A book for anyone serious about writing fiction

If you are unable to be admitted to the Syracuse University writing program (it accepts six students a year from an applicant pool of between six and seven hundred), the next best thing is George Saunders’ A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life.

Actually of course it’s Saunders who gives the master class, which is based on his twenty years of creative writing teaching. To illustrate what he wants to convey he uses three Chekhov stories (“In the Cart,” “The Darling,” “Gooseberries”), two Tolstoy stories (“Master and Man,” “Alyosha the Pot”) and one each by Turgenev (“The Singers”) and Gogol (“The Nose”).

Saunders advises reader at the beginning that none of the models he offers as a way to think about a story is “correct” or sufficient. “If a model appeals to you, use it. If not, discard it.” He is not trying to teach you how to write like George Saunders (or Chekhov). He is trying to teach you how to write a compelling story, one readers want to read.

Each of the stories he examines is, in its own way, worth studying for what the author does and how he does it. Saunders gives each a very close reading. Indeed he analyses “In the Cart” virtually sentence by sentence, one of his points being that the short story writer does not have room for words or sentences that do not contribute directly to the whole. So how does Chekhov do it?

The million-dollar questions Saunders wants to answer is: What makes reader keep reading? He believes happens through a series of expectation/resolution moments. “We read a bit of text and a set of expectations arises. ‘A man stood on the roof of a seventy-story building.’ Aren’t you already kind of expecting him to jump, fall, or be pushed off? You’ll be pleased if the story takes that expectation into account, but not pleased if it addresses it too neatly.”

Janice Hardy on her Fiction University blog has an interesting article that points out the difference between idea, premise, plot, and story. “Ideas are those moments of inspiration that first excite or interest us. The premise is a general description of the story you plan to tell, and what the story is about. The plot encompasses the core conflict. [The] story is . . . the internal struggle the character goes thorough to resolve a personal issue.” 

Saunders says that a story “frames a moment of change, saying implicitly: ‘This is the day on which things changed forever. A variant of that says, ‘This is the day on which things almost changed forever, but didn’t.”

One of the problems with my stories (one among many) is that they tend to be anecdotes. Time passes. Things happen. They often have interesting ideas and observations. But the main character does not change. Or, the character had an opportunity to change but didn’t. 

Chekhov said, “Art doesn’t have to solve problems, it only has to formulate them correctly.” Saunders says, “A story is a series of incremental pulses, each of which does something to us. Each puts us in a new place, relative to where we just were.”

Saunders mines each of the seven Russian stories for what they can teach about description, pattern, repetition, facts in fiction, and the possibility of saying true things in a world in which “things happen in it that don’t and could never happen in the real world.” I.e., in Gogol’s “The Nose.”

How does a detailed description of a country inn, the furniture, a character’s face, or clothing add to the story? What does “a bloated face, a pair of sly, genial little eyes, and a fleshy forehead with deep furrows running right across it” really tell you about the character? We modern readers are sensitive to and impatient with data dumps. 

Saunders describes how he discovered he was a writer and how he works. He seems to be a pantser rather than an outliner, never sure where the story is going after he’s written the first sentence. He also believes in revision.

At the same time, he insists that every writer should find his/her own way. Hemingway may be a great short story writer but he’s already done what he can do. Writing in the style of Hemingway is still fake, no matter how skillfully done.

Rather he argues, “We can reduce all of writing to this: we read a line, have a reaction to it, trust (accept) that reaction, and do something in response, instantaneously, by intuition . . . In my experience that’s the whole game: (1) becoming convinced that there is a voice inside you that really, really knows what it likes, and (2) getting better at hearing that voice and acting on its behalf.”

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is a splendid book for several reasons. As a writer, I have revisited older stories and think I now see why and where they fail. As a reading writer, I try to see the mechanism at work under the stories and novels I read; I believe I am now more sensitive to what is actually going on (or not). As a reader, I am delighted to be introduced to seven masterpieces by an experienced and knowledgeable guide.

Finally, I am inspired by Saunders writing. Anyone who is serious about writing fiction should own and read A Swim in a Pond in the Rain and return to it regularly for insights and inspiration.

 

How do you make sense of your life?

Reader Alert! The following includes spoilers. Do not read on if you are the sort of person who is upset by learning how a book ends before you’re read it. 

Ordinarily, I avoid giving away an ending, but (a) careful readers of Luiz Ruffato’s Late Summer will know how the novel must end halfway through, and (b) the pleasure the book offers has little to do with how the book ends.

Ruffato was born in Cataguases, a small industrial city in southeastern Brazil. The novel is set there and, if the text is to be believed (and why not?), the town has fallen on evil days. The textile factories on which the economy was based have closed. The polluted and stinking river Pomba floods during the rainy season. Street crime is common.

The grandson of immigrants who fled northern Italy, Ruffato worked throughout his youth as a bar clerk, textile worker, street book vendor, and turner to supplement the income of his parents, a popcorn vendor and a laundress. He earned a journalism degree from the Federal University of Juiz de Fora, and later settled in São Paulo. 

He is the author of eight novels as well as short story collections, poetry, and essays. In addition to numerous Brazilian literary prizes, his works have received the Premio Casa de las Américas (Cuba) and the Hermann Hesse Literaturpreis (Germany), and have been published in thirteen countries. Since 2003 Ruffato has worked exclusively as a writer.

Late Summer begins with Oseias Moretto Nunes, an older (elderly?) Cataguases native returning to his home town from Sao Paolo on Tuesday, March 3, which could make it 2015. His wife has left him taking their son. He is sick, and he is tired. He still has two sisters living in the city; a third sister, Légia, is dead. And he has a successful and wealthy brother. His parents are dead. He did not return to the city for their funerals.

Oseias spends five days in the city, two nights his sister Rosana’s houses. Rosana is a school principal, visits New York City once a year, is fighting a furious if losing battle with the signs of aging, and is married to a doctor Ricardo. After the second night, Rosana leaves a note in her “teacherly scrawl”: 

“Oseias, I’m afraid this situation can’t go on. Ricardo has been patient, too patient. I don’t want to get into a fight with him at this point in my life. He’d appreciate it, we’d appreciate it, if you could find some other place to stay. Rosana.” He moves to a cheap hotel.

A former school chum is now mayor and Oseias attempts to see him, finally ambushing him one morning. The mayor is not interested in talking about old times and brushes him off. Oseias does  connect accidentally with a former art teacher who is now sick and penniless and who would like to talk about old times. Oseias is repulsed and escapes.

He visits his younger sister Isinha (Isabela), who is married to an affable drunk and has an ingrate and shiftless adult son who has at least two illegitimate children. Isinha, although poor and estranged from her Cataguases siblings, seems to have accepted her portion. She washes and irons his dirty laundry Oseias brings her. But in a house overflowing with children, Isinha has no place—or much time—for her brother.

João Lúcio, Oseias’s younger brother, having been given a leg up by an uncle, has been able to turn a local sawmill into a regional furniture manufacturer and himself into a rich man with a big house, a pool, a wife and a mistress. Caught unawares by his older brother’s arrival, he invites Oseias to spend the night in the guest room although he cannot stay with him. He has an unspecified appointment elsewhere. 

In the final pages, Oseias showers in João Lúcio’s house, dresses in his clean, freshly ironed clothes, destroys his driver’s license and ID, crushes the pills he’s been collecting for his condition (cancer?) to make a cocktail. On Sunday, March 8, he hides himself in the deep woods behind the estate and kills himself.

Late Summer is so vivid, so alive that it did not occur to me until much later to wonder how Oseias was able to tell his story in the first person—the only way it could be told and have the effect it has—if he were dead.

I can imagine some readers will be put off by the 277 pages of solid type, no paragraphs. The book’s design reflects Oseias’s thoughts and perceptions, leavened with dialogue, as they pour from him.

I can also imagine readers being put off by all the unfamiliar names of relatives, children, friends, associates, acquaintances. Julia Sanches’s translation from Portuguese is fluent and smooth however, so anything the reader bumps on is the author’s not hers. (For example, I had to look up “Cebion” to learn it’s a branded form of vitamin C.)

But you don’t read Late Summer to ask how a dead narrator can tell his story or for the plot. You read it—or I read it once I became acclimated to the lack of paragraphing—for a powerful evocation of a man trying to make sense of his life. To explain to himself how he came to be where he is. To attempt one last time to only connect with his sisters, his brother, his nieces and nephews, his childhood companions. 

You read Late Summer for a compelling portrait of contemporary Brazilian life. Ruffato’s evocation of Cataguases is not one that will please the local tourist office. (And I cannot imagine what the Covid-19 pandemic is doing to the town.) 

You read Late Summer because it extends your knowledge of what it is to be human. 

How do you live with history?

Ordinarily I do not care for a book that has to include a family tree to guide the reader through the family connections. 

I am making an exception of Asako Serizawa’s collection of thirteen linked stories, Inheritors. The stories involve five generations of a Japanese family. They cover the period 1913-2035 although do not appear in strict chronological order. The family tree is useful to see how characters are related and the year in which a story takes place.

Asako Serizawa was born in Japan and spent her pre-college life in Singapore, Jakarta, and Tokyo. She completed her BA in English and French at Tufts University, her MA in English and American literature at Brown University, and her MFA in creative writing at Emerson College.

She told the Rona Jaffee Foundation in connection with the book, “Over the years, the task of balancing my practical responsibilities with my writing needs trimmed my life to its essentials, but my project, over ten years in the making—an interconnected short story collection spanning 150 years and tracing five generations of a family fractured across Asia and the U.S. by war—was slow going, its completion, as well as my sense of its viability, blinking in and out of focus. Then, several years ago, I received a seven-month fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where I made tangible progress, after which pressing on felt critical.”

Serizawa’s winning a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award made possible not only a whole year of full-time writing but also the freedom to return to Japan for final research. The result is Inheritors, an exploration of a Japanese family fragmented by the Pacific side of World War II. 

A retired doctor is forced to confront the moral consequences of his work at Unit 731, where the Imperial Japanese Army experimented on human subjects.

The doctor’s sister-in-law, compelled to speak of a fifty-year-old murder, reveals the realities of life in Occupied Japan. 

Half a century later, her estranged American granddaughter winds her way back East, pursuing her absent father’s secrets. 

Decades in the future, two siblings face the consequences of their great-grandparents’ war. 

We live through the fire-bombing of Tokyo in which more people died than in the atomic-bombing of Hiroshima (and thankfully, given Serizawa’s fierce writing, we do not have to live through that). We ride with a pilot as he guides his kaiten, a manned suicide torpedo, toward an American destroyer. 

Because Serizawa is writing from both an American and Japanese perspective, the stories are exceptionally rich with insight and the details are fascinating and apt. The storis are told from both a first-person and a third-person point of view. They can come in the form of a Q&A interview and as a transcript, as in: 

“I was born in the first year of Taisho—

“That’s right, 1912. Of course, as a Japanese, I wonder if nuances aren’t lost when accounting in the Western way. For example, unlike Meiji people, like our parents, we Taisho people were very open to the Western world. Have you heard of ‘moga,’ or ‘modan gaaru’? As a girl, I thought we were quite modern, quite the sophisticates <laugh>. . . .”

A central character in one story becomes peripheral in another, and the book’s power grows as we learn more about this family, their lives and histories. And Serizawa is not afraid to break free of the strict realism that characterizes most of the stories. The penultimate story, “The Garden, aka Theorem for the Survival of the Species,” while still realistic is set in 2035 and begins:

“’So, the world’s deconstructing,’ Erin said. It was day three of their senior year of high school. He and Anja were sitting at their usual table in the cafeteria. ‘War’s breaking out on all planes of existence. We’re like, the last human generation still holding out any chance of survival. What do we need to do?’”

Reading Inheritors would be a good start.

The life and art of a Living National Treasure

This thin work of non-fiction does not reflect its depth and substance. While Back to Japan may not be the most captivating title, it does the job of identifying the key event in the subject’s life. The subtitle offers readers much more information: “The Life and Art of Master Kimono Painter Kunihiko Moriguchi.”

The author, Marc Petitjean is a French writer, filmmaker, and photographer. He has directed several documentaries, including From Hiroshima to Fukushima about an atomic bomb survivor, Living Treasure (2012) , about Kunihiko Moriguchi, and Zones Grises, on his own search for information about the life of his father after his death. 

Several years ago while Petitjean was making the Hiroshima documentary, he met Kunihiko at the late, lamented Hotel Okura. Kunihiko speaks French thanks to his years in France where he went to study at the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs after graduating from Kyoto City University. 

He and Petitjean talked about France, art, Japan, Japanese art and culture, and he gave Petitjean a catalog of his painted kimonos. It piqued Petitjean’s interest, which resulted ultimately in the documentary, Trésor Vivant and this book.

Kunihiko was born in Kyoto in 1941 where his father Kako Moriguchi was a master yūzen artist. Yūzen (友禅染) is a  resist dyeing technique that involves applying rice paste to silk to prevent the dye from bleeding into other areas of the fabric. Originating in the 17th century, the technique became popular as both a way of subverting the Shogun’s sumptuary laws on dress fabrics and as a way to produce kimono designs that were hand-painted with dyes rather than woven. 

The Moriguchis survived the war. The U.S. never bombed Kyoto, although Kunihiko recalls houses being torn down to create firebreaks in the event we did. Around the time he turned twelve, a student of his father’s came to live with them and was soon joined by two others. “According to the old school to which his father adhered, being a student meant not merely learning a craft, but living full-time with the master, cleaning the house, carrying out all sorts of thankless chores for the family, keeping quiet and obeying orders.” 

Rather than stay at home as another apprentice to his father, Kunihiko entered the department of modern painting in the Japanese tradition at Kyoto City University of Arts where “teachers and students alike were dazzled by American Pop Art.” He, however, distanced himself from that movement.

On graduation, he applied for a student grant from the French government, won one, and in August 1963 sailed to Paris where he was exposed to Op-Art (in which repeated shapes are used to produce illusions) and became a friend and protégé of the French-Polish painter Balthus. Through that connection, he met Jean Miró, Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, and other artists. 

He finished his course of study at the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs and was courted by French companies. Friends expected him to stay on in France, but he decided to return to Japan and learn yūzen painting from his father. He realized that it would be impossible to duplicate his father’s approach, telling him, “I think your kimonos are magnificent, but if I have to draw the same patterns as you—” Waterfalls, plum trees, cranes, chrysanthemums. “—I might as well stop right now. I need to know if following in your footsteps implies working in the same style as you. I might as well tell you straightaway, I’ll never be as good at it as you are.” 

Rather than insist Kunihiko match his patterns, Kako gave him permission to follow his own path. 

Kunihiko’s patterns resemble Op-Art. He called his first yūzen kimono “Hikari” (light). The design is made up of squares that push and pull the illusion of space on its landscape, creating a sense of movement.

The geometrically inspired patterns create different visual effects thanks to the interplay between the background and the foreground or the movement created when the kimonos are worn. Back to Japan includes photos of both Kunihiko’s and Kako’s kimonos; unfortunately they are not in color. And while these are garments meant to be worn, they are also works of art now collected in museums.

The book, smoothly translated from French by Adriana Hunter, not only sketches Kunihiko’s life (and suggests the life of a traditional Japanese artist), it discusses kimono, the art of yūzen, and Japanese culture generally. 

“For me,” says Kunihiko, “tradition is like the purity of spring water. There always needs to be water falling into pure water. When it’s dirty, it overflows. And so it’s always kept pure. And I’m just one droplet in history. That’s how I see tradition.” He is also, like his father, a Living National Treasure, a trésor vivant.