The flawed and the unforgettable

What makes a book unputdownable and unforgettable? For me, it is unanswered questions. When the author doesn’t quite explain why certain momentous or catastrophic events took place or why others gloss over them or manage to live life as if they never occurred. This is a deal breaker in some sense for me and yet these are the ones that I can never quite put aside.

Perhaps the book that has disturbed me the most among the lot that I’ve read during the pandemic-induced lockdown has been Tara Westover’s memoir Educated.  One of the reasons this book sticks in the memory is that there are so many unanswered questions that aggravate me. 

Why did Ms Westover agree to go on drives and maintain such an outwardly cordial relationship with her physically abusive brother? Who allows their older sibling to hold their head in a toilet full of water and react so placidly? Why did Ms Westover’s mother, who seemed aware of her son’s afflictions and uncontrolled violent outbreaks, tolerate this for so long? Why couldn’t anyone see that her father displayed all symptoms of some mental disorder? Why does her brother Tyler have seven children even after he’s in some fundamental manner rejected the Mormon faith his parents believe in and earned a PhD? Seven seems a stretch in today’s world no matter which faith one has embraced. 

The book made me question Ms Westover’s ability to ever overcome her past. Her skill and courage at being able to recall and write about the events that made up her life till the age of 17-18 is nothing short of miraculous but it left me both indignant at her and on her behalf.

Equally baffling has been Hanya K Yanagihara’s A Little Life, a 736-pager that requires both strong arms and large doses of patience. One finds oneself suffocated by the tortured existence of the Jude, the protagonist, who attracts and repels in equal measure his three friends living in New York. Jude is one of the most damaged characters I have encountered in any fiction and he leaves one with the question: How can anyone’s life be one long series of torturous events chained together? So hopeless is Jude’s predicament by what life has dealt him that I felt a twinge of disappointment when his first suicide attempt fails. It seems better that he is released from his battered existence. This is a rare emotion to evoke in a reader since the sympathy one feels with someone no longer able to cope with life’s tyranny almost always lies with the victim. The book was gripping, I couldn’t put it down but if I met Ms Yanagihara I would shake many answers out of her including why Jude’s life is as bizarre as she has portrayed it. 

In terms of defining the personalities of its principal characters, I have rarely read a book do this with such finesse, so much so that it makes the reader want to meet the foursome — Jude, Willem, Malcolm and JB — get to know them better and feel a slight sense of betrayal that they are not real people you could encounter in New York. Only in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of The Day have I come across equally strong characterisation.

As far as characters go, a strong and inexplicable character is built by Barbara Vine, a pseudonym for the crime writer Ruth Rendell, in Gerald Candless, an author whose life is anything but an open book in her psychological suspense thriller The Chimney Sweeper’s Boy.  The book was published in 1998, and I re-read after many years during the lockdown. Candless and his heartless rejection of his wife Ursula is a telling saga of the taboos around homosexuality at the time and its severe consequences on the lives it touched even inadvertently. 

Far less demanding and happier reads are A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende, a master at weaving historical events with live characters in stories that cannot but entrance you. I find I always learn more history from her books than my school textbooks. I’d suggest to anyone looking for well crafted, easier on the mind novels to try John Boyne’s A Ladder To The Sky (2018), a delicious mix of darkness, irony and humour in a world sprinkled with famous writers and personalities and a telling tale of how ambition can twist and redefine ethical boundaries. 

Although I read it in 2018, Mr Boyne’s The Heart’s Invisible Furies  (2017) was for me an equally delightful discovery of how homosexuality can shape, mould, alter and even destroy the trajectory of one’s life in a society as contemptuous of it as conservative Ireland. The novel seethes with anger. 

Finally, a book that even my 16-year-old navigated with great ease was Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens, a debut novel that chronicles the life of an abandoned girl, Kya, who ekes out a remarkable existence in the North Carolina marsh. It holds one critical lesson for all parents today: Few things can shape character the way adversity manages.  

Pandemic Perusing is an occasional column on books and reading