Like Anyone Else, Only More So

From time to time during the next month I will be posting passages from The Namesake that illustrate what a wonderful book this is. In the fifth chapter, Gogol Ganguli, the thoroughly American son of the still very Bengali Ashima and Ashoke, is about to begin college. And for this new phase of his life he wants a new name. He's always hated being called "Gogol," and his father Ashoke has never fully explained the importance of the name. In addition to being his favorite writer, Ashoke credits Gogol with saving his life. Back in India long before Gogol's birth, Ashoke had been traveling to see his grandparents when his train derailed. The rescue team might never have found Ashoke, his pelvis and right leg broken, trapped inside the overturned car, unable to speak, had he not raised his hand just enough that they could see it holding a page of Gogol's story "The Overcoat," which he had been reading at the moment of the crash. Like a white flag of distress, the page caught the eye of the rescuers and they pulled him out.

Young Gogol knows nothing of this. He just knows he wants a name that's comparatively normal. Trying to explain to his parents why he wants a new name, he says, "Nobody takes me seriously." "Who does not take you seriously?" his father asks.

"People," he said, lying to his parents. For his father had a point; the only person who didn't take Gogol seriously, the only person who tormented him, the only person chronically aware of and afflicted by the embarrassment of his name, the only person who constantly questioned it and wished it were otherwise, was Gogol.

I love this passage because it illustrates not just the angst of being a teenager, but the irony of human self-consciousness. So many of us walk around troubled by something about ourselves, that we agonize over and wish we could change, not realizing that most people probably don't notice it. Gogol hates his name and is conflicted about being Bengali. But if he were just another WASP, he would simply find something else about himself to hate, to be conflicted about, because that's who teenagers are. That's who people are. Gogol's position on the border of two cultures simply magnifies the angst and self-consciousness we all feel at times.

Just a Reminder

Tomorrow is the kickoff event for this year's Somerville Reads. It starts at 2 pm at the East Branch (115 Broadway). We hope you can join us!

Somerville Reads Kickoff!

Join us at the East Branch this Saturday at 2 p.m. for the start of Somerville Reads! From 2 to 5 you can listen to Bollywood music and enjoy a performance by the Somerville High School Nepali Dance Troupe. You'll also be able to get a henna tattoo custom-designed by local artist Manisha Trevedi (example at left) and contribute to an "immigration quilt" telling the stories of the people of Somerville. Refreshments will be served.

It's free and everyone's welcome!

If...

...you haven't started reading The Namesake yet, what are you waiting for? We still have plenty of copies at the library on a display rack in front of the reference desk. If you're hesitant, Michiko Kakutani's New York Times review should whet your appetite.

Somerville Reads 2011!

This month Somerville will begin its second annual one city/one book campaign, a community read project in which people throughout the city will read and discuss the same book. This year's book is Jumpha Lahiri's The Namesake, a novel that follows the lives of two generations of a Bengali-American family as they struggle with the conflicting demands of two cultures. Our kickoff event is Saturday, April 30, 2 p.m. at the East Branch Library, 115 Broadway. We'll be offering light refreshments and a performance by the Somerville High School Nepali Dance Troupe. This is the first of numerous events we'll be hosting throughout the city during May, including book discussion groups and a movie series on the theme of immigration. Stay tuned!

Vote for Somerville Reads 2011

Please help us decide our next book for Somerville Reads 2011. Please click on the below link and vote for your book choice. We hope to decide the next book by the fall and the program will launch in April of 2011.

Thanks for your input!

http://polldaddy.com/s/C61A07679A2F6F00

Somerville Reads Concludes

Thank you to all who participated in and supported our first Somerville Reads program! We hope you will continue to read The Things They Carried and to explore other Vietnam-related materials; many choices are listed on the left-hand side of this blog. The blog will stay active, as a place for future Somerville Reads programs and a place for your voice and opinions to be heard. We hope to have a lot of community input on the next book selection, for the 2011 program. Stay tuned to this blog for a survey and let us know the book you would like Somerville to read!

Finally, I leave you with a beautiful piece of artwork, created by our staff member Meghan. She is a librarian-by-day, but most certainly, an artist at heart. There is a lot to reflect upon in this painting and a lot to carry with us as we move forward.


Keep Reading!

Stories Can Save Us

Please enjoy Michael Downing's reflections upon The Things They Carried, which he shared with our discussion group on Saturday April 17.

Stories Can Save Us: The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien

Michael Downing/michaeldowningbooks.com

As a teacher, I find it hard to remember how I talked to students about the war in Vietnam before the publication of Tim O’Brien’s book. Maybe I didn’t. I think for a lot of teachers and students, for a lot of parents and children, for a lot of veterans and Americans who’ve never served in the military, not talking about the war seemed like a relief after the confusion and division and shouting that had dominated debates from kitchen tables to Congress for so many years.

But silence takes a toll on people. The stories that people were not allowed to tell, the truths that they were not allowed to share—they didn’t go away. They were carried. And I think the weight of an untold truth can wear a person down.

A well-told story—a sad story or a love story or even a ghost story—can lift your spirits. And the twenty-two stories in The Things They Carried are, I think, uplifting—ennobling. “The goal, I suppose, any fiction writer has,” said Tim O’Brien in answer to a question from a caller to a radio show on which he recently appeared, “no matter what your subject, is to hit the human heart and the tear ducts and the nape of the neck and to make a person feel something about what the characters are going through and to experience the moral paradoxes and struggles of being human.” [as quoted by John Greenya in a review for the Washington Times, 4-2-2010.]

From the moment we encounter Jimmy Cross and his bundle of letters from Martha, we have a sense that we know this guy, and this sense of familiarity deepens into intimacy even as we move with him through terrain and dangers unfamiliar to many of us because we get nearer and nearer to the truth of Martha that he carries—the Martha we come to know through Jimmy’s memories, regrets and often contradictory yearnings—“he wanted her to be a virgin and not a virgin, all at once.” In a matter of a few paragraphs, we are deep in the hearts and minds of Jimmy, Kiowa, Henry Dobbins, Norman Bowker and several other very young men, deep in the heart of the thicketed landscaped of Vietnam and deep in the heartland of America, too.

These stories become our stories. We didn’t always know it, but these the stories of our lives.

In most of the reviews that greeted its publication in 1990, in many of the thousands of scholarly appraisals of the book written in the intervening 20 years, and in the countless editorials and blog posts responding to the republication of the book this year, The Things They Carried is cited as the best and truest book ever written about war. And yet “in a way, for me” said Tim O’Brien to that same caller to that radio show, “although on the surface, of course, it is a book about war, I’ve never thought of it, really, that way in my heart. Even when I was writing it, it seemed to be a book about storytelling and the burdens we all accumulate through our lives.”

This is a generous way to talk about a book you wrote because it opens the door to readers of all backgrounds, all experiences, just as the stories in the book give voice to soldiers’ stories, veteran’s stories, a schoolboy’s confession of his first crush, and the story of Linda, a nine-year-old girl who carries her secret story under a red stocking cap with a white tassel. “Even then,”writes O’Brien near the very end of the book, “at nine years old, I wanted to live inside her body. I wanted to melt into her bones—that kind of love.” We hear the echo of Jimmy Cross with his eye fixed on a tunnel in Chu Lai and his mind on Martha. “He wanted to sleep inside her lungs and breathe her blood and be smothered.” That kind of love. “Dense, crushing love.” And in the next moment, Ted Lavender is shot dead. And a few months after Tim’s first date, Linda dies. And we know these stories are not the same, but they are related, two parts of the same story, two more things they carried.

A lot of discussion and scholarship has been devoted to the question of exactly what this book is. Is it fiction? Is it history? Is it a novel? I’ve often tried to make some meaning of the arrangement of the stories, to see something in their structure. But lately, I’ve come to think that the truth might be simple; these stories are connected simply because they are next to each other. In fact, what I admire about this book is that Tim O’Brien never tries to hide the seams, never tries to sell us a cliché about happy endings or perfect unity or a moment in which everything can be understood. These are separate stories that stand alone, and they are stories can’t be separated, stories that belong together. Maybe the art of this book and the emotional truth of this book are the same—maybe this is about repairing a badly broken story, pasting it back together until the patchwork of portraits and the butterfly on a boy’s forehead and landscapes from Minnesota to My Khe is big enough to encompass all of us. This is not unlike the different way readers connect with this book, attaching themselves initially to one or two characters—maybe its Jimmy Cross or Kiowa or Ted Lavender you care about most, whose fate you worry over--but that interest, that hope inevitably connects you to everyone else.

In this way, this unlikely collection of stories invites us to tell our own stories, to connect ourselves and our experiences to the lives of these once-young men, living and dead. I hope this great citywide project to read this book, to have this book in common, will incite a lot of storytelling. And I hope today, many of you will tell us a story that connects you to Tim O’Brien’s stories.

I am mindful today of the stories I was told the first time I read the first story in this collection with a class of first-year college students. It was the early 1990s, and even then, no thematic reader or anthology of the best American stories was complete if it didn’t include The Things They Carried.

I was then teaching at Wheelock College in Boston, and the course was a first-year composition course—a required course because no freshmen in their right minds would have volunteered to renew their acquaintance with the rules of grammar and punctuation. It got worse. The class culminated in a writing proficiency exam—including a spelling test—which students had to pass in order to move on to sophomore year. You get: I desperately needed great stories I could dole out like sugar to make the medicine go down.

Early in the semester, I assigned The Things They Carried as homework. In class the next day, I tried to launch a literary analysis of the story. To a person, every student—they were all women—said she loved the story, but why was I asking so many questions about themes and characters? One of the braver souls said, “Isn’t all that sort of obvious?”

It was, of course. Tim O’Brien’s prose is crystal clear, and though his sentences carry a lot of emotional and psychological weight, the meaning is right there on the surface of his plain-spoken sentences. Nothing up his sleeve, no cryptic meanings hidden between the lines. This is literature of the highest order—not trumped out or dressed up but shockingly simple and achingly direct. So I ditched the analytical essay I had planned to assign them, and asked them instead, to write a story inspired by The Things They Carried.

I’ve taught hundreds of students and read thousands of essays and stories they’ve written, but to this day I remember many of the stories the students in that class read aloud to us the next week. One young woman wrote about waking up at 5 a.m. every day during high school to carry and deliver newspapers so she could pay part of the cost for her gymnastics classes. A young woman from Lowell began her story with the words, “I carried nothing to America.” She and her family had carried as much as they could from their home in Vietnam to a refugee camp, and when they finally secured passage on a crowded boat, they had to abandon everything they had risked their lives to carry from their home. And a very quiet and, I thought until that day, rather unengaged student began her very funny essay by apologizing for having had a pretty easy life compared to the guys in the book—“until I ended up in this class,” she added, “because I couldn’t pass a spelling test if my life depended on it.”

When he was interviewed last month for the website IdentityTheory.com. O’Brien was asked whether he thinks his books ought to be used to teach history. This gets us to one of the questions that has caused consternation since this book first appeared. Is it true? Is it real? Is it fact or fiction? Does the distinction matter? I think that distinction is worth discussing. “My books are taught in schools,” O’Brien said, “high schools and colleges—and there’s a tendency to over-politicize the books and use them almost as history lessons. It’s a bit like using The Sun Also Rises as a history lesson about the Lost Generation,” O’Brien explained. “It would be true in a way, but it would undermine the artistry of the book . . . Yeah, it’s a story . . . The history is a backdrop, and it’s all related,” O’Brien said, “but the true subject of the book—you know what it is when you close your eyes and think about the story.”

When I close my eyes and think about The Things They Carried, I always see Tim O’Brien on the Rainy River in a fourteen-foot boat with Elroy Berdhal, floating on the border, suspended between his past and future. And then I see Norman Bowker circling Sunset Park twelve times in his big Chevy on the Fourth of July and finally landing in middle of the lake—which is miles and years away from Vietnam, and yet it is the somehow the very same muddy water where Kiowa slipped down into the muck and died, the very muck Tim O’Brien revisits twenty years later, where he wades out to the middle--his ten-year old daughter Kathleen on one dry bank, and a wary Vietnamese farmer on the not-too-distant dike—and he is still right there in the middle of the Rainy River, on the border between his past and his future, in the middle of life and death.

It almost makes sense. It almost seems to come together. But when I open my eyes, I see what is missing. Norman Bowker with a jump rope around his neck. And Mark Fossie’s girlfriend Mary Anne Bell, who traveled from Cleveland to LA to Bangkok to Saigon to Chu Lai to the perimeter camp of the Green Berets and finally walked off into the mountains and did not come back. And that water buffalo that Rat Kiley literally shot to pieces.

These, too, are the stories we all carry. These are our stories, too.

How much do we want to know? How much can we carry?

“Daddy, tell the truth,” Kathleen can say.

This exchange between Tim O’Brien and his daughter ends the very short story “Good Form,” a tough little story that begins with an assertion. “It’s time to be blunt,” writes O’Brien. “I’m forty-three years old, true, and I’m a writer now, and long time ago I walked through Quang Ngai Province as a foot soldier. Almost everything else is invented.”

And then his ten-year old daughter asks a simple question. “Did you ever kill anybody?”

I think Kathleen speaks for a lot of readers. I think that while we are reading these stories and admiring these stories, many of us find ourselves wondering if Tim O’Brien killed anybody. Maybe we hope he will be spared the burden of having to carry that for the rest of his life. Or maybe we want to spare ourselves.

“Daddy, tell the truth,” Kathleen can say. “Did you ever kill anybody?”

And, O’Brien writes, I can say, honestly, “Of course not.”

Or I can say, honestly, “Yes.”

I wonder—and this is a genuine question—is that an answer we can live with?

Reflections on the Vietnam War

The Things *We* Carry

Somerville Reads committee member Jodi had an interesting idea: why not get people to talk about the items they carry around? Sure, we're not in a war zone (although it can seem like it when you're in Boston rush-hour traffic), but we all have distinctive assortments of items we carry around for reasons that may range from the practical to the irrational. So, Jodi asked people to come by Sherman Market, weigh what they have on their person and talk about it. Two friends of Jodi's, Anna and Meg, thought this sounded like an interesting project and graciously agreed to help.


















Meg diligently took notes on all the participant interviews.

Full disclosure: I (Kevin, a library staff member) came with my shoulder bag, which usually has books (3.01 pounds or thereabouts) my passport (only piece of ID with my full name on it--besides, if I decide to leave the country on a whim, I'd rather not stop by my apartment) and pen and tiny notebook (I'm often jotting things down).

Here's what other people had to say who came to Sherman Market on Sunday April 11, to talk about their day-t0-day gear.

Here Andrea puts her whole bag down on the scale. Total weight: 8.6 lbs.














In her bag she had a sketchbook diary ("In case I'm ever moved to draw," she said), chapstick, books, cell phone and a flashlight (which she said came in handy quite recently).

And here Andrea proudly shows off her Somerville Reads button:

















One man who asked to go unidentified showed us a police baton that he always carries with him. He found it on a street in Roxbury two weeks after being mugged. It weighs 0.8 lbs:



















Anna's bag weighed 3.18 pounds:





















The biggest surprise inside? "I carry corks around, in case I want to practice juggling:"













Jodi herself got in on the act. Her hemp bag weighed 2.61 lbs. Of the items inside, her journal was the clear favorite:





















"I write down lists and appointments and phone numbers and people to send postcards to and sometimes I write personal stuff in it but then I obscure it with colorful designs. This particular notebook has been to North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Tennessee, Illinois, Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia, Pennsylavnia, New York, Massachusetts, and back and forth across the country with me twice."

One participant always keeps this key chain with her:




















She said, "This keychain says LOVE on it. A friend got it for me when I was in middle school. She got it in the New Dehli airport and she bought it because it reminded her of me."

A woman who asked not to be identified put a binder she had with her on the scale and found out it weighed 9.77 lbs. She said, "I'm a therapist and these are client files and paper work -- all the information about the lives, children they have... They're heavy, emotionally and physically. I think it's good to revisit why I'm acutally holding on to these things right now. I'm carrying fifty people's hearts and souls and pains and grief. "

And lastly, someone decided to weigh a person he carries around with him:



















This young man weighs 26.3 lbs. Derrick, his father, said, "26 pounds is a lot to carry, especially when you're moving around a lot."

The Things We Carry made for a really fun and fascinating afternoon.

A special thanks to Sherman Market owners and staff for letting us use the space!