“If you had an unexpected hour, what would you do with it?”

There were four of us, all women of a certain age who can center our lives on ourselves a bit more – our children grown, our parents either gone or not requiring daily attention yet.

One woman, a painter, said, “I love to create most. I’d create something.” Another woman, a poet and the one widow among us, said, “My children … I love to do anything for my children.” The next woman said she liked “to do – read, cook, organize, plan.”

I had already blurted out my answer without thinking. I’d said, “read.” After hearing the others’ answers, was reading really it?

• I read books and magazines
• I read recipes to cook and bake
• I read music and CD inserts to make and listen to the sounds I love
• I read trail and road maps to explore new places
• I read and reread my own writing

These entries will be an exploration of how reading impacts my life. Not a book review, or a critique but a thought or two about how a particular book or reading shifts the way I live.

 

Solar Bones by Mike McCormack

I’d been forewarned. Fabulous bookseller, Des Kenny, of Kenny’s Books and Art in Galway, Ireland, told me he’d sat down to start this book and couldn’t put it down even though it was mid-dawn when he closed the cover. “So don’t start until you know you can finish it,” Des said.  I am one of the world’s slowest readers. Could I read a 224-page novel in one day? In the time between Christmas and the New Year I sat amidst the refuse of Christmas and read. I ate one-handed engrossed in this story. I resented my body for insisting I go to the bathroom or simply move.

This novel that lives outside the expected story structure, the typical rules of grammar and the one-way progression of time. It is a story about one man considering his life in County Mayo, Ireland. There is nothing exceptional about this man, or his life. But McCormack’s writing reminded me that every life is a source of wonder, struggle and beauty. Here is a brief excerpt that, I think, shows this. The main character, an engineer, and his father, an old fisherman, are testing old versus new technologies:

          twenty minutes out from land, on a heading straight for Clare Island, he calculated that we would soon be over ‘The Maids’, a sudden rock shelf visible only at very low tide, a feeding ground on which crabs and lobsters thrived, and he stood at the stern of the boat looking back towards land because the old way of finding this particular marker was to head straight out from the bottom of Kerrigan’s land and bring the spire of the Protestant church in the north out with you till Matthew Ryan’s hayshed in the south came into view around the end of the headland and with these three markers drawn into alignment you should be over ‘The Maids’ as I knew them myself and still know them, having heard of them since childhood but not till now, when they were being put to the test, had I ever wondered how much faith should be put in this old way of finding them because while part of me had a real appreciation of just how wise it was to invest so much in it but now

           my anxiety on all this was only a small wager — this old technique was not something I ever had to live by, unlike my father who now, at a time in his life when he could have passed up the challenge with honour, still found it necessary to test what he knew and had lived his own life by so that now, with him standing at the back of the boat and scanning the coast, my heart was in my mouth because there was no knowing how he’d react if his old system was at variance with the sonar and my sense of what was at issue was so clear to me it reached down into my very soul because, what really hung in the balance was the possibility that a good man, through no fault of his own, but by way of received wisdom and immemorial faith, may have lived an important part of

       his life warped in error and foolishness, misguided over the seas and if that was now shown to be the case then might not that same foolishness have been handed down to me some way or other — what’s bred in the dog coming out in the pup — and been responsible for some of the misdirections of my own life so

now

he shouted from the stern

we should be over them now

      and sure enough, standing in the wheel house, I saw the graph rising across the screen, ocean floor coming up to meet the keep in a crest of shallow peaks, my soul rising with it, a gladness which must have been contagious because Joe Needham was chuckling and slapping me on the back as if I were responsible for the happy outcome, both of us relieved —  thank fuck for that — and I went out to the old man and confirmed that yes, we had hit the marker and he contented himself with a nod, pointing out to me the relative positions of the church and the hayshed, markers which were ten miles apart in a straight line which traversed the parish west to east, a meridian known only to a handful of fisherman along this coastline and

      that summer Sunday, with its blue sky arched down to the horizon beyond Clare Island my father showed me how he had so precisely fixed and located himself within the world’s widest shores, an incident I would recall often not because of what he had shown me but because I, with all my schooling and instruments, could never lay claim to such an accurate sense of myself in anything whatsoever

A book in a day! Easy with Mike McCormack’s lyrical language and creative structure which drew me into the story as if the main character, Marcus, was sitting across from me telling me this himself.

Change to my life? I’m going to do this again – soon – and see if it’s just this book or I’ve tapped into something I didn’t know I could do.

Also: in my writing life I’m going to experiment, take more chances.