golden apples of curiosity

How this place for exploring reading, writing, music, and the domains of the muses began:

First -- an e-mail from a writer friend in Hamilton, who had all unwary of the ultimate effect sent me references to a couple of literary blogs, among them chekhovsmistress. Being for many years "chekhov's admirer", I had to explore, and stumbled upon a link to reading Gaddis's The Recognitions, ergo doubly enticing.

Next --   a phase of rampant literary blog exploration beyond the local enticements of bookninja, encouraged by same friend, thus:

"Keep blogging away. For people marooned in the deserts of Willowdale or Hamilton sometimes it's a way to "get" culture since it is a specific we need in regular doses in exurbia to stay sane."

Then -- au revoir William Gaddis (for the moment) and bienvenu Cervantes, courtesy of the readers at 400windmills, and the conversation really began.

And voila, the suggestion that even a creature immersed in the printed page might try her hand at a thread in the great litblog network, casting a few lines in the direction of books chanced upon, books loved, books beguiling and leading to more books, and writers, with always music going on.

As to the name, which I mentioned in a tentative form to a new virtual friend, who recognized the Greek myth of the huntress Atalanta, and to whom I responded:

"Your recognition of the meaning of "apples for Atalanta" is spot on, and when I came across an epigraph by Eudora Welty* (who refers to her as "Atlanta") in one of Levertov's books, I realized how well it applies to my modus operandi. It's standard lore that people who write are as a rule voracious & curious readers, and the more I read, the more crops up that I want to have a look at -- with the result that yes: I do get "distracted" by all those golden apples tossed my way (and who could resist?), but the difference in my case is that the apples are edible, or digestible, and nourish me as well."

*"Was it so strange, the way things are flung out at us, like the apples of Atlanta perhaps, once we have begun a certain onrush?" in "Music from Spain", a story in Eudora Welty's collection, The Golden Apples, the quotation given by Denise Levertov Breathing the Water (1987).

Metaphorically edible and nourishing: no bibliophagy here.

"what should I read?"

I'm always stymied when people have told me that they don't read much, but think it might be a "good idea" to read books, only they don't know what to read, where to start. I can only tell them, if they ask, what I'm reading at the moment, though I have then to decide whether to talk about the book on the go in the bathroom,  usually a second-hand one because the pages suffer from the humidity of the bath, or the one in the kitchen, which can be a new one but paperback so it doesn't take up too much space among the accumulated counter debris where it must rest while porridge gets stirred or vegetables get added to the pot but will wait faithfully for my return to take up the next few pages. Then there's one on the so-called coffee table in the living room in the event that one actually sits there with a cup of coffee and needs a book to go with it, or the other at the dining room table, just in case. Not to mention the table by the daybed in the small front room that doubles as occasional guest room plus extra space for bookshelves and a place to house the dusty old portable television set which is rarely on because it only receives local channels and normally broadcasts pure drivel and would be left on the curb except that it has become handy as a plant stand ("More" Arguments for the Elimination of Television?)  Bedside books, books in backpacks for subway travel, jacket pockets for shorter jaunts e.g. waiting in line at the grocery store, or at the bank. The titles vary as they get consumed, and seem seldom to appeal to my interlocutor because  . . . don't know why, except that they tend not to be bestsellers.  Indeed, they are never "bestsellers", unless picked up from the library shelf for a three-day loan to check out what the fuss is about. 

On the go now, besides Don Quixote (who wanders room to room), are Saira Shah's The Storyteller's Daughter (good size for the subway; more about this one below, at "where are the women"), Arturo Perez-Reverte's The Flanders Panel (from the library, out of curiosity, for kitchen reading, having replaced the recently completed library copy of  Howard Engel's Memory Book); Tatyana Tolstaya's Pushkin's Children: Writing on Russia and Russians, borrowed from the library mostly for her essay on Andrei Makine's Dreams of My Russian Summers, after I'd read a tepid review of Makine's writing when The Earth and Sky of Jacques Dorme came out. Then there's a new book published by Anansi, The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich as told to David Cayley, plus a clutch of recently acquired poetry books: Adam Sol's 2003 Trillium Award-winning book, Crowd of Sounds; Hans Faverey's Against the Forgetting: Selected Poems; and Edvard Kocbek's Nothing is Lost: Selected Poems, as well as an outcropping of books bought at the recent Toronto Festival of Storytelling and a growing stack of fiction by women.

In sum: it's an organic process, peculiar to what arouses interests. One book leads to another, there is no one way, or right way, to proceed, no lists to adhere to. Diving in, getting immersed, picking up what floats by -- is the only way I know how; it's a huge sea.

Having avoided the whole business of reading lists, I still got excited about Robert Gray's list of world fiction in translation at Fresh Eyes: A Bookseller's Journal, and his invitation for interested folk to read in May and offer comment. I've tracked down copies of almost all the books he mentions, need only to figure out where to find the time to read them along with everything else on the go. In my enthusiasm I sent the URL for Grey's blog to my west coast friend, herself a former bookseller, once also a poetry reviewer, and now a freelance editor and public radio broadcaster, who agreed the list is of interest but asked: "where are the women?"

WHERE ARE THE WOMEN?

Indeed: Gray's anatomy of world fiction in translation is missing about 35% (by my ad hoc math) of its body. Only 3 of the writers out of 20 on the list are women, so if the list were to be 10:10, that's a 35% difference. And if the existing list were to be expanded to have as many women writers as men (17 men:17 women) there'd need to be 14 more women writers to have a balance.I don't even really want to get into percentages with the latter (though it looks like the number of women writers should be 70% greater), for purely practical reasons. I'll have enough to read with my list of Grey's 20 for the moment, by only adding 7 women writers to the pile. As time goes on, maybe I'll gradually add ten more.

Women Writing the World

Here's my personal list, for starters (the first two having been written in English, but by women from non-English-speaking countries):

Saira Shah. The Storyteller's Daughter (Anchor Books)
    Although written in English, the writer's background is Afghani, this being a memoir by the daughter of Idries Shah, the great Sufi writer and storyteller.  A journalist, she filmed a documentary called Beneath the Veil, about the plight of Afghan women under Taliban rule.

Kamala Markandaya. Nectar in a Sieve (New American Library)
    Written in English by an Indian woman.

Gioconda Belli. The Inhabited Woman (University of Wisconsin Press)
    Translated from Spanish by Kathleen March. Belli is Nicaraguan.

Carmen Boullosa. Cleopatra Dismounts (Grove Press)
    Translated from Spanish by Geoff Hargreaves. Boullosa is Mexican.

Elfriede Jelinek. Wonderful Wonderful Times (Serpent's Tail)
    Translated from German by Michael Hulse.

Fumiko Enchi. Masks (Vintage)
   [Translation from Japanese appears to be by Doris Bargen]

Maria Dermout. The Ten Thousand Things (New York Review of Books)
    Translated from Dutch by Hans Koning

These seven for a beginning, all of them chosen simply by browsing at Bob Millar Bookroom when I went looking for Purple Hibiscus by the Nigerian writer, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. (It was out of stock and I'll get a call when more copies arrive.) The last two on the list (Enchi and Dermout) were encountered by happenstance on the internet, and the trail has been lost. There's another Mexican writer whose work I'm enthusiastic about, Elena Poniatowska, with a recent novel, The Sky's Skin, available from the library, as are only a few of the others mentined above. Finally (for a current total of 10 women writers of current interest to me) is Marie-Claire Blais, whose fiction I haven't read since university. The title I've chose is a collection of stories, The Exile & The Sacred Travellers. It has been translated from French by Nigel Spencer, available from Ronsdale Press, but I'm going to locate the original French from Librairie Champlain, or the library (depending on finances). A possible 11th is Dina Rubina, Our Chinese Business, a novel and stories published in Russian in 2004. I have read her writing in translation, and am tempted to dust off my Russian to attempt the original, bought last winter at the Russian bookstore Knigomania. As a teaser, there is an excerpt translated into English by Daniel M. Jaffe at the online Toronto Slavic Quarterly, the University of Toronto's Online Academic Electronic Journal in Slavic Studies http://www.utoronto.ca/tsq/03/rubina.shtml

Enough.

I'll use this site to give progress reports, in the hopes that these randomly chosen books will find fellow readers to converse with.

Now my toes are wet, "E il naufragar m'e dolce in questo mare." I just have to learn how to insert diacritical marks where needed, and the digital photo-as-blog-embellisment will be imported sometime tomorrow.

Time for Quixote.

Comments

[Bud Parr]

Brava! I'm waiting to here about Tatyana Tolstaya's Pushkin's Children, particularly, and everything else as well. You're going to cause me to spend even more money at the bookstores. Great start Norma and you can look for a note of announcement on my site.