ALL IS FORGOTTEN,
NOTHING IS LOST by Lan Samantha Chang
Book Quote:
“I am imprinting
this upon my memory,” she said. “The southern exposure of a winter morning
light, the sounds of thaw, water dripping off the eaves, the squirrels…Sometimes
I seem to know, in the split of a second of a moment, that it will be a moment
I’ll want to keep.”
This is a beautiful
book. If you want to read something that has the same effect as gazing at a
vast and perfect ink-wash painting, calming and yet utterly absorbing, reach
for this. Like the tiniest haze of seeping ink will be skillful enough to
convey a distant village nestling in the hills, or the flight of a crane; there
is not a word misplaced in this small and lovely work. Its theme is poetry, and
indeed the exquisite style does full justice to the subject.
The plot follows
the lives of a handful of graduate poetry students and their teacher. The
initial focus is on their interactions and early relationships during
university years, but as the story progresses the camera lens zooms with
painful precision on subsequent pinpoints of time.
The technique of
the writing is such that it leaves one with an impression of overlapping layers
rather than a well-woven tapestry, the latter of which is the more usual
impression in a well-plotted novel. Life depicted here is more a palimpsest
than a continuous narrative. There’s an almost fatalistic crystallisation of
the view of the past seeping into the present (or the ongoing) that’s highly
peculiar, and entirely seductive.
It’s even more
astonishing to find such alluring excellence in a book that is essentially
about writing. Generally, tomes ranting away about the torment of literary endeavours
and the social inadequacies of their perpetrators are best put out of their
misery immediately by means of a swift bonfire. But rather than wallow
first-hand in the self-absorption and uncertainty as so many of these efforts
tend to, Chang depicts a view onto these same themes that’s as unnervingly
detached as a high-resolution spy satellite picture: taken from space, but
accurate enough to read the print on a newspaper. The style is formal,
bordering on the stilted, the tone even and quiet.
Two of the central
characters are the poetry student friends Roman and Bernard. Roman is driven,
moderately gifted, insistently handsome and, eventually, inordinately
successful. Bernard is his counterpart, with caricature-like introversion,
religious torment and more than a hint of obsessive compulsive disorder born
out in poverty, and the novel makes no bones about his role in the narrative as
the “traditional” poet.
These extreme
stereotypes should be flat shadows by rights. Instead they’re almost luminous,
depicted by refraction, like a painter using the space that is not to denote
the presence of an object. These two characters vie with each other, in their
peculiar way, for the attentions of their teacher Miranda Sturgis, the
acclaimed and established poet. Their differing approaches, viewpoints and
degree of success in gaining her approval and attention are at the core of the
novel.
Along with the
much-debated question of “why write poetry,” the novel explores facets of the
role of the teacher (or mentor), the relationship of the mentor with the
recipient, and the progression of the student in turn becoming mentor. The
development here is linked structurally and thematically to the ageing process,
which gives the novel as a whole a feeling of natural evolution; something
organic and inevitable. Perhaps this is why I can’t remember reading anything
with so little a sense of contrivance. Despite, or perhaps because of, the
meticulous precision with which it’s put together.
The character
reveal is also atypical. It’s not so much a reader discovering an
already-formed entity but the entity and the reader making the discovery
together. Again, the sense of extreme detachment fused with extreme intimacy is
slightly dizzying.
If you read action
thrillers exclusively, then I suppose this book is not for you. Apart from that
I’d recommend it to anybody. You don’t need to know about writing or poetry,
just be ready to think about why art is necessary for life. And read a jolly
good story in the meantime, complete with romance, betrayal, suspense and
verve. It’s quiet, but it’s a page-turner.
(First published in
Mostly Fiction Book Reviews, 2011)
