 The Secrets Hidden in BooksbyNicki Leone
I’ve always lived my life a little bit in books. Even as a child, I knew the stories of my favorite books better than I knew most people—they carried the weight of reality to me, as solid and “present” in my life as my best friend Kathy who lived across the street. More so, perhaps, because for a best friend Kathy wasn’t an intimate part of my life. Her interests were more focused on clothing and movies and jewelry and make up. We bought our first record together, scrounging our allowance to come up with $9.99 for the soundtrack to the movie Grease—we both wanted to be Olivia Newton John, the one at the end of the movie with the perm and the skintight black leather, not the one at beginning with the saddle shoes and poodle skirt. We got our ears pierced together, and we bought our first make up together, a shiny and gooey flavored lip gloss called “Kissing Stick” long before we had ever kissed anyone. We did not read together though, because Kathy wasn’t much of a reader. And we went to different schools, so she had an entire other life outside the one we created, out of my sight and to be honest, out of my interest. “Off the page” of our friendship. While she was comparing Kissing stick flavors and crushes with her friends after school, I was reading. I was often reading. I was, I admit, happier reading. Hushed discussions of boys I didn’t know with girls I didn’t go to class with bored me. (Olivia Newton John in black leather did not bore me, but that’s a topic for another column). In other words, Kathy and I led different lives which only intersected because of an accident of geography—we happened to live across the street from each other. To know her, I would have had to hang out with the people she hung out with—to be more in her day-to-day life. And for her to know me, I used to think, she would have had to read the books I was reading. I used to think this. But now, I’m not so sure. My second-floor bedroom at home was a converted kitchenette that had, as its most distinctive architectural features, a door that opened onto nothing (the attached upper veranda having long since been removed) and an inset space along one wall that had originally been for cabinets, but that my parents had turned into a small bookshelf for me. Even when I was young, the shelves were crammed full. I used to idly run my eyes over the books on the shelves—all of which I had read many, many times, and wonder what a stranger would make of the person who had such a collection. To know me, know my books, I thought. (Even now, I am resisting the urge to write down a list of titles for readers to visualize.) I wouldn’t have to explain so much, I would think, if everyone else would just read these books. They’d get it. They’d get me. Of course, now that I’m older I realize that a shelf of books is not a secret alphabet for decoding someone’s personality. There are good signs and bad signs and curious and mysterious signs but they are only signs, pointers. Just as finding a bottle of good quality extra virgin olive oil in a cabinet is a good omen for what to expect from dinner, even though it does not, in itself, guarantee that anyone in the house can cook. It is what we, as readers, bring to every book that will ultimately determine what we take from reading it. Still, it’s impossible for me to look at a shelf of books and not at least speculate about their owner. To see the books lined up neatly, or stacked haphazardly, and not think that they are a kind of clue, whispering about the person who has taken the trouble to own them. What we are to books, what books are to us—what they offer to us and what we take from them—is the theme that runs through David Bajo’s seductive and sometimes puzzling novel The 351 Books of Irma Arcuri. The 351 books of the title are hand-bound hardcovers that Irma, a writer and book conservationist, has bequeathed to her long-time friend and sometime lover, a mathematician named Philip Mazyrk. The first Philip hears about the inheritance is in an email from Irma’s mother. Irma, apparently, is gone. Not dead. Just gone. Disappeared from life. “Can one do that? Leave her own life? How does one do that?” asks Philip’s most recent ex-wife, who knew and liked this woman who drifted in and out of Philip’s life like an errant comet on an unpredictable orbit. “She left me her books, B.” answers Philip. It’s as final a statement as either of them can imagine her making. Naturally Philip resolves to find her. Irma and Philip’s relationship has endured longer than anything else in either of their lives—longer than Irma’s countless boyfriends, and through Philip’s two marriages and the following inevitable divorces. They each seemed to use the other to fill in the gaps of their lives, like the leading that holds all the colored glass together in the window—undemanding, but utterly necessary. The logical course of action in a missing persons case is to inform the authorities. Or hire a detective, start tracking down credit card statements, phone records, witnesses, email accounts—following all the little ripples we leave as we navigate our way through life. Philip does none of these things. Instead, he quits his job at an insurance firm, rearranges his furniture to make room, and waits on the books that Irma has sent him. When they arrive, he shelves them (by author as she did, without regard to subject or genre) and then he starts to read them. The secret to Irma Arcuri, he believes, is in her books. The books themselves are very nearly the main characters in the story. Of the 351 sent to Philip, five were actually written by Irma Arcuri herself—one even loosely based on their own relationship—and the rest were re-bound by her in a kaleidoscopic collection of colors and materials: They were splendorous together, in their cloth and leather bindings of jewel-toned yellow, green, red, or blue, or the more austere black and burgundy. No jackets, with titles embossed in gold, silver, brass, or iron. Most she had re-bound or restored herself, using period materials and tools. There are quite a few sex scenes in the story—Philip and Irma, Philip and his exes, Philip and the strange and enticing woman he met seemingly by accident at a bar—the man has no trouble getting laid. But not one of them are as sexy or physically sensuous as the scenes that describe the books. Those are written with worship. With lust. As it turns out, Philip’s instincts were well founded. The first book he picks to read—chosen via his own peculiar habit of sampling things in a 3,4,7 pattern—is Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges. When he opens the cover to look at the title page he finds a penciled inscription in what he thinks might be Irma’s handwriting: “Welcome to my world.” Philip’s search for Irma takes him through the books as well back through the people that make up his own life—his two ex-wives, his stepdaughter and stepson, old friends he knew before, and during, and after his various times with Irma. But the more he reads, the more he realizes that his Irma was only one version, one story. All the people in his life seem to have their own Irma. She was friends—and sometimes lovers—with both his ex-wives. She knew his stepdaughter, entranced his stepson. Philip had thought that Irma floated in and out of his life, but perhaps he had that backwards. Perhaps he floated in and out of hers. Philip starts to feel suspicious of every seeming coincidence. Of the woman he meets in a bar—who reminds him of Irma although they look nothing alike. Of the way his stepdaughter suddenly, after months of silence, starts inviting him to go running with her. Of the sudden phone call from his second ex-wife, (who bears a name in common with Dante’s beloved and immortal Beatrice). All these apparently random occurrences start to feel connected to the mathematician, who is, after all, practiced at seeing patterns in the world. His main companion in his search, appropriately enough, is a copy of Don Quixote (bound in dimpled yellow leather, four fingers thick at the spine). But he is afraid to start it, and once started, afraid to finish it—worried what it means that Don Quixote dies at the end. By the time he takes it off the shelf to read, he has realized that the Irma’s books all contain messages—not just penciled symbols or slips of paper hidden in the pages, but actual messages, letters and conversations from her to him bound right into the book and indistinguishable from the surrounding authentic text—he knows that not only is he following her footsteps, Irma has anticipated his every move. The 351 Books of Irma Arcuri is the kind of biblio-mystery that invites comparisons to Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s Shadow of the Wind, or Arturo Perez-Reverte’s The Club Dumas. Plot, however, takes second place to descriptive power and sheer, breathless exultation in the magic of literature. It is not a mystery to be solved so much as an extended rumination on what it means to become lost in a book, and as such contains layer after layer of allusion and illusion, plots and subplot, metaphors that turn on themselves to become metaphors for something else. Don Quixote’s quest being the most glaringly obvious case, but there are implications and intimations throughout the story. Because of this literary indulgence, the novel lacks a certain cohesiveness and focus (one can’t help wondering, for example, why no one ever takes a more prosaic approach to finding Irma—this is the age of the Internet, after all. It isn’t all that easy to fall off the grid) and there are some weak spots, one suspects, especially with regards to Philip’s mathematical approach to his search. For example, Philip often describes (very poetically) the equations he writes to discover any number of mysterious things, from how to find Irma to what might be bothering his saddened stepdaughter. But a mathematician would tell you that these are expressions, not equations. Expressions describe. Equations solve. These are minor complaints, however, in a book that is rich in beautiful detail—especially in setting and in describing books. There are gorgeously-rendered descriptions of Philadelphia, Corsica, Mexico, Barcelona, Seville. But it is the books that get the most attention. The process of restoring and binding a book falls naturally into many parts of the story until the reader, like Irma, like Philip, can almost feel the texture of different linens and leathers, the rough edges of old paper, parchment and vellum, and smell the acrid scent of ink, tannic acid, and the dust that seems inherent in every old volume. “Most of us,” Irma once told Philip, “can’t accept being the protagonist of our own lives. Whether we only watch TV or sports or read thousands of books, we’re all just trying to find another protagonist for our lives. One besides ourselves.” Philip doesn’t watch television, and until he was sent Irma’s book collection, he didn’t read much—at least in the way of fiction. But as he makes his way towards his disappeared lover, guided by Borges and Cervantes, he discovers that he has become the protagonist—if not of his own life, then of hers. Books mentioned in this column:
|
