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?