Naïve.”ĭespite this admonition to herself, the narrator goes on with her midwifery, sowing her seeds. They require people like me-insecure, indecisive, easily led astray. Tales have a kind of inertia that is never possible to fully control. As it is I’m taking on the role of midwife, or of the tender of a garden whose only merit is at best sowing seeds and later to fight tediously against weeds. “Am I doing the right thing by telling stories? Wouldn’t it be better to fasten the mind with a clip, tighten the reins, and express myself not by means of stories and histories, but with the simplicity of a lecture, where in sentence after sentence a single thought gets clarified, and then others are tacked onto it in the succeeding paragraphs? I could use quotes and footnotes. Halfway through the book, under the heading “Travel Tales,” the narrator seems to question her method of writing the book:
That gargantuan ear travels the world, straining hard to listen, picking up images and setting them down in print. This passage shows up on page 13, but it is a good description of what is to come in the following four hundred pages of the book. In my writing, life would turn into incomplete stories, dreamlike tales, would show up from afar in odd dislocated panoramas, or in cross sections-and so it would be almost impossible to reach any conclusions as to the whole.” It was a story for travelers, meant to be read on the train-what I would write for myself to read.” She continues as follows: “I was able to concentrate and became for some time a sort of gargantuan ear that listened to murmurs and echoes and whispers, far-off voices that filtered through the walls. The ‘I’ narrator informs us early on that she The fiction is mixed in with the fact to the point that you sometimes cannot tell which is which. From accounts of nonsexual orgasms documented in “Orgasm Range and Variability in Humans: A Content Analysis.” Study published in The International Journal of Sexual Health, November, 2018įlights (Riverhead Books, 403 pages) is a fascinating, while quirky, eccentric book, often factual, non-fictional, often clearly fictional. Or if I can hear a flight take off.” – From “Come As You Are,” in Harper’s “Readings,” April, 2019.
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