Readings for October 23, 2022

I borrowed The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka from the library after reading a brief review that mentioned two things: the book was about people who swim laps at a local pool and about a woman with dementia. It also mentioned that the book does innovative things with voice and style, which I love.

The first two chapters are the ones most discussed in reviews. It’s not common to write using the first person plural as Otsuka does here:

The pool is located deep underground, in a large cavernous chamber many feet beneath the streets of our town. Some of us come here because we are injured, and need to heal. We suffer from back backs, fallen arches, shattered dreams, broken hearts, anxiety, melancholia, anhedonia, the usual aboveground afflictions.

And that’s just the opening three sentences.

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Soon a faint crack appears at the bottom of the pool, and the chorus responds to it in individual ways. Some leave the pool immediately and never come back. Some deny its existence. Some want to study it. Experts are called in to offer opinions.

The only character granted an individual existence in these early chapters is Alice, who is in the early stages of dementia. A faint crack has appeared in her neurology.

The Swimmers doesn’t use this choral voice throughout. Otsuka shifts into the more usual third person to describe what Alice can (Japanese internment camps) and cannot (the day of the week) remember. Then she shifts again into second person as Alice moves into a memory care facility and remains in the second person to relate the experiences of Alice’s adult daughter:

What was it, you wonder, that first made her begin to forget? Was it the chemical in the hair dye that once turned her scalp bright red for two weeks? Was it somethin toxic in the hair spray (Aqua Net) that she used two and sometimes three times a day for more than thirty years? Hold your breath! she’d say as she pressed down on the nozzle and disappeared beneath a cloud of clod white mist.

The book is drawn from Otsuka’s own life and her mother’s decline from a rare type of dementia known as Pick’s disease, though it is categorized as fiction. If I may hop on one of my many hobby horses for a second, The Swimmers is what everyone used to just call literature: not memoir, not autofiction, but the transformation of one’s life events into a truthful fiction, as practiced by Joyce, Kerouac, Miller, Acker, Jong, all of whom were shelved under literature until BISAC categories came along in 1995. Recent Nobel laureate for Literature Annie Ernaux practices this kind of literature as well.

Back to The Swimmers: it accomplishes all of these shifts in voice while maintaining Otsuka’s quick-paced but thoughtful style in only about 125 pages (I read the ebook). It’s a short book whose themes linger beyond the last page.

Other Things I’ve Been Reading

Speaking of Annie Ernaux, there’s a good essay on her work in the Times Literary Supplement if you’re unfamiliar or would like a refresher. Also, check out the joyfully unhinged tweets from the American publisher of Ernaux in translation after her win. The people at Seven Stories Press are good eggs.

Join me in reading Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell. Starting later this week (October 28, so get on it), the Orwell Foundation will be serializing the book in 1500-word chunks, approximately.

Orwell DailyGeorge Orwell. Every day. For free.By The Orwell Foundation

If you recall, I was reading Fairy Tale by Stephen King, and it had a slow-ish opening. Well, things pick up a lot at the end. The story structure is more like ramp than a mountain. It’s a wonderful book to get lost in on rainy fall days. You can respond to Substack newsletters via email, so if you would like a spoiler for how Radar the dog fares, send me a note and I will individually share that one piece of information.

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And Now for Your Dog Pic