Falling in Step with Literature

I have about 70 pages left in the book I’m reading—In the Garden of Papa Santuzzu by Tony Ardizzone. It’s been an odd reading experience; I sailed through the first 90 pages, then trudged through the next 100 or so, and now am sailing again. Of course, it’s fair to disclaim my reading with the fact that I was turning in graduate school applications in that middle section of it.

That small caveat being what it is, I’ve never let responsibilities (work, sleep, eating, etc) distract me from a book that I’m heavily invested in. In fact, right now, my eyes and fingers are itching to get back at their work. But I think last night’s epiphany is worth documenting before I move forward. It is the progression of a reader contrasted with the progression of a book, and an important look at the delicate dance that both the book and the reader have to give themselves to.

When I first began the book, I enjoyed what I was digging into. It is well written, with poetic language and a real “storytelling” vibe. I also was stuck for a few hours doing nothing in the emergency room, so that helped motivate my reading. Then I stalled—the novel wasn’t exactly what I expected. I like experimental writing, I generally enjoy a book that jumps perspectives (if nothing else, I admire how one writer can capture multiple voices within one work), but something about this bogged me down. It was hard to read the book—which melds a realistic story of an immigrant family with a familial mythology, each chapter “told” by a different family member—because the interjection of mythology made it hard to cleanly follow the characters and their unraveling “real” stories. Realistic fiction is what I particularly enjoy, so while mythology is fun, I found it distracting.

Last night, though, I was able to shift my perspective, and it is amazing how easily a book can shift from tiresome to engrossing. Because I realized what this book is, and how to read it: it isn’t a novel, despite the stamp on the cover. It is a series of short stories, anecdotes, engaging tales told over a dinner of fresh sweet bread, minestrone soup, and a pasta whose name I likely can’t pronounce. While the ribbon of continuity is there, I was spending so much mental energy attempting to follow it rather than enjoy the individuality of each story. And the truth is, as I’ve relaxed my hold on the story as a whole, each anecdote has been easier to follow and insert into the weave of the “novel” in its entirety.

And so the book has changed. It is no longer a frustrating task I am trying to firmly hold, chart, and analyze, but it is a dinner amongst friends, whose stories elicit rolling laughter or heartbroken, sometimes bitter, tears. I knew from the beginning that the book was well written, and I have long held that any story, if it is well-written enough, should be enjoyable. So the stymieing effect this novel had on me was particularly unsettling; it assaulted my most basic philosophies of good literature. Instead, though, it just took work to shift my perspectives, and hammered home how much of the relationship of reader to novel really forms what the novel is. It is a dance, and I had to learn to follow the books’ steps before I could appreciate the tone, rhythm, and beat of the music.