Over the weekend, with the cozy comfort of my duvet, I finished reading the Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. The story took me by surprise. I had no prior knowledge of the plot, characters, or themes, so I had the luxury of reading without the taint of another opinion. Even as a teenager, Duddy has the ambition to pursue his dream of owning a huge plot of land before he’s even legally allowed to own it, but he loses his humanity in the process. It was a fairly galvanizing story, something I’m not sure I could say if I knew more about the book before reading it. It’s his drive, his initiative that I admire.
Yesterday, I started The Republic of Love (on the recommendation of Karen) by Carol Shields. Even though I’m only through the first chapter, I can already tell that Shields knows what she’s talking about. She knows how relationships disintegrate, knows how people think, knows how our daily lives are a reflection of the moods we have and mindsets we wear. I’m reminded of Khalil Gibran, the Lebanese philosopher and author of The Prophet who wrote as if he understood love and the spirit on a completely different level. Even though he never met the love of his life face-to-face (they knew each other through publications), their collection of love letters shows an understanding and harmony deeper than any other two people I can think of.
It always makes me wonder: how much of an author’s writing is from experience and how much is from imagination? The details, subtleties, thoroughness of the characters they develop, expressed in the ingenuity of the words they use must be from more than mere understanding. Would Frost have been able to write his rural poetry without moving to New Hampshire, spending his time there as a cobbler, farmer, and teacher? Would Irving have been able to write from the perspective of a teacher at Bishop Strachan, without first watching the girls in their plaid skirts being picked up by their wealthy parents? Even in the preface to A Hero Of Our Time, Lermontov admits, “others delicately hinted that the author had drawn portraits of himself and his acquaintances” and brushes this off as a “threadbare witticism”, but could he really have created such an amoral anti-hero without a lump of burning indifference in his chest?
