In the last three
days I have finished three books that all could have “psychology” listed in the
Library of Congress tiny font reference. They are written from three different
countries (hence only 2 actually have Library of Congress references listed) in
three different years by two gentleman and a lady. One is hard covered and one
has a damaged spine that has lost page 107/108. They are all fictional, though
I’d argue that they are realistic. I read them chronologically from when they
were published and how I picked them up off the bookshelves in the Mekele Peace
Corps Office.
We Need to Talk About Kevin (copyright in 2003) was the 2005 winner
of the Orange Prize for Fiction by Lionel Shriver. Instead of chapters, this
book is broken down into letters from November 8, 2000 to April 8, 2001 between
Eva Khatchadourian and her estranged husband Franklin. Eva recounts all the
secrets and hidden thoughts that lay behind their marriage until their
almost-16-year-old son, Kevin, commits mass murder at his high school. She
battles through guilt, despair, grief and so much more.
The Solitude of Prime Numbers merited its author, Paolo Giordan,
Italy’s Premio Strega award. Originally written in 2008, it has been translated
into 33 different languages. It’s set in 1983, but primarily focusing on the
main characters’ lives in 1991 (freshmen year of high school) and 2007 (after
life takes them in different directions). Mattia and Alice both had tragedy
strikes in their childhood that greatly influenced them into their teenage and
adult lives. Mattia, a mathematician, realizes they are like prime numbers,
more specifically twin primes (example 11 and 13, 41 and 43) that get rarer as
you go through all possible numbers. It’s a book focused on how things can be
so close together, but never really be side by side.
The Silver Linings Playbook surprised me on the shelf as I’ve only
been aware of the movie. The book is better. Like The Solitude of Prime Numbers this was the author’s, Matthew
Quick’s, debut novel. In the book, Pat Peoples has just been released from a
mental health facility with the intentions of winning his estranged wife,
Nikki, back with a change of character. One of the ways he does this is to find
the silver linings God has put into the movie of his life. However, just
because God is directing the movie, doesn’t mean it won’t be complicated or
messy. Pat soon realizes that he has lost his memory, more time has passed than
he was aware of, odd new friends will enter, and he’ll have to remember and
face the past eventually to start seeing the future.
Of all these books,
I’d only really recommend reading the latter. (Dad & Heather, only chapters
4, 21 and a couple of paragraphs in 31 and 33 actually mention math) However, I
was unexpectedly perplexed when I put them all next to each other and realized
how much truth they do speak together about my own life right now.
Lesson #1:
You never know what someone is really thinking or why. There isn’t a book that
gives you a background on the other characters walking around your own story.
There are no italic bubbles floating over people’s heads giving you a heads up
on what they are thinking behind all they say. Sometimes I wish there was. I
want to know the why’s for other people’s thoughts and actions. I want to
understand them with a cheat sheet. That is why relationships are so important.
In order to truly see the people in your story, you need to listen to theirs.
It will take more time than a paragraph or chapter of a book, but it is
important.
I’ve realized this
recently as I started talking with a Peace Corps Volunteer that I hadn’t
chatted with much before. There wasn’t anything wrong with this volunteer, it’s
just we never really talked. Through dialogue of various topics over time,
we’ve started to see a better picture of each other than we first imagined when
we first saw each other.
Lesson #2:
You don’t know how it is going to end. Unlike some of my friends, I refuse to
skip chapters to see what happens next. I let the story play out. But, and I
wonder if this isn’t most of us, I do try to picture the ending. This was
especially the case in The Silver Linings
Playbook, where I was under the false impression that the movie had
followed the book (typically, it didn’t). Pat keeps this impression too as he
continues the theory that his life is a movie and it’s about time for the happy
ending. However, in the last 50 pages of each book twists came that were so far
from what I imagined I had to stop and read paragraphs again and again to grasp
their meaning. This was especially the case in We Need to Talk About Kevin. What’s surprising is that these
unexpected elements smoothly fit into the larger picture. This all made me
wonder what I was thinking when clearly the author had had a different aim
going the whole time. The Solitude of
Prime Numbers left me with the most unanswered questions about the
characters, but ended with completion like the others.
This entire school
year, I’ve thought I’d been in control. I knew what was going to happen next to
the end. Yet looking back on it I realize that it went so wonderfully different
than I had expected. I taught outside and in classrooms with no desks. There
were days when 2 students showed up and others when I had students from other
classes crowd in, making my 70 student class seem small. There were complaints
that I wouldn’t finish units on time, and I ended up finishing with the most
review time (not that it’s a race or anything).
I can only assume
that the remainder of my Peace Corps service (and my life, if I’m being very
honest) is going to be this way. I’m not sure how this chapter will end or
when. I don’t know what characters will remain and which ones will leave. I
don’t know what lingering questions will remain or if it will be a clean and
clear break. The end is inevitable, but the content to fill the pages towards
it is uncertain.
Lesson #3:
Give yourself a voice. In the first line of her first letter, Eva states that
she is unsure what has really moved her to start writing the letters to her
husband. In the first chapter, Pat states that this is “mostly daily memoirs”
for Nikki though it starts after he has been released as doctors confiscated everything
he wrote before hand. While Alice
and Mattia are told from a third person narrator, their voices and thoughts are
adequately represented.
Tone is important.
You know the way Pat speaks based on his writing, just as you do with Eva’s
letters. But what’s more valuable is that they gave their voices a chance to
speak. They didn’t keep their words muddled in their heads. They didn’t cave to
the second guesses of not writing. They just wrote. They gave themselves a
voice.
So often I second
guess myself and remain silent. I don’t speak Tigrigna, but act shy and pass up
the opportunity to met someone new. I don’t try the strange verb conjugation
and end up just pausing or putting in another word. I think of things I want to
share, but don’t type them up. I find an excuse to not write or see my ideas as
unimportant. How many ideas are wasted? And not just from me. What haven’t you
said that needed to be said or articulated in one way or another? Who cares if
your words won’t become an international bestseller, award winner or turned
into a movie, but we all should at least try to share our voices.
These books may be
slightly depressing. They touch on topics which most people avoid, with various
forms of language that you wouldn’t want to hear at school or church. (For the
record they are relatively clean). They aren’t books that I normally would have
picked up, but I did. And in the process I learned something new about myself,
and maybe the world around me.
PS. For the unofficial
record of my life, I don’t usually read this much. It took me a week to read We Need To Talk About Kevin’s 468 pages
and I was able to get through the other two’s combined total of 560 pages
thanks to a combination of sickness, lazy Saturday-ness and no phone network.
While I do loving reading, I much rather be out and about.
PPS. If anyone is
curious, in The Silver Linings Playbook
six other books claiming greatness are mentioned: The Great Gatsby, A Farewell to Arms, The Scarlet Letter, The Bell Jar,
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and The Catcher in the Rye. These are
going to go on my “Read Before PC Ends” list, though they do admit to be
depressing and I’m not sure I can do that right now. Any suggestions?
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