Eva Luna, Isabel Allende

Here’s what happens in Eva Luna: a fascist scientist develops the perfect embalming method, an old woman survives a flood by floating in her own coffin, a little girl and a Portuguese man cut open chicken throats for gold, an artful application of Universal Matter helps rescue rebel prisoners from a jungle prison, a high ranking military official makes advances and threats during a classy dinner, a young Austrian boy and his mentally disabled sister hide under a tablecloth from their abusive father, three cousins explore love in a South American hamlet, a guerilla leader can’t follow some of his own rules, a talented artist becomes more of a woman than most who are already born that way, a girl buries her dowry after witnessing a suicide, telenovelas start heading in new directions, and a stuffed puma shows up every once in a while.
Allende manages to blend all these stories and more into a single, coherent story. The story within a story idea fascinates me, and I began to think of each Allende story as a living thing. I kept thinking of walking through a jungle as I read; there were enough details to be almost overwhelming, yet these details helped me focus on new details as they crossed my path. As Allende tells these stories, she seamlessly switches from first person to third person; she moves but never rushes. My only issue with the story was that Eva Luna seemed a little too irresistible to be believable, but that’s only a small interruption in what was otherwise a continuous and vivid dream. I’m satisfied that this read has left me with the open-ended question of “how does an author create this coherent jungle book, a complex ecosystem that has taken Mother Nature millions of years to achieve?”

Zen in the Art of Writing, Ray Bradbury

Bradbury’s collection of essay is part advice and part auto-biography from meetings with Mr. Electrico to keeping and feeding your own Muse. The beautiful aspect of these essays is that you can read and reread them on their own or any sequence; either route still allows the reader to experience Bradbury’s generosity as he openly communicates his sources of inspiration.
There were some points in the book where I was distinctly aware that Bradbury comes from an older generation. For example, he mentions how Fahrenheit 451 was literally a dime novel since he frantically typed all the text on typewriters in a library basement that charged a dime for each half hour. Unless I survive an apocalypse and my electronic appliances don’t do the same, I don’t see myself ever having this experience. However, there are some aspects that hold true through the generations. Bradbury frequently mentions that he has written a thousand words every day for a very long time. He certainly doesn’t claim that all these words have become masterpieces, but he does imply that all writing – even bad writing – has some value (how else do we preserve our inspiration?). I won’t give away the simple but insightful steps that Bradbury mentions in his essay for which the book is titled, but I’d like to end with a simile that he offers to the reader to keep as their own. “Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. That landmine is me.”

On Becoming a Novelist, John Gardner

“That’s me!” I thought to myself as I read the book title and congratulated myself on buying the book at my local Borders. I started questioning both my previous statement and my purchase when I struggled to get through the first half of the book, a section entitled “The Writer’s Nature.” Originally, I felt distanced from Gardner’s advice by what I took as pomposity (especially when he bashes science fiction); I eventually realized that this is Gardner’s honesty taking its own form. He repeatedly makes genuine appeals to the highest level of novelist in an extremely detailed fashion. These details are what make the continuous and vivid dream of a novel possible (“detail is the lifeblood of fiction”). Gardner provides numerous examples of how a poor choice of language can disrupt this dream from sentence structure to distasteful idioms. I was shocked to find that I had overlooked many of these applications in my own writing.
The second half of the book was more accessible, and I wonder if Gardner did this with conscious intent (many of his anecdotes follow a similar pattern of describing arduous but rewarding experiences.) We are taken on a brief but intricate journey through writer workshops, interactions with agents and editors, and possible bouts of writer’s block. I have faith that these later sections will be useful in my future endeavors, but there is an undertone of respect and generosity throughout the entire book that is immediately inspiring. I believe Gardner sums up these values when he warns the aspiring novelist to not “play pointlessly subtle games in which storytelling is confused with puzzle making.” Respect the reader enough to take them on as an equal partner. Be generous.