the predominance of landscape and weather to the experiences of people living there. 

For The Power of the Dog, he creates a family, the Burbanks, wealthy cattle ranchers in Montana. The elder Burbank, whom they call The Old Gent, has retired with his wife, the Old Lady, to a hotel in Salt Lake City to escape the harsh winters and isolation of the ranch. In 1925, brothers Phil, now forty, and George, thirty-eight, are marking their twenty-fifth year of running the operation, dividing duties and still sharing their childhood bedroom. 

But they are as different as two men can be: Phil is smart, shrewd, observant, skilled – and mean. All his powers he turns to crafting the perfect cutting remark, whether to a ranch-hand late for breakfast or to any non-white person daring to elevate themselves to equal status: Jews, Indians, Mexicans, he despises them. George, on the other hand, is a little dense, a plodder, but sociable and reflexively kind, giving others the benefit of the doubt. 

Phil manages the ranch hands, the cattle, the haying operation. While he likes to spend evenings in the bunkhouse, he sets himself above the cowboys, and they know it. Otherwise, he is isolated, answering to no one, going off alone, keeping his thoughts to himself. When George marries, Phil considers the woman unsuitable, and torments her with the intention of driving her off. She is a widow with a bright effeminate teenage son, another target for Phil’s scorn and derision. 

I won’t say more about the story, just observe how insightfully written it is: "[George] knew all there was to know about love, that it’s the delight of being in the presence of the loved one.” and “Doors, doors, doors, doors; five outside doors in the house, and [Rose] knew the sound of the opening and closing of each one.” 

Phil is not without humor – he muses on parties the Old Folks hosted, always awkward affairs with guests terrified lest they blunder socially, the conversation dominated by some subject happened upon then worried to death till it was time to leave: “Phil referred to that as the Cabbage Dinner, and it was one of the last parties that the old Burbanks ever attempted. But there had been others – the Mud-Hole Dinner and the Grizzly Bear Dinner.” 

I haven’t seen Jane Campion’s movie, but I highly recommend the novel.

Drive My Car - a film review

You could call this film “Uncle Vanya in Hiroshima” in echo of Louis Malle’s “Uncle Vanya on 42nd Street” as another way of exploring Chekhov’s play about futility and despair. Ryusuke Hamaguchi doesn’t get his actor/director to Hiroshima until well into his story, but arguably he could have started with a recently-widowed man taking a job with a community theater – a two-month respite from a soured life in Tokyo. 

Hamaguchi starts, however, with the marriage of Yusuke Kafuku (Kaf-ku?) and Oto – she is a successful writer for television who gets ideas during sex, narrating them to Kafuku who later recites the stories back to her so she can write them down. One day he comes home from a cancelled flight to find her having sex with Koji Takatsuke, the popular young star of her series. He says nothing, and they are unaware of his intrusion. He quietly leaves, bottling up whatever this discovery stirs in him. 

Adding to the weight of this secret is Takatsuke’s appearance in Hiroshima to audition for a part in “Uncle Vanya.” Everyone at the theater assumes Kafuku will play Vanya, which suits his age and temperament, but instead he casts Takatsuke in the role. A surprise of another sort awaits Kafuku – due to a previous car accident in which a guest actor injured someone, Kafuku cannot drive his beloved red Saab. A driver is appointed – if he won’t accept Misaka his contract is null. So she becomes his driver. 

At first he is uneasy – he’s used to rehearsing lines while driving – but she assures him she doesn’t mind, he should do whatever he is accustomed to. And he does. Her silence and expressionless mien make it easy for him to work on the play from the back seat, without noticing her – she is unattractive, dressed in jeans, work shirt, and a shabby sport coat. But gradually he becomes curious about her; she takes him to the refuse center where she used to drive a truck, and bit by bit her story comes out. 

Again we see the power of Chekhov to move people. Takatsuke flounders as Vanya, and we learn he is in Hiroshima to wait out a scandal. Paparazzi snap pictures of him any time he’s in public, and he chases and assaults them. Takatsuke describes himself as empty, and Kafuku concurs – he chose not to play Vanya because to act well, he must open himself to the depths of the character, and he is unwilling to accept that vulnerability. But Takatsuke carries himself aloof from Vanya’s interior, which makes his acting suffer.

This film explores the hierarchy of theater, in which the director stays apart. The actors have a group bitch session after a reading all found unsatisfactory, but Kafuku has already left. The actors stay in Hiroshima, while his hotel is an hour’s drive away. The producers are there to smooth things over and enforce their set of rules. 

The Korean woman with the role of Sonya is mute, and plays her part using meticulously expressive sign language, which her husband translates to the cast and director. The actor playing Vanya’s young wife speaks English and Mandarin, Takatsuke speaks only Japanese. Chekhov would approve of this multi-lingual cast who cannot comprehend each other’s words. Humans failing to understand each other is the essence of his work. 

My only quibble is that the viewer has to know "Uncle Vanya" for the film to have full impact. In “Uncle Vanya on 42nd Street” we see the progress of the play – the cast is rehearsing, with takeout coffee cups and street clothes, but the lines are Chekhov’s, and finally it dawns on us that we're watching the play – we don’t need sets, costumes, props. In “Drive My Car” the focus is on the lives of director, actors, and driver – the moving moments of the play are adrift from its full story.

The Secret Knowledge of Water, by Craig Childs

The Secret Knowledge of Water is Craig Childs’ love letter to the desert, to its hidden pools, nocturnal streams, and floods. In a land of scarcity, water seems more abundant, more alive, more alluring, than in wet places. Childs journeys out into desert areas armed with detailed maps, but he is seeking to be surprised, to discover pools described by John Wesley Powell in 1870, to sojourn in the lands of the Tohono O'Odham, native people who live in and with the desert. 

The book is divided into three sections, each with its own aspect of water. We begin with Ephemeral Water, in which he seeks the water hiding out in water pockets, rock crevices, and underground until heat and parch evaporate its remnants. The next section is Water That Moves, which relates the stories of streams, creeks, narrow canyons where water can hide from the relentless sun. And finally, perhaps most beloved to him, is Fierce Water, about floods. 

The tagline of the book is “There are two easy ways to die in the desert: thirst and drowning.” He doesn’t seem much at risk of dying of thirst, despite wandering for weeks in places with no likely water sources. Even when he finds some tiny water pocket with a brackish gallon in it, he leaves it untouched though he is thirsty – it’s a religious kind of response. But floods fascinate him, and by the end of the book we concur in his assessment that floods are as much part of the desert as aridity. 

He writes, “[Water] is not a true element; its atomic structure can be easily broken into Hs and Os, a fact that startled many at the time of its discovery. It behaves so curiously, however, able to move unlike anything else we know of, that it is still unscientifically considered to be an element.” He describes the fish that survive inhospitable conditions, and notes the interference of humans – “There have been cases of native desert fishes being actively poisoned out of waterways to make way for non-native sport fish.” He commiserates with a biologist who has spent decades in a losing battle to preserve these unique species. 

From a café in Kanab, Utah, he watches a thunderstorm, its flash flood arriving to the nods of locals and consternation of tourists. “The water in the street suddenly turned from clear to deep red, the red of the Vermilion Cliffs that surround Kanab, flowing instantly with the viscosity of milk and not water. Objects began to show. Rocks. Uprooted plants... The narrow downstream box of Kanab Canyon was going to be a violent place in about two hours. Anyone hiking down there, or lounging on a boulder in blatant sunlight, was probably expecting the next noteworthy event to be nightfall.” 

Childs writes beautifully about everything he sees – the shapes water has left on rocks; the birds, fish, trees, insects; the sight of a far-off thunderstorm; the ragged forms of desert mountains – and about his own yen to experience water directly. Often he strips naked to explore some narrow side canyon or bask beside a huge pool in the middle of rocks, that shouldn’t even be there. As the American Southwest descends into long-term drought, it’s worth your while to learn more about water. This book is a great place to start.

The Tale of King Crab, a film

The Tale of King Crab, by Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis 

This visually-stunning 2021 Italian film spins us a tale. In more-or-less present-time rural Italy, a group of old men sit around a table. One offers to tell a story, then we move into that story: in Part 1, in the 1800s, Luciano, drunkard son of the local doctor, stirs up trouble: the shepherds have been taking a shortcut to the river through the grounds of the Prince’s castle, and one day they find the entry barred. At the pub they complain – they’ve been using this route for countless years, and while acknowledging the land belongs to the Prince, they feel they have a historic right to passage with their flocks. Luciano reopens the gate – perhaps to be contrary, perhaps because one of the shepherds is father of his inamorata. With this act, he runs afoul of the Prince and his enforcers. 

From here we move into Part 2, in which Luciano is exiled to Argentina. In Tierra del Fuego, he learns of a Spanish galleon that ran aground in a storm. The ship’s captain took the cargo of gold and hid it somewhere on a large rugged island. Pirates and treasure hunters come seeking it, Luciano among them. Here a spaghetti-western interlude nearly upends the film; fortunately the through-line of the story, having to do with the crab of the title, keeps us on course to a wondrous finale. 

The landscapes are enfolding, characters have the weathered simple features of plain folk, dialog is laconic, action brusque and sometimes violent. We see peasants at their daily tasks – milking sheep, washing out clothes at the spring, filtering the sediment from wine. Allegorical imagery is there if we want to pursue it: twice Luciano is shot in the side, in the same place where Jesus was speared as he hung on the cross. Sin, redemption, the weight of the world, the power of love, all are here to be expounded on. Luciano also fits the nihilist loner archetype of Westerns: ravaged by his own emptiness, he drinks, defies, tries to find deeds worthy of his effort, all the while aware of the brevity of life and futility of death. 

I can’t say more about King Crab without spoilers, so I’ll just urge you to go see this lush film on a big screen.

See No Stranger, by Valarie Kaur

Sometimes the voice in a book matches the voice in your head, manifesting not only ideas and stories but your deepest convictions and understanding of how the world truly works. Such a book, for me, is See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love, by Valarie Kaur. Though she writes from the perspective of the American Sikh community, much reviled, attacked, and yet invisible victims after September 11th, 2001, her realizations about community, opposition, and ways to push through pain and rage, should resonate with anyone grappling with America’s upsurge in hatred, wondering what to do, how to protect targets of violence, and how to go to its sources, to do the hard work of reconciling. 

She teaches how to move past judgments into wonder, into hearing the stories of those who have wronged us. She’s clear: “Reconciliation mends what has been torn asunder, but it does not return us to a point before the harm happened. Perpetrators and survivors can just leave each other alone after that. Roshan acknowledged that, even after his apology, I still did not owe him a relationship.” 

Kaur’s life was a perfect storm of harrowing abuse, physical pain, disrespect, and self-doubt. And by pushing through, with the loving support of a community, she has used her experiences to inform the lessons she offers – we know she lives her ideas because we can see what it cost her to learn them. 

I’m not Sikh, I’m a person of privilege in this society, a well-off white woman whose upbringing was easy – a loving family, encouraging teachers, opportunities to expand the possibilities of mind and body – and yet, to live honestly in 2021 I am summoned to leave my comfort zone, to undertake the work of healing the world. Like any journey, it’s a process of steps, small movements from origin toward destination. My circumstances and my skills are different from Kaur’s, but each must use the tools we have. No one’s keeping score except the inner critic and the wise heart, the former saying, “you’ll never get there,” the latter noticing, “you’re further than you were. Don’t give up.” 

This book was my call to action – maybe it will be yours too!

The History of Love, by Nicole Krauss

In 2005, Nicole Krauss’s layered work The History of Love was published. As in Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s novel The Shadow of the Wind, we have an intergenerational mystery of lives in danger, at its heart a love story. 

In The History of Love, the mystery is about a book of that title being translated by a girl’s mother. Who actually wrote it, why is our young heroine, Alma, named after the girl in the book, what happened to the girl in the book? 

Krauss fully captures the voices of her three narrators: 

Leo Gursky (an old Jewish man, WWII refugee living in New York. We see a boy from a village in Poland, in love with a girl whom, in the chaos of the buildup to war, he lost track of): “Then one day I was looking out the window. Maybe I was contemplating the sky. Put even a fool in front of the window and you’ll get a Spinoza. The afternoon passed, darkness sifted down. I reached for the chain on the bulb and suddenly it was as if an elephant had stepped on my heart. I fell to my knees. I thought: I didn’t live forever. A minute passed. Another minute. Another. I clawed at the floor, pulling myself along toward the phone.” 

Alma Singer: “I WAS SIX WHEN MY FATHER WAS DIAGNOSED WITH PANCREATIC CANCER. That year my mother and I were driving together in the car. She asked me to pass her bag. ‘I don’t have it,’ I said. ‘Maybe it’s in the back,’ she said. But it wasn’t in the back. She pulled over and searched the car, but the bag was nowhere to be found. She put her head in her hands and tried to remember where she’d left the bag. She was always losing things. ‘One of these days,’ she said, ‘I’m going to lose my head.’ I tried to picture what would happen if she lost her head. In the end, though, it was my father who lost everything: weight, his hair, various internal organs.” 

Bird Singer (Alma’s younger brother, who believes he is one of the 36 lamed vovniks, holy people on whom the existence of the world depends): “I have been a normal person for three days in a row. What this means is that I have not climbed on top of any buildings or written G-d’s name on anything that doesn’t belong to me or answered a perfectly normal question with a saying from the Torah. It also means I have not done anything where the answer would be NO to the question: WOULD A NORMAL PERSON DO THIS? So far it hasn’t been that hard.” 

Their stories are braided with misunderstandings and grief, resolving at last after many blind crossings. This novel is beautifully written, leavened with both humor and pathos as readers stumble alongside characters learning, being wrong, learning more, still wrong…