Henriette Lazaridis

I'm a novelist, but this is where I post slightly random and somewhat infrequent thoughts on a range of topics, from what I'm reading, to music I'm listening to, to what I'm working on in my writing, or in my training as a rower. From time to time, there will be pictures. www.henriettelazaridis.com (photo credit Marion Ettlinger)

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A couple of favorites from Oman now that I’m experimenting with Photoninja

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Two strangers and a car

Something interesting happened to me last night. I was walking home from the T late in the evening and was more than halfway into the crosswalk on a side street. I saw that an SUV on the main street had its blinker on to make a left turn, but to my surprise, the car didn't slow down at all and continued at brisk speed. I had to jump out of the way to avoid being struck by it, and only just escaped by inches.

As I jumped, I yelled something--probably profane, though I don't remember--and then stood on the sidewalk generally being aghast. But this lasted only seconds because I realized that the SUV had stopped and that the driver had rolled down his window. I said things to him--variations on "You could have killed me!" and "Holy crap!" (I know that I did say that, ridiculous as it is), and then "You could have fricking killed me!" (I am sure I said fricking because I was kind of surprised that I hadn't sworn).

The whole time during this very brief outburst, the driver was repeatedly saying "I'm sorry". And I caught myself mid-exclamation and said to him "But you stopped, so thank you. Not everybody would." I finished by telling him he had scared the crap out of me and telling him to be careful. He rolled up his window after another apology and drove away.

I've gone on at length to describe this because I was struck by the fact that I hadn't actually sworn a blue streak at him, and that he had actually stopped and apologized without irritation or insincerity. And there it is: everybody behaved well. I was, I think, too scared to just blast the guy with swearing and yelling. And he knew he had made an honest mistake and instantly took responsibility for it. Because of those initial behaviors (his intentional, mine probably not), what could have been a shouting match was instead an experience of people being polite to each other. It was, in the end, kind of cool. Which is why I wanted to write it up.

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Greece Must Stop Saying No

No is a very powerful word in Greek culture. I write this just a few miles as the crow flies from a hillside on which the word ΟΧΙ (NO) is written in white-painted stones. It has nothing to do with the referendum Greeks are voting on today as I write, but commemorates Greece’s rejection of Mussolini’s ultimatum in 1940. After Metaxas, the Greek leader, refused to capitulate to Mussolini’s demands, Greece went to war, pushing the Italians back out of Greece and even into present-day Albania. The ΟΧΙ on the hillside marks the furthest-south spot the Italians reached before they were turned back by defiant and heroic Greeks. It has been painted there for decades, high above a wall on which the same word is mounted in large bronze letters.

That NO has been coopted by those who wish for Greece to exit the Eurozone and go forward independently, surely (though they insist the opposite) on a newly returned drachma. They elide the NO that was issued to Mussolini with the NO to the Germans who eventually imposed on Greece a punishing occupation and a famine so profound that in Athens people dropped dead as they walked on city streets. The NO camp in today’s political arena preys on memories of that conflict and, realigning that NO to today’s Germans, recasts it as a fight against Angela Merkel and the Eurozone for dignity and independence.

Greeks have a tendency to negation. They like to make dire predictions just as much as they express their κεφι, their joie de vivre, in their wry sense of humor and their ability, even in a crisis, to laugh and play. In fact, it’s often the dire predictions that serve as the source of the enjoyment and the playful humor. One of the many good jokes circulating in this period of capital controls goes like this: No work and sixty Euros a day? What crisis?

The most Greek gesture a person can make is not the μουντζα, the open palm thrust out in a Greek version of a middle finger. Nor is it the sweeping out of hands or the pinched fingers moving up and down to punctuate a conversation. It is an upward flick of the head combined with a soft tisking sound from pursed lips. It is very difficult for even those well-versed in Greek culture to get right. What does it mean? It means no. If you wanted to create a sort of shibboleth to sort Greeks out of a line-up, this would be your test. You would ask them if they would like anything, and they would all, to a person, flick their head up almost imperceptibly and make that tiny sound with their lips. No.

Even Metaxas’ rejection of Mussolini was absorbed into the simple and simplistic ΟΧΙ. For what Metaxas actually said on the evening he received the ultimatum was “Alors, c'est la guerre.” He was at a diplomatic function and, speaking the then language of diplomats, declared, “So, this is war.” He uttered a positive. How fitting that the country would immortalize that stand for Greece and for independence as a negation.

It’s time for Greece to embrace the act of embracing something, rather than simply rejecting what is offered, as if to do so were to assert a greater dignity. No is simpler. No makes a person feel defiant, even proud. But it’s time–and I desperately fear that the time has run our–for this culture that expresses so much that is positive to turn its expression to the good, to the YES.

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My latest for the Grub Daily.

You know the feeling, that feeling of a tickle or a whisper, or even less a faint presence of something in the back of your mind. Well, strictly not the back of your mind, but more the upper right- or upper left-hand corner. It just hovers there like some faint star you can’t see unless you look away from it. And even if you do look away, it’s hard to really perceive what it is.

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Robert Falcon Scott: Had we lived

A propos of nothing except my abiding fascination with Robert Falcon Scott and Antarctica, I am struck for the umpteenth time by his final words from his final letter:

We took risks, we knew we took them; things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint, but bow to the will of Providence, determined still to do our best to the last. But if we have been willing to give our lives to this enterprise, which is for the honour of our country, I appeal to our countrymen to see that those who depend on us are properly cared for.

Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance, and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale, but surely, surely a great rich country like ours will see that those who are dependent on us are properly provided for.--R. Scott*

Had we lived. What an astonishing phrase for a living--and dying--man to write. So much impresses me here: the insistence in his last moments that those left behind by his companions and crew be supported; his calm acceptance of the ultimate cost of his risk-taking, and simply the fact that he has taken the time to leave such a note behind to accompany his dead body and give it articulate voice in all that desolation. Surely, surely, he writes. Even in his self-abnegation, there is the wider self-consciousness that leads him to use that rhetorical repetition and to strike the unusual and powerful narrative pose of a dead man. Surely Scott believed that his tale of hardihood and endurance would in fact survive him and that, as a dead man, he would indeed have a tale to tell.

*quoted in Apsley Cherry-Garrard's The Worst Journey in the World

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"It’s been said that the experience of writing is like that of falling in love. The writer enters an exciting new world in which experience is immersive and vivid, in which joy and despair mingle and everything — every gesture, emotion, event — connects back to a sustaining energy. But really, to write is to have an affair. In creating our narratives, we engage in a kind of seduction; we’re called by a lover’s whisper but it’s the summons of our inventions, not our partners."

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Just some thoughts on how useful sports can be in creative life.

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Glorious Sentences: Jane Gardam's Last Friends

That they had in old age finished up by buying houses next door to each other in a village where there was absolutely nothing to do must have been the result of something the lolling gods had set up one drab day on Olympus to give the legal world a laugh.--Jane Gardam I read Jane Gardam's LAST FRIENDS a few months ago and I still remember a sentence that appears on the novel's first page. Read this sentence aloud and you'll notice that the sounds of the opening half seem to be evenly distributed, with no particular assonance or alliteration holding sway. Then in the second half, the Ls announce themselves, then give way to the hard Bs and Ds, only to come back again at the sentence's conclusion. "Lolling gods" is brilliant for the assonance of those Os. And then the Ds of "gods" and "one drab day" form their own leitmotif as the sentence moves on. And finally, we have the Ls of "Olympus" and "legal world a laugh". The whole sentence seems to be constructed as a sort of whipstitch of sounds, through which an aural theme is set up but overlapped with another, Os overlapping with Ds and Bs, overlapping with Ls. I couldn't pinpoint a specific correlation between the sound and the meaning--though surely hard consonants do have a way of sounding drab--but a sentence like this is profoundly pleasing because Gardam has given it a shape directed by content but directed, too, by the aural details of the words she has so carefully chosen.

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"In many ways, it is exactly like James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man — but with the benefit of being 100 pages shorter, and screamingly funny.” - Caitlin Moran's Year in Reading

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I love Portrait but I also love Adrian Mole.

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On Silence

I have been thinking about silence lately. Which is a strange situation for a writer to be in, used as I am to communicating in some way all of the time. At the same time, while thoughts of silence weigh in my mind, I have been surrounding myself with music, blasting my tunes in my car, stuffing my ears with headphones. I have been immersing myself in music while thinking, thinking, all the time, about silence.

The music is only there, of course, as a way to drown things out, and despite the way it fills my environment, my head, with sound, it has the eventual effect of keeping things unsaid. I sing along, loudly, saying other people’s words, not my own.

I’ve been mindful, thus, of things I would write but won’t, essays I could write but choose not to. For I am choosing silence, not being forced into it. This all becomes a question of considering whether I should express certain insights and observations, or whether it’s enough to have had them. There’s the impulse to share a discovery or an idea--I love the essay form (as this little piece might attest) and find I learn from the process of writing in that mode--but do I have to write an essay just to confirm my newfound wisdom on a particular subject or experience?

A writer’s answer to that question is supposed to be yes. Especially now, when a writer must be present, visible, audible on all platforms at all times--when we memoirize and confess and reveal so much about ourselves to the wider world. And yet there are always questions of audience, of that wider world that may or may not care, that may or may not be affected by what we write, and of the narrower world whose boundaries overlap so closely with our own in a Venn diagram of identity.

So I find myself in a strange and not uninteresting situation, in which I keep these essays in my head, held inside by the music I keep playing and singing over them. It’s not a bad thing. In this self-imposed quiet, I find myself turning the ideas over in my mind like pebbles to examine, and this feels like something useful. I’m beginning to wonder if some good, some writerly good, may come from resisting the impulse to express. I wonder if silence can deepen the ideas in some way so that, while they might never emerge as essays, they might enrich some other writing enterprise of mine, some novel down the line.

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Silence in The Marriage of Figaro

Near the very end of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro comes the moment when the philandering Count Almaviva, fresh from yet another discovery of his betrayal, asks his wife for forgiveness. “Contessa, perdono,” he sings, repeating the phrase. And then there is a pause while he awaits the Countess’ response.

Depending on the production you see or the recording you hear, the pause can be the briefest of instances or the longest, most agonizing interruption to the opera’s giddy pace. And if you have the good fortune to witness that longer pause, the agony you feel unfolds like a rich perfume, its narrative deepening and become more complex as the time passes. You have time to hope for the Countess’ mercy and you have time to hope that this time she will stand up for herself, and you have time to ponder a marriage in which forgiveness granted, requested, or withheld is its defining characteristic. By the time the Countess sings, you may well not know what it is you want her to say, though you somehow feel as if your own fate hangs in the balance.

It’s a marvel to me that the moment I would consider the opera’s most powerful--indeed, the moment in which the underlying seriousness of this seemingly comic fluff reveals itself--comes in silence. The Marriage of Figaro begins with perhaps the most purely fun piece of music I have ever heard: the overture, a piece that can’t possibly be played at anything other than breakneck pace and which concludes with a series of wonderfully arrogant chords. It is an onrush of sound that almost can’t keep up with itself. When you see the opera live, you can peek down into the pit and, even from the nosebleed seats, you can sense the exhilaration of the orchestra racing through this physical and aural rush.

And three hours later, you sit up there in those nosebleed seats and hold your breath and wait, along with hundreds of others, to hear whether the Countess will pardon her wayward Count. In a 1981 studio recording of Kiri Te Kanawa singing the role, you wait a for a full four seconds of silence. You wait long enough to begin to feel that something is wrong, that the opera has come to a stop--that the Countess will say no and bring the entire enterprise of the opera, of her marriage, of marriage altogether, to a halt. While you wait, you hear the rustle of someone’s dress, or another person’s cough. Perhaps it’s a nervous cough, for the silence is going on too long and you begin to worry for the Count and somehow for yourself.

Then the Countess replies with perhaps the most beautiful phrase in music, beginning with a soaring fifth that, in Te Kanawa’s voice, seems to be pure, ether-born sound: “Piu docile io sono”. I am kinder than you, she tells the Count, and so I will say yes. Her answer is deeper for the silence that has preceded it--a silence that makes us see the real possibility of rejection and the real cost of her forgiveness.

In Mozart’s silence, the Countess has had time to consider her own pain balanced against her love. What she seems to find in that silence is her dignity. I am kinder than you, and so I will say yes. And we who have waited anxiously for her answer feel that kindness and that dignity all the more powerfully.

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Papingo, Zagori, Epirus, Greece November 2014

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Glorious Sentences: Atonement

Soon after the death of Gabriel García Márquez, I wrote about the opening sentence of One Hundred Years of Solitude, a glorious sentence if there ever was one. For months, I have been thinking of a sentence that perplexed me when I first encountered it in 2002 in the famous library scene in Ian McEwan’s Atonement. It’s not a particularly glorious sentence, but it is, I think, quite masterful.

“She had no experience at all.”

The sentence is a repetition in a passage whose prose carries no extra weight. McEwan conveys both the details of Robbie and Cecilia’s intimacy and the expansiveness of the moment’s emotional import with carefully crafted language And yet, not only does the narration tell us: “As for her, beyond all the films she had seen, and all the novels and lyrical poems she had read, she had no experience at all.” But soon after this, a mere eight sentences later, the narration tells it to us again as McEwan repeats the final clause as a declarative sentence.

When I first read the passage, the repetition was jarring, and though the emotional momentum of the scene carried me forward, I kept puzzling over what McEwan’s purpose could be in allowing, insisting on, this clear echo. Several years after I first read the novel, I had the immense fortune to meet McEwan and speak with him a little. Our conversation turned to a complaint among some readers of Atonement that it was merely a trick novel and that he the writer had managed the novel’s éclat through simple (and cheap, some critics said) manipulation. McEwan replied by saying that the ending was not a trick at all, but that he had written a fully realist novel; given that his narrator is Briony, a writer, the only way she knows how to atone for her crime is to write a correction to the story. What seems a manipulation of the reader is in fact a realistic rendering of what Briony the writer would have done.

Of course anyone who finishes Atonement knows that this is so. But I had not quite allowed Briony a presence in that library scene--beyond her very unwanted appearance as a child of thirteen years. And so, when I had encountered that repeated sentence, I suppose it did not occur to me that the repetition is not McEwan’s but Briony’s. The repetition is an early signal that something is up in this narrative, and that something troubles the air around the two lovers more than the whispers of war, or the hints of domestic violence, or the shattered vase than we realize at this stage in the story.

“She had no experience at all.” This is the adult Briony using her narrative to preserve a certain propriety for her older sister even as she grants her a full measure of the passion Briony’s own actions have cut short. In insisting on Cecilia’s virginity and sexual inexperience in a scene that also demonstrates Cecilia’s sexuality in some detail, Briony behaves at once like the atoning adult writer and like the child whose fateful actions on that summer evening have given her something to atone for. And this is, indeed, Briony’s character: an adult who is frozen in the emotional time of her childhood, who can’t escape the loop of self-recrimination that leads her to rewrite her sister’s and her own story.

That repetition in Briony's narration becomes the eruption of a very particular form of humanity right in the middle of an otherwise controlled scene of another form of humanity. Though she doesn't enter the room until two long paragraphs and one long moment later, Briony, for better and worse, is already in the room.

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Gamila Peak, Zagori, Epirus, Greece

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My Writing Process Blog Tour

In an earlier life, I used to be an academic, and I was deeply involved in the vast critical industry that surrounds James Joyce. There is an annual conference, alternating between cities in Europe and in the United States; there is at least one major critical journal devoted to Joyce; there are additional conferences that spring up around the US from time to time. One of these was called—and here I date myself—Miami J’yce and took place at the University of Miami right around Groundhog Day, aka Joyce’s birthday. I mention all this because it’s through this Joyce circuit that I met Edvige Giunta. We were graduate students at the time, in that cohort of up-and-comers who formed fast friendships when we got together in Milwaukee or Philadelphia or Venice (yes, the locations were different like that). Our first children are roughly the same age and met as babies, but we eventually lost touch. And then we didn’t, in the lovely way that these things go. Neither one of us still works on or with Joyce, but Edi is still in academia, doing wonderful work on memoir, and Italian-American writers, and the Italian-American experience. She kindly asked me to be a part of the My Creative Process blog tour, and I’m delighted to be joining the conversation. Click here to read Edi's post about her writing process. 

WHAT AM I WORKING ON

Just last week, I finished the first draft of my second novel, tentatively titled The Exiles, about a group of American expats in Greece while their finances, their marriage, and their safety at home are increasingly under strain. It’s a messy draft, and will need significant cutting, but at least the story is complete. I wrote The Exiles in bit of a rush, as the novel is set in 2013 against the backdrop of the political and economic crisis in Greece and I want that setting to be as current in the reader’s mind as possible by the time the book comes out. When I began writing it last May, it felt as though I had scooped up two handfuls of water that I had to carry to a finish line before the water ran through my fingers. I’ve just sent the book off to my agent and am now thinking through everything I need to improve.

HOW DOES MY WORK DIFFER FROM OTHERS OF ITS GENRE?

My genre is, I suppose, literary fiction or upmarket fiction. From within that genre, I have my own little pantheon of writers I cluster around me as I think and write. I am acutely aware that I differ from them in the sense that I am neither as technically sophisticated as Kate Atkinson, nor as fine a crafter of prose as Ian McEwan or Jennifer Haigh, nor as skilled at peeling away layers of character as Tana French, nor as laconic and subtle a plotter as Tom Drury. These are the writers I aspire to be like; if this were sports, they would be the ones I wanted to train with so they could push me harder, even though I would never catch them.

WHY DO I WRITE WHAT I DO?

Ah. The killer question. I write about home. You can dress it up with all sorts of permutations—exile, hyphenated-American life, identity—but my topic is almost always home. I’m the kid who was always trying to figure out how you could fit a treehouse in every branch, or build an upside-down version of your bedroom; and I grew up into a person who wants nothing more than to live, someday, in a converted carriage house or a converted fire-station or school or church. The idea here is that I’m fascinated with the idea of making a home where there isn’t supposed to be one—an idea that very much drives the characters in my debut novel The Clover House. My parents emigrated to the United States from Greece in their mid-thirties; my mother’s mother emigrated from Switzerland to Greece when she married; my father’s father traveled all over Eastern Europe as a boy with his father who was a merchant throughout the Balkans. Travel is in my blood. But for me, an only child who grew up in a thoroughly Greek-speaking household, travel is at once wonderful and unsettling. Expats, emigres, bi-cultural American kids: we’re all caught between home and away. In my fiction, I’m always trying to look at this conundrum from different angles, holding it up to the light to find what more I can see.

HOW DOES MY WRITING PROCESS WORK?

I’m discovering that I am a serial monogamist when it comes to process. Every project is a little different. The Exiles is my third (or maybe fourth) completed manuscript, The Clover House being the second, with the first one to remain in the drawer. I wrote the drawer book and The Clover House pretty much from start to finish, page one to the end. I wrote The Exiles in a sort of patchwork, starting with a scene that now ends up on page 234, and then writing what would be the opening pages, and then a chapter I kept pushing further and further out into the plot and eventually decided not to use at all. I did it this way for two reasons. First, The Clover House had just come out in April of 2013 and I set aside a weekend that following May to work because I felt it was important to switch gears and get working on the next novel even if only for a weekend. That scene on page 234 was what came up first; rather than hold it off and force myself to work on the opening scene, I went ahead with it to get me started. I felt then that I needed to treat the novel like a barn-raising—to build the frame quickly so that I would at least have a space in which to move around and see the new world I was creating. Second, I decided for this book that I would write fast (see above: water, fingers), and so I didn’t let myself get hung up on perfecting things. I wrote more than I needed, jumping in at the spots that interested me at a given moment, with the knowledge that I would prune and toss and heighten when it was all on the page.

I’m finding that I like this accretive process quite a bit. It worked for me during a time when my commitments to promoting another book made it difficult to sit down for long stretches at a time and work. Writing in snatches fit with this kind of schedule and now I think that, in general, it seems freer than the start-to-finish way in which I used to work. I’m looking forward to working this way for the next novel.

There is one thing that doesn’t seem to change about my process. Beside the laptop, I keep a pad of A4 narrow ruled refill paper that I order from Ryman in England because I fixated on it as a grad student and now allow myself this bit of preciousness. On that pad, I talk to myself, keep track of things, ask questions, and mark my progress through the manuscript. While I didn’t always date the entries, I do now. It can be a useful reality check to look back and see just how many days I dedicated to the actual writing—and it can also be a confidence-booster to look back and see a stretch when I was on a roll.

AND THE OTHER PART OF THIS QUESTION, HOW DOES MY WRITING PROCESS NOT WORK?

The very same accretion I was just touting can end up being a source of frustration. When you’re writing in this way, there’s a greater chance that you’ll end up with too much material, because you’ll be striking the same notes over and over, or repeating plot elements. This means that revision has to be ruthless in order for you to find the true line of the novel. My concern, as I embark on this revision now, is that the writing is easier but the revision is much harder. We shall see.

Another way in which my writing process doesn’t work is that I continue to have a terrible time with plot. I think I do end up with a plot that works, but, oh, if you could see the ones I almost used. It’s embarrassing—even though when I first come up with these ideas, I’m proud and excited. My plotting seems to work by trial and error, but I would love to be able to see a good plot clearly right from the beginning of the writing process.

PASSING THE TORCH, OR WHO’S NEXT

After I quit teaching, it took me several years before I managed to take myself seriously as a writer. Though I was in a writers’ group—which I’m still a part of, though our numbers have dwindled to four—I had stalled creatively. Then I joined GrubStreet in Boston, and found myself in a workshop led by Jenna Blum. Even if I wasn’t taking myself seriously yet, Jenna certainly was. I’ve learned a tremendous amount from her questions, her Sharpie-written comments on my numerous submissions over half a dozen years of classes, and the relentlessness that says “this is lovely, but is it as good as it can and must be?” Jenna’s two novels, Those Who Save Us and The Stormchasers, turn her insight, eloquence, and empathy to themes of family obligation, rescue, and turmoil that rages both inside and outside her characters. Jenna will be blogging about her writing process at http://jennablum.com/blog/ on Monday, June 2. Don’t miss a chance to visit her blog and read what she has to say.

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Digital Disruption? What Was the Norm?

Good people of the writing world, please take a moment to consider the history of narrative as you bemoan the death of the novel. Stories have come to us in many platforms and through many different technologies--or without any kind of technology--over the many thousands of years that people have been telling (or writing) stories. The book is a technology. The printed installment is a technology. Reading is a learned act--whether we’re reading a printed pamphlet, a printed magazine or book, or a digital file.

When we wring our hands about the maw of the digital monster that has come to swallow up the noble book, we need to realize that we’re privileging one particular period in the history of narrative and treating it as if it were representative of all narrative. We’re taking the decades from, roughly, 1910-1980 and acting as though these seventy years represent the entirety of the book and the publishing industry. They may represent our ideal of what publishing should look like--but I suspect that, when we consider that period more thoroughly, we’ll see that it had quite a few faults of other kinds.

When we bemoan the distractions inherent in the digital world, let’s remember that the image of a reader sitting in a comfortable chair with a one-volume printed book is an ideal taken from a quick moment in narrative’s long history. Just 150 years ago, the only ways to experience a novel were to read it in cheaply-printed installments over the course of several months, or (if you were middle class or wealthier) to buy three expensive volumes--or all three packaged together in one even more expensive volume. Or, if you had a paid membership to a lending library (as opposed to a Free Library, which came later), you could borrow a copy--if you could find one.

I fear that, when we yearn for the better days of publishing before the digital disruption (even to call it that assumes that that seventy-year heyday was a norm), we sound like nations who seek to reclaim their old boundaries--nations that take as their reference point the historical moment when their territory was at its largest. Instead of trying to reclaim something that has already changed, we’re better off making sure we understand the new ways--the new technologies and platforms--so well that we can still use them to get our stories across. In the end, does it matter so much whether we hear a story, or read it in print, or read it on a phone, a tablet, a website? Or whether the story is any good?