I heard about it reading The New Times in print or online. College kids were using Facebook to communicate with each other, and I thought, “Yeah? What’s wrong with email?” I’d been using email since the mid 80′s. It worked for me -what ‘s the deal?

I figured it out eventually, – like – if you want to party or find out who’s having a party Faceboook would be quicker than sending emails to individuals. Okay. But being a person who always thinks of the down side, I also thought, “Yeah, but what if you don’t want “everybody” to know.? Apparently that is not so important anymore.

The next thing I knew, Facebook was spreading downwards to younger kids, and younger and younger.

So much so, I learned via the New York Times online site, some parents were joining Facebook as well – only partly to see what their kids were up to. Didn’t like that at all, but it was out of control. I mean, out of control! Wikipedia says that as of July 2011, Facebook had more than 800 million active users, and according to a report on ConsumersReports.org on May 2011, there were 7.5 million children under 13 with accounts, (I know some of them personally) – violating the site’s terms.

Now it’s not just people, it’s businesses, corporations, communications networks, The New York Times itself – every where you go on line and everything you hear on the radio or on television – everywhere, you hear, “And come visit us on Facebook.”

I will deal with this last statement immediately: I cannot imagine why on earth I would want to visit “them” on Facebook. Maybe I’m missing something, but I suspect most companies, most for-profit industries, most all of them would really want to sell me something, and I don’t want to go there.

In fact, after being a registered member of Facebook for a while, I am now contemplating giving it up. Contemplation deserves a full inquiry, right? So why did I join Facebook in the first place, why have I stayed (almost to the point of addiction), and why leave?

When I click on Facebook to see what’s new with my nearest and dearest, most of whom are not near enough to hug, I land on my “News Feed” page where I do indeed find some news about people I love, people who are my “friends” because they agreed to “friend me”. There are old friends, new friends, real friends to share with. Or perhaps the possibilities. I haven’t experienced a whole lot of that. And I also treasure being able to “get to know” some members of my extended family, some of whom I have never met in person even though they are “close”. “Close” simply isn’t what it used to be when families stayed in the same place and everyone attended the weddings, celebrated the births, and mourned the deaths together.

But mostly what has kept me on Facebook has been the very great pleasure of tuning in to see that my grand kids are having a great time at camp or are thrilled with their new job or they are meeting their friends (no quotes) for fun. And yet, it is distinctly uncomfortable to know that they really truly do not have me in mind when they post this information.

Somehow it reminds me of that decade of my life on the farm on Prince Edward Island where we experienced the “party line”, the telephone that is, not politics. We might go to the phone to make a call and come upon a conversation already in progress. Or we might be involved in a conversation ourselves when a neighbor would pick up the phone to inquire, “Line pizzy?” Sometimes we might all pick up the phone at once, not sure whether that ring was two short ones and a long one, or one long one and a short,or a short and then a long?

On Facebook, it seems to me, one never knows – “Hey, are you talking to me?”

On the “News Feed” recently, a “friend” enquired if anyone (I presumed that meant me but I wasn’t all that sure) had any background in a certain area because that person had a question to ask. There were several responses, all of them indicating that there didn’t seem to be anyone out there with the information requested. (The question had not yet been asked.) It was something I did have background in, but somehow I knew the person did not really have “me” in mind. Mind you, it was not a personal issue – it was actually quite general. Something like, say, has anyone out there ever used Ivory Soap? Should I or shouldn’t I announce my availability? I pondered. And finally I sent a simple response: “Me” I wrote. “Ask”.

The person never did ask or mention the topic again. In fact, the next “status” post, several days later, indicated that person was seriously considering quitting Facebook.

Yes, I took it personally. Can’t help it. I thought, “Hmmnn! Facebook is kinda like a bulletin board you pass in the hall where people you know are posting all kinds of personal observations, questions, plans, and procedures. You scan it as you go by and see – “Oh, there’s something from…….” a friend, perhaps a relative. You stop to check it out….and you get the creepy feeling it is not meant for your eyes…and you are embarrassed.

Well, maybe not you – but I am. It’s not the nature of the message that embarrasses me – I don’t mind that bulletin boards have changed from places where you announce you are looking for someone to share an apartment or to share car expenses on a trip to New York or Toronto to a place where you can express how tired and depressed you are, how sick you are with the flu, or anything even more personal than that. As a psychotherapist I’m certainly not offended by expressions of feeling. But…then what?

Facebook was invented for college kids by college kids. Their territory has been invaded by the rest of us, younger and older, private and corporate. And yet there are those who “own” it. And they are all younger than I am.

With “friends” who are relatives, close or distant, sometimes the measure is not merely geographical. sometimes the distance in age speaks louder than any other. Some, for example, very close to middle age will complain, after a day of vigorous exercise, that they “feel like an 80 year old”, and I restrain myself from commenting that on my recent 81^st birthday I walked 20 minutes to the pool, did 40 laps (1000 metres), walked 25 minutes to the hair salon and then 20 minutes home, and then went out to dinner, and I felt fine.

So what am I doing on Facebook? Am I leaving? Am I staying? Just checking for news about my loved ones who are too busy to call or write. That bulletin board is there for all the world to see. Don’t tell me to keep my eyes straight forward and mind my own business. Not in this world!

©Elaine A. Zimbel 2011

I don’t have thousands of “friends” on Facebook. I don’t have a single one I don’t know personally although there are some great distances in age, more important perhaps than those in geography.

Recently a reader responded to one of my book reviews with a comment that first scared me half to death and then embarrassed me to the same point: “Once again,” this person wrote, “your review of ‘an incredibly good book’ tells me that this is not a book I want to read.”

a) This was from a person whose judgment I valued , and b) I had just been to Blockbuster Video to help them liquidate their stock and I was sickened, not for the first time, by the superlatives on the cover of every single flick in the store.

Did I say that – “an incredibly good book”? Yes, I did. Not in the review itself but in the email to announce it. No excuse! Fortunately, my valued reader wrote that she would read it anyway, simply because she valued my judgment.

Abraham Verghese’s “Cutting for Stone” was recommended to me by another valued reader who never said it was an “incredibly good book”. She made it clear that she liked it very much, and that was enough for me. I knew Dr. Verghese’s name, had read some of his writing in The New Yorker, and I knew that this was his first novel.

So I searched the library catalogue, found that all the copies were out,  put one on reserve, and waited quite a long while. In the meantime I heard from another reader that “it’s been flying off the shelves” in book stores.

Reader, be warned! This is not the first time I have reported on “millions of copies sold”, “flying off the shelves” , “recommended by a truly valued person” – with great disappointment.

“Cutting for Stone: a novel” takes place mainly in Ethiopia beginning shortly after World War II where a very young Catholic Nurse-Sister , trained in India, works as a surgical assistant to a small mission hospital’s best surgeon. I won’t tell you how this came about or even their names because, for me, the best part of reading a good book is being on the page not knowing what comes next until you turn the page.

On a beautiful day in Montreal I sat on a bench overlooking the garden beside La Grand Bibliotheque where I had just picked up my reserved copy and read for longer than I intended to. The story from the beginning is compelling, it’s touching, and it is well told. After a while I went home looking forward to spending a lot of time with this very thick book.

Abraham Verghese is a medical doctor who made his reputation as a doctor who writes. Unlike W. Somerset Maughm who trained as a physician and then allowed his success as a writer to take him off course, Abraham Verghese, MD, MACP, has persisted in his medical career. He is Professor for the Theory and Practice of Medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine and Senior Associate Chair of the Department of Internal Medicine.  And he writes.

This book is so full of very detailed descriptions of medical pathologies (I use that word to warn you – I’m serious!) – that often, especially if reading while eating lunch, I had to skip long passages. Sometimes he describes an operation, from incision to – well, nevermind. I am a health professional – though not a surgeon or an m.d. or a scientist, I am not squeamish. Or I thought not. Reading these descriptions, however, I was completely convinced that in not pursuing medical school, I made the right decision.

So then I began to muse about the decision the author made – why would he include such graphic descriptions of human “guts” in a novel? Did he wish to share with the reader what to him (and to the narrator) is the magnificence of this little known territory? Even when “the narrator” is a fourteen year old boy who is just discovering his own fascination with surgery in the mission hospital? Or was it his idea to present in a novel solid medical knowledge – some of it grossly disturbing and horribly tragic – to prove that medical text books do not have to be either daunting or boring? Or, cynically, did the marketing department of his publisher insist that this emphasis would sell books? (Raise your hand everyone who is ready to respond, “Oh, Elaine, those were the best parts!)

“Cutting for Stone: a novel” covers a good fifty years. Along the way the narrator, even as a child, uses the first person singular. This is, as Maughm has said, “a literary convention which is as old as the hills….It’s object is of course to achieve credibility for when someone tells you what he states happened to himself you are more likely to believe that he is telling the truth than when he tells you what happened to somebody else. It has besides the merit from the story-teller’s point of view that he need only tell you what he knows for a fact and can leave to your imagination what he doesn’t or couldn’t know. Some of the older novelists who wrote in the first person were in this respect very careless….” And so, dear Reader, is Dr. Verghese when, for example, having just described the reaction of someone in the room to something the first person narrator has just announced, writes, “I was blind to the look on her face.”

Mr.Maughm, continuing on the subject of those “carless older novelists”, has said that when they report at great length conversations they couldn’t possibly have heard and incidents they couldn’t possibly have witnessed they lose the great advantage of “verisimilitude”.

Right on! There were times reading this book when I thought it was more like a memoir than fiction. This must be true – I thought - he couldn’t have made this up. And there were times when I couldn’t help thinking this novel was written by committee – I could see them around the board room table, hear them kicking around this event or another. I think Dr. Verghese lost more battles than he won, from a literary point of view. I wasn’t there, of course. I do not pretend “verisimilitude”. But that the marketing department won is clear from the numbers. Incidentally, the book has eight pages of acknowledgments and one and a half pages of bibliography. Bibliography for a novel?

It’s a good read, overall, not a great one. It reminds me of “The Kite Runner”. a very big seller a few years back. It too started out with a very compelling story and advanced to “group think” which succeeded admirably – millions of copies sold, film made, etc. (By the way, there is already a film called “Cutting for Stone” – it is not taken from this book.)

Why the title “Cutting for Stone” ? I didn’t know what it meant and even at the end didn’t get its significance. I looked it up on google. (Watch out for this one: “The title “Cutting for Stone” is taken from the Hippocratic oath, but may also reflect a double meaning. … “ ) No kidding! It’s that double meaning I didn’t want to acknowledge. Too simplistic, demeaning! And yet, further research, which I will not share at this point for fear of giving away too much of the story, awakens other interpretations, not quite so simplistic as the first that comes to mind, but still a little “in your face”.

Millions of people have read this book. Some of them loved it and some did not. This reader will not refer to it as “an incredibly good book”, a term she uses only when she means it.

©Elaine A. Zimbel 2011

What?  That can’t be!  That’s seven plus hours.  The slowest daytime train takes about five and the fastest a bit over four.  I return to the internet, find a special notice of possible changes after a certain date on certain trains, check it out:  all the stops are listed, one or two more than usual, but a suspicious gap in the morning – from Dorval to Brockville takes 3 hours and 19 minutes.  That can’t be right!  It usually takes one hour and 45 minutes.  I take a screen shot of that trip schedule.

Urgent phone call to Viarail.  Nice people, Really nice, very accommodating.  “Oh that train “, I am told.  “It goes to Ottawa first.”  OH??  OMG!!!

During the brief moment I am speechless, I see myself on the train having a hysterical fit similar to the one Charles Grodin has in “Midnight Run” when Robert de Niro, the bounty hunter, forces him to board an airplane.  I am shouting “Stop the train!  Stop this train at once!”

But of course I say only, calmly even,  “Ottawa?  But I am not going to Ottawa, that is out of my way.” The person on the other end offers to re-book on a train that leaves 15 minutes later and arrives in Toronto, minus the side trip to Ottawa, one hour and 24 minutes earlier at the same price.  Fine.

Not fine.  Several days pass but my fantasy of hysteria does not.  I cannot believe such subterfuge!  Hysteria fueled by outrage?  Oh-oh!  I email my generous friend at customer relations, the one I thanked in a previous letter to the corporation. (http://www.elainezimbel.com/?p=389)

Subject: No Thanks this time!

I told the story of my booking misadventure and how it was corrected, mentioning with great restraint, I thought, how disturbed I was.  In the re-telling, I see now, my true feelings were not well hidden.  My letter continued:

This is a screen shot.  I trust you can see that there is no mention whatsoever of a side trip to Ottawa….

XXXXX, while you may (or may not) argue that the Ottawa “detour” was mentioned when I made my original selection, I will spare you any discussion on that topic.  I can only say that if I had seen it, I wouldn’t have booked it, and if I had not discovered this ruse before I boarded the train, I would have been extremely upset.

I am not a novice using the internet, and I have to say that it gets more frustrating, not less so, partly because it seems there is a game involved – let’s see if we can fool some of the people all of the time.

As you know, I am not soft on corporate sleaze, or whatever adjective “greed” goes by these days, but I think this degree of deception hits a new low.

And so, I will take this opportunity to add one more thing:  my son (I have three) was on the train that struck a truck several weeks ago.  He felt a great deal of compassion for the driver of the truck who died, and for himself, it was not a pleasant experience, you will agree.  His arrival in Toronto was completed by bus several hours later than expected.  I was surprised to learn that he was not offered a free ticket for another trip or even a reduction of the price.  What does that say about customer relations?

Yours truly,
Elaine Zimbel

I clicked on SEND and I was surprised to get a phone call just a few minutes later.  My “friend” was very anxious to explain that at certain times of the day when there are fewer trains, they have extended the routes in order to get more people on a given train and they assumed that some people would actually enjoy the longer ride.  (Who are these people?  Fill in the blanks.)

I mentioned to my “friend” (who has never asked me to hide his/her identity) that the train I was re-booked on left 15 minutes later and that there was another to Toronto not long after that.  Whatever VIARAIL was thinking, I insisted,  it was really bad not to be perfectly clear about that thinking so the passenger had a choice.

And about the horrible train wreck my son was involved in, it turned out, oh yes, in fact there was a reimbursement for that one part of the trip.  Perhaps in the confusion of the event, the staff forgot to mention it.

In doing my research for this tale, I have returned to the Viarail website several times.  There is a slight indication that train 55 from Montreal to Toronto does go to Ottawa first.  I am reasonably sure it wasn’t there before and that it could be easily missed still.

Perhaps the railroads are taking their cue from the airlines – direct flights from point A to point B are rare and rarely available at bargain rates. It doesn’t make sense to the traveler but obviously makes lots of $$ense to the corporations.

And that’s what it’s all about…making $$$$$ense.

©Elaine A. Zimbel 2011

It’s an extraordinary book about ordinary people in which you may very well conclude that “ordinary people” is a meaningless term.  In the hands of a truly extraordinary writer, like Jennifer Egan, such creatures do not exist.

They are people of our age, that is, our contemporary, near contemporary era, today, yesterday, tomorrow.  In one chapter they are teen agers, in another in their 50’s, or 30’s, and then it is decades – we are not quite sure how many – earlier.  And then we catch them in the future, which is when, exactly?  We are not sure.  And it all makes perfect sense.

Most of these people love music – they are driven by it.  To make it, to listen to it, record it, sell it.  Listed on the back of the title page, hints for librarians or search engines, are:  “Punk rock musicians, sound recording executives, old men, young women, psychological fiction”.  Hmmmnn…if young men are not mentioned, is it a given everyone will know they are already accounted for – “punk rock musicians”?  And as for “psychological fiction”,  should I put this book review in “Cabinet privé”?  Could do.

This is the best constructed novel I have ever read;  it could hold its own as a book of related short stories as well.  It does not follow a chronological time line, the floor plan is not totally obvious.You may find yourself wondering how you got where you are, not sure where you are going, and yet the more you read, the deeper you travel into it, the more certain you are that you are in good hands.  And when you have finished reading it, you will be awed by its wisdom and its beauty. Indeed, you will feel the tremors of that awe all along the way. Even, I must add, in the section in Powerpoint.  Yes, I said that.  Though I am a person who generally deplores Powerpoint presentations, in Jennifer Egan’s hands, this part of the book not only fits perfectly with the beauty and wisdom of the rest, it is particularly touching.  (Note: maybe it’s not Powerpoint.  You can visit it on the web in full colour with music.  www.jenniferegan.com, click on books, A Visit From the Goon Squad, and scroll down – its amazing!)

I was puzzled at the end of the book, left with the big question – what does it all mean?  Not a bad thing, to be left with, that.  You stay with it, it stays with you.  And then  the next reader in the family opened the book at the page following the dedication to read me the words Jennifer Egan chose to begin with, quoting Marcel Proust from his book, In Search of Lost Time. I had indeed lost it on the way to the end of the book.

That quote for this book!  (You, too, will find it when you need it.)  If Jennifer Egan is not a genius, she is certainly a very wise woman.  While she makes no mention of the shaky translation of his title, “A La Recherche du Temps Perdu”, she certainly made me think of it profoundly.  Are we searching in our memories for time that is lost, a time that is lost, the people we knew then, the person “I” was then?  Or are we seeking to understand this time, “now”?  Can we ever?

“A Visit from the Goon Squad” won the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.  Had anyone asked for my vote, yes, yes, yes in both cases.

©Elaine A. Zimbel 2011

Originally published by Charles Scribner & Co. in 1897, this is an extraordinary book which deftly manages the near-impossible – it tells, with the voice of an adult, a child’s perceptions, carefully guarding her innocence, her freshness, yet never denying the reader full knowledge of what is going on.  And if that were not enough of an accomplishment, Mr. James does more – he perfectly, most subtly reveals how Maisie’s knowledge deepens as she grows older.

Maisie is very young, not yet six years old, when her parents’ divorce, after interminable and particularly nasty litigation – the details of which we are spared – becomes final.  Her father is awarded full custody of the child and is ordered to refund to her mother some twenty-six hundred pounds she had been required to put down provisionally for the child’s maintenance.  However, “He was unable to produce the money or to raise it in any way; so that after a squabble scarcely less public and scarcely more decent than the original shock of battle his only issue from this predicament was a compromise proposed by his legal advisers and accepted by hers….” His debt was disposed of “…and the little girl disposed of in a manner worthy of the judgment-seat of Solomon.  She was divided in two and the portions tossed impartially to the disputants.  They would take her, in rotation, for six months at a time….”

“[Maisie] was abandoned to her fate….the only link binding her to either parent was this lamentable fact of her being a ready vessel for bitterness, a deep little porcelain cup in which biting acid could be mixed.  They had wanted her not for any good they could do her, but for the harm they could, with her unconscious aid, do each other.”

Fortunately, Maisie’s parents, a very handsome pair if no longer a couple, were of a class in which social activities kept them very busy.  Her “education”, her care, would be in the hands of a nurse, later a governess, one or another, each with different qualities, different “baggage” as well.  Each of them would need to buffer as best she could, some managed better than others,  the “confidence of passions” Maisie was taken into by either parent.  “It was to be the fate of this patient little girl to see much more than she at first understood, but also even at first to understand much more than any little girl, however patient, had perhaps ever understood before.”

Maisie does not long remain the innocent child who, leaving her father’s after the first six months, dutifully replies to her mother’s question – “And did your beastly papa, my precious angel, send any message to your own loving mama?”   “‘He said I was to tell you, from him’ she faithfully reported, ‘that you’re a nasty horrid pig!’”

It wasn’t long after that, you may imagine, that she became aware of the strange office she filled as the centre of her parents’ hatred for each other and as their messenger of insult.  Henry James puts this revelation so skillfully in the context of the world of childhood that one doesn’t doubt in the least its authenticity, not even when he attributes to a mere child “the idea of an inner self or, in other words, of concealment.” We believe it because it comes to her from a new feeling, a feeling of danger.  We believe it because that feeling comes not from angry looks or words but from familiar things; “The stiff dolls on the dusky shelves began to move their arms and legs; old forms and phases began to have a sense that frightened her.”

But Maisie does all right.  She gets on with her life as it shifts and changes according to the whims, the pursuits of adults  She forms attachments, people of importance come and go, somehow she takes care of herself -  never selfishly.  In other words, like all children of divorced parents, “She’s fine!”

Yet, though divorce is  a necessary reality, now even more so than at the end of the 19th Century, the children of divorce, as Henry James who never married, never had children of his own, knew, the children are the story.  Their fears, their confusion, their helplessness, their dreams, their wishes, these are indescribable – and yet this, the story that cannot be spoken, is the story James imagines.

I have quoted liberally the words of the author because if I were to summarize or paraphrase you would miss the flavour, the impact of his tale.   The more I pour over each page – (warning:  there is hardly any white space on the page, he does not believe in short paragraphs) – the more I find to treasure.

And yet, I have to remind as well that Henry James’ writing is so thick, so round-about, that sometimes one has to double back to get the meaning.  So if you are inclined to read this book, read it slowly.  Savour it.  “….[take] refuge on the firm ground of fiction, through which indeed there [curls] the blue river of truth.” What Maisie knew and when she knew it you cannot learn from any other child of divorce.  They don’t talk about it – they live it.

©Elaine A. Zimbel 2011

Dear Ms/Mr……

I know your name!  I would like very much to publish it because you have been so kind, so respectful, so generous to me.  However, since this behaviour is so rare in the annals of corporate greed in our times, I fear that if I were to identify you, at the very least you might receive a nasty reprimand and at worst you might be “terminated” without a generous package.

I will briefly remind you of the circumstances which began our interaction.  Late one Sunday night I was sitting on my couch, fire in the fireplace, laptop on my lap trying to book a return trip for a very busy dear one to come for a visit from Toronto to Montreal.  Between numerous phone calls to him to verify his possibilities and numerous clicks on your website for appropriate scheduling and best price – I would estimate an hour at least – all the stars aligned and I was ready to book.  However, it was not clear to me how to book for my dear one when your website kept insisting I, a Via Preference client, book in my own name.

Failing to find the way around my dilemma, I searched for a phone number to call for help only to find telephone hours which ended at 4 pm on Sundays!  Somewhere around midnight, I gave up, went to bed, and resolved to get up early to make the call – which I did.  The person who came to my rescue was very helpful until it came to pricing this trip – it seems the special price that was available the night before was no longer available, sorry!

I do not take this kind of corporate sleight-of-hand lightly.  When I explained my story and my dilemma, I was told that I was on the wrong page, literally – I was on the “Via Preference” page when I accessed the Sunday phone hours.  I should have been on the home page where I would have found a 24/7 phone number.

“In other words”, I summarized, “I am penalized because I am a Via Preference Client???”  The irony failed to touch my formerly-helpful telephone  contact.  She only managed to offer her helplessness in providing me with a reservation at the same rate I had found just a few hours before.

Frankly, dear Sir/Madam, it was more important at that moment to book a ticket for my dear one, even at the higher price, than it was to express my annoyance.  I managed to get a number to call to register my complaint, which I did later the same day, twice.

The first time, my story was met with an indifferent, insulting “YOU SHOULD HAVE KNOWN YOU WERE ON THE WRONG PAGE”,  at which point my “annoyance” turned to indignant rage, thus inciting my second phone call.  Perhaps I should have mentioned that the phone number on which to “complain” leads to a recording which promises to return the call within 24-48 hours after leaving a short message.  On my second phone call I said very authoritatively that I wished to speak to a vice president in charge of customer relations regarding how I had been INSULTED  by someone in that same department.  Your phone call came very soon thereafter.

Together we ironed out certain discrepancies, and proof, supplied by me, of a printout of the ”wrong page” I was on showing not only the prices but other information regarding my “preference” status you said should not be there.  You ultimately said you would reverse the over-charge, for which I was very grateful.

I am quoting here a part of the e-mail I sent to you along with the scan of the troublesome page:

“A person in your position, xxxxxx, should know that the general public is getting very impatient with corporate imperiousness.  It begins with pressing numbers, continues with endless waiting while, on your lines, being blasted with raucous noise, and ends with a “robot” reciting lines from lessons learned in company training sessions where they are not taught a most basic lesson: listen carefully to what the caller is saying, try to understand what the issue is before you recite your lines, and be aware that if you don’t listen, you may hear things you really don’t want to hear.

I do thank you for meeting these basic courtesies in your call to me and look forward to having the difference in the fare credited on my credit card.”

At present I have noted that indeed my credit card has reflected your kindness.  Not only have you reversed the overcharge but you have failed, I hope by design, to re-instate the reduced fare.  I like to think this is not merely a kindness but is a recognition that I have given Viarail Canada, at no charge, several valuable lessons – as indicated in the above paragraph – to pass along to your frontline employees.

Wishing you the best of luck in your efforts to sweeten the really sour breath Corporate Greed daily breathes upon us,

Yours sincerely,

Elaine A. Zimbel

@Elaine A. Zimbel 2011

Yes, I have to say, my previous reading of a “novel that is very philosophical” (http://www.elainezimbel.com/?p=359) left me more than a little disappointed.  Returning it to the library two days past due, I wandered over to “New Books” and found one I instantly recognized to be better qualified for that description.  I had read some of Rebecca Goldstein’s previous novels and found them intelligent AND readable.  She in fact has a PhD in philosophy  – AND, more important to me than that,  she has won awards for her writing.   So I picked it up, checked it out, and brought it home with me.

The title is perfect.  Not awesome, not scary, not argumentative really, because it is, as it so declares itself,  “a work of fiction”.  It takes place on familiar ground, whether or not you have ever been to Harvard University in Cambridge, Ma. or “Frankfurter University” twelve miles up river from there, you will recognize academia, its people and the games they play.  You may not like some of them, but that’s true of everything you read, isn’t it?  Even people you meet in real life.

But chances are, you will not dislike them all.  I have read, or started to, other books that dealt with this crowd, one in this very same famous corner, and I found the author’s portraits so stark and unforgiving, so snarky/nasty, I had no patience for her – Zadie Smith, I mean,  or her flawed cast of characters, not one of them.  I could not waste my time with them.  Goldstein’s story and the people in it are -  some of them, somehow warmer; and those who are not, the ones who are ruthlessly ambitious, egotistical, and conniving, they are somehow funny, laughable.  You don’t mind when they come on stage – they have a role to play.

The main character is Cass Seltzer, an unassuming guy who “For close to two decades..has all but owned the psychology of religion, but only because nobody else wanted it…The sexy psychological research was all in neural-network modeling and cognitive neuroscience.  The mind is a neural computer and the folks with the algorithms ruled.”  His girl friend, Lucinda Mandelbaum, is also a psychologist but “her work is so mathematical that almost no one would suspect it has anything to do with mental life.”  She is into game theory and is the creator of the Mandelbaum Equilibrium.  To put it plainly (as Goldstein can do so expertly even with her high powered vocabulary)  “Cass is about as far away on the continuum as you can get and still be in the same field.  He’s so far away that he is knee-deep in the swampy humanities.”  And you gotta love him for being there. Anyway, I do.  The “swampy humanities”, yeah, me too!

Cass has just published a book which has met with unexpected attention. Dealing with what Cass has cleverly called “the varieties of religious illusion”,Time magazine has praised it and has hailed its author as the only one of the “new atheists” who seems to have any idea of what it feels like to be a believer, and they have dubbed him “the atheist with a soul”.

Cass himself is not sure he deserves that description or, on the other hand, whether he actually likes  it.  It depends.  He is a man who has floated throughout his life from one attachment to another, never seeming to notice when that attachment has lost its hold, never really ready to give up on it, until something else, another person perhaps, another idea, has  come along to  capture his loyalty.

Thrust now into “celebrity”,  known more politely as “success” in academic circles,  Cass is awed, stunned, elated to be taken seriously.  As the story begins, Harvard has just made him an offer, hoping to woo him away from Frankfurter.  He is so excited about the prospect of sharing this wonderful news with Lucinda, he can’t sleep – because Lucinda, known in her world as “the Goddess of Game Theory”, is in California at a conference on “Non-Nash Equilibria in Zero-Sum Games”.  Phone her?  E-mail?  No, he does not want to distract her with his news while she is so focused on delivering her own paper at the very end of the week.

During the entire week this “work of fiction” takes place we are with Cass in the present, sometimes joined by ghosts from the past, and sometimes actually in the past. If the transitions are made “seamlessly”, sometimes we might wish for a marker here and there, for we are not always sure where we are or when, and possibly not sure with whom.  Nevertheless, it’s a fascinating trip, a good ride and a very good read.

Cass and his younger brother grew up in Brooklyn. Both parents had been raised as very religious Jews, his father’s family was “fairly observant”, but his mother was raised in a Hasidic cult that lived in a self-contained village up river from New York City.  Cass used to visit his grandmother there when he was little but both his parents had by then given up their own “religiosity”.   Modern Jews – “non-kosher” and “non-sabbath observing”, they allowed their membership in the synagogue to lapse after the younger of the two boy’s Bar Mitzvah.

So there you have it, not the whole story but the field on which it is played.  You will be enriched by knowing people in a Hasidic community, especially a wonderful little boy who knows more about math than I ever will; you will certainly feel smarter for having a simple explanation of what is a zero-sum game, if you don’t already know (I didn’t); you will be annoyed, amused, and/or touched  by the arguments for the existence of God;  you will be annoyed, amused, but not touched, I think, by Cass’s mentor, the professor about whom I have said nothing.  Like me, you quite probably will find yourself thinking how smart you are, and sometimes how ignorant.  I didn’t mind a bit, and perhaps you won’t either.

©Elaine A. Zimbel 2011

Coming soon!

“Shopping Online Ain’t What it Used to Be” - Buyer Beware!
“What Maisie Knew” by Henry James - delayed but not forgotten!
“A Letter of Thanks to a Corporation” - No kidding!

Sometimes it matters how you came to pick a book to read – perhaps you were

1.  mindlessly browsing in a bookstore, or urgently searching in the library for something to read before rushing home,    read a page or two and said yes, this one;
2.  or maybe you ordered online or on the phone because someone told you it’s a must read and you couldn’t wait to get to it;
3.  or you read a brilliant review that spoke to you personally.

For me and the book mentioned above, it was none of these.   Number 1 would not have worked for me, I think not for anyone.  I’ll tell you why later.  Number 2 might work for some, depending on who one’s friends are.  And number 3 is a faint possibility, depending on how vulnerable one is to brilliant reviews.  I confess, I sometimes succumb to truly brilliant writing.

I didn’t pick this book at all.  It comes with a completely different story;  one of my favourite Americans told me his wife, who is an ardent francophile, was reading this book in French with her French book club and asked if I had read it.  When I said I had never heard of it, he was surprised, not only because I live in Montreal where French is the language of choice if not necessity, but because “millions of copies have been sold world-wide” and a movie has been made of it.

“And what is it about?”   I asked humbly.  To the best of my recollection, he said it was a novel and it was very philosophical.  Say no more, I’m there!

The library had two copies, both in French, and both were out.  I asked my most literate French friend if she had read it, and she had never heard of it either, nor , she reported later, had any of her friends.  Nevertheless, being an adventurous sort, she went out and bought a copy and delivered it immediately into my hands.  She was into several other good reads at the moment and so she offered me the chance to be first at it.

I tried.  I put it down. I tried again.  I could not understand a word.  That is, I did know most of the words, but the sentences, the thoughts I didn’t understand at all.  And it didn’t seem worth the struggle.  I kept the book a long time, trying intermittently to get into it, and finally I gave up and gave it back to my friend.

Then one day browsing in the English section of the library, there was the English translation.  I took it home.  I began at the beginning:  “Marx (Preamble)” in which one of the book’s two narrators, Renée, concierge in a Parisian upper middle class building, has a brief exchange with the Pallières boy , whom she describes as the “prosperous heir to an old industrial dynasty,…the son of one of my eight employers.” (If you fear I am giving away too much, we are so far not yet at the end of line five.)

It is, however, line six, that stopped me cold. “There he stood, the most recent eructation of the ruling corporate elite – ….)

Eructation?  A word I have never seen or heard before in my entire life?   I didn’t understand the French?  This is supposed to be English!  Yes, in fact it is.  It is a noun whose first known use, (and perhaps its last) was in the 15th century.  I assume its presence, so close to the top of the very first page, is a needlessly heavy-handed way of alerting the reader to the fact that this concierge is no simple-minded person.  She is not a person. low-born though she may be, who would even think of saying “belch”, or even “burp”, when she means to describe this boy as the most recent eructation of the ruling corporate elite….

Does it put one off to be assaulted in this way?  Yes, but….something draws one back.  Madame la concierge knows words you may never have heard of,  she knows the philosophy of Karl Marx, she knows what she knows is more than her employers would ever dream of giving her credit for, and that’s fine with her.  She doesn’t want them to know – she scorns them big time.  The lines are long-drawn in French culture – she will not cross them and she will not give them reason to believe they would find anything interesting on her side.  She is a 54 year old widow who wants to be secure in her little domain with her cat, her books, her music, her thoughts, her philosophy.  So she literally walks the walk in her scuffy slippers, and talks the talk (except when she forgets herself for one moment with the Pallieres boy) of the “traditional” French concierge.

You have to admit, this is kind of strange.  So, mixed with the irritation there is a mystery, or perhaps, more mildly, a nagging question – why?  Why is she doing this?  What’s going on here?

In the second part of the brief Preamble we are introduced to the other narrator – a twelve year old girl who lives with her parents and older sister in this very building.  In her own voice she tells us how intelligent she is, – “very intelligent.  Exceptionally intelligent.” But just like Renée,  the concierge she scarcely notices, she also makes every effort to disguise herself.  “an exceptionally gifted child would never have a moment’s peace -” she explains.  She has every reason to keep her secret.  She is as bitter and biting in her assessment of the people she lives among, her parents, her sister, the others in the building, on the planet, as Renée, but she does not intend to become one of them.  She does not intend to live the life of an adult.  She is no Peter Pan – she will not stay a child.  She is determined to commit suicide on the last day of school in June, which happens to be the day she turns thirteen.

This is no minor irritation.  One has to decide right here – yes we are still at the very beginning – if one wishes to go through this.  If I were reading a review of this book and it said just this, I would say no thank you, good bye.  Even if it were brilliantly written.  And so you may as well.

So there you have it – the basis of a book called “The Elegance of the Hedgehog” – two people, very different in age, in station in life – very much the same in their ability to think deeply about life, in their inability to NOT think deeply.  It weighs very heavily – we cannot bear their scorn, their bitterness. Their acute sensibilities, what they see in other people, how they see contemporary life – all this leaves them so alone – we cannot entirely turn our backs.  We look away and turn back to see if they are all right.  Perhaps we see ourselves, our own dark view of life as we know it.

We put the book down – and we pick it up again.  I am certain several million of those “millions sold world-wide” have never been picked up again, and that’s a pity.  The concierge and the child, each speaking in her own voice in more or less alternate chapters,  scatter jewels of wisdom on these pages.  Call it philosophy if you will. Sometimes it glistens, sometimes it comforts, sometimes it makes us smile.

Renée has found ingenious ways to live disguised in the role of the “typical French concierge” while secretly listening to Mahler or watching Death in Venice on her second tv, the one passersby cannot see -  she is “perfectly euphoric,…[her] eyes filling with tears, in the miraculous presence of Art“.

Paloma, the child, does not intend “to vegetate like some rotting piece of cabbage” between now and next June.  Rather she has set as her goal “to have the greatest number possible of profound thoughts, and to write them down…formulated like a little Japanese poem: either a haiku (three lines) or a tanka (five lines).” Each of her chapters supports the simple lines of the poem at the top with some bittersweet observations.

Eventually these two who do not see each other find each other,  recognize each other, and instantly respect one another’s secrets profoundly.  They cross lines without intrusions.   But this relationship is almost “off-stage” – it is not what the book is about.  Another relationship evolves and it changes everything.  It changes the light, it changes the air, it changes the people, all the people in the building.  They breath and grow.

Reading the book  on the way home from MKE the second time, I was very close to the ending.  I was able to breath, I was comfortable in Renée’s story. abandoning for the moment the sadness of my own.  Paloma’s fate no longer worried me.

I read the final pages the next day on a city bus on the way to an appointment.

I was in tears, whether from happiness or sorrow, I will not say.  I closed the book.  I felt bereft.

I tried to take responsibility.  Was I thinking about the sister I had just lost?  It’s me.  My vulnerable state.  It didn’t work.  I felt betrayed, manipulated.  In the last few pages I saw the author.  She shouldn’t have been there.  I didn’t want to see her.  There is a failure there.  When you see the author, you have lost the people.  They are no longer real.  On the first few pages I had seen the translator.  I had wondered why on earth she would choose a word like “eructation” – later, without having seen the French word (I certainly did not remember if from my early attempts to get through the French version), I assumed the author made her do it!  The author, her editor, her publisher, certainly the marketing department — I saw a lot of heavy hands in there.

Am I cynical?  Am I bitter?  Can a “philosophical novel” sell millions of copies world wide?  The library that had two copies in French when I searched for it several months ago, today has three in hardcover, six in soft cover, in addition to two in English, one in Italian, and one in German – all “out”!  Am I just peeved because I didn’t like the ending?

No, the author stole those people from me.  She showed her hand.  She pulled a fast one.  The ending was made for the movie.  My literate French friend was way ahead of me – she found herself  wondering before she got to the end how the author could possibly end it,

I took the book back to the library.  It was two days late.  I paid the fine.  And then I ordered a copy of my own from Strand Books in New York.  I thought it was going to be a used copy, but it arrived looking brand new.  Like no one had read it, certainly not beyond the first few pages.

©Elaine A. Zimbel 2010

If you ever find yourself at the Milwaukee airport and you have a little time, you are very lucky because the Renaissance Book Store is there, and if you love books, you will love this place.  This is not an ad – this is a gift.

I hate airports lately – I hate being treated like a terrorist, and I can’t figure out why those who single me out for virtual strip searches and pat-downs think I might be one. Me, a female person of a certain age. So I don’t travel a lot – not enough to get used to such undignified treatment. And generally my destinations are not so romantic or exotic that I could easily ignore “getting there”, which, obviously, is no longer even the tiniest fraction of the fun of being there.

I was born in Milwaukee, I grew up there, and then I left there.  When I was growing up there, the airport was called Billy Mitchell field, named after a flying hero of the first world war.  That’s all I knew then, but now there is Google and there is Wikipedia, so I could tell you lots more about him, stuff I wish I didn’t know.  Oh well, times have changed….Billy Mitchell field is known as MKE just like Los Angeles airport is LAX and Montreal is YUL – figure that one out.

Times have really changed, which is why I found myself at MKE four times, coming and going, within two weeks recently.  I was going there, initially, to visit “the twins”, the miracle babies I have dearly loved all of my life.  Perhaps I have already told you the story about their birth.  I wasn’t even born yet, but I remember the story well – my mother told it to me, she told it many times.  It was my Goldilocks and The Three Bears, my  Little Red Riding Hood, it was my Cinderella.

When the twins were born, my mother already had three children, the youngest was not yet three.  (My mother didn’t tell me that – I figured it out just now.)  My mother only told me this:

The twins were born at home; one of them weighed a pound and a half and the other weighed a pound and three quarters.  They were so tiny they were kept in market baskets, (That’s what they called those baskets like the ones you get peaches in in the best days of summer.)  And it was the summer when the twins were born.  But just the same they put hot water bags wrapped in cotton batten in with those babies in those baskets, and the lady who came to help my mother slept on the kitchen floor with one basket on one side of her and the other basket on the other side.  And she had to be sure to keep the water in those bags hot  – and one time the water in one of them was too hot and one of my sisters got burned on her tiny leg and she had a scar there that never disappeared. (I saw it!)

I love this story.  And if I have told it many many times without asking, oh, have I told you this before? – why would I?  Did you only need to hear about the three bears one time?  Two times?  Three?

Later, after the lady who slept on the kitchen floor had left,  those baskets with the little babies in them were kept on the dining room table, and whenever anyone walked by they would stop and talk to them, my sisters, the miracle babies.  My mother didn’t tell me this – someone else did, my oldest sister perhaps.  I was grown up when I heard it, old enough and “wise” enough to think: “Oh, that’s why those babies are still alive!”

How many tiny babies born in 1917 survived infancy?  How many, sadly, survived but were blinded by too much oxygen fed into hospital incubators?  And how many – like my sisters -  lived long healthy lives, married with children and grandchildren and even a great grandchild?

My sisters were still alive, age 93, on another 9/11, this one in 2010, when I found myself at YUL at four o”clock in the morning waiting in line to go through security, which hadn’t even opened yet, wondering if I was going to make my 5:30 flight to Toronto (YYZ) and then on to MKE to visit them. The twins now lived, each in her own apartment, in a Milwaukee residence that provided a certain degree of assistance.  While they had lived all their adult lives as married women each in her own home, sometimes in different cities, their new life was not so different except for the unexpected proximity; for some months now they shared some programs during the day and dinner in the evening and sometimes visited in one apartment or the other.  I would call to speak to one of them, let the phone ring 15 times and get no answer, call the other in a panic and find them together.  And it was lovely to think of them like that, closer than they had been in years.  I wanted to be able to picture them in their new surroundings; I wanted to see them “together again”.

By the time my departure date arrived, one of them would be in different surroundings, a part of the facility that provided more than assistance – they give names to different levels of care – call it what you will.

Her bed faced the huge window that looked out over Lake Michigan and the parkland where people ran, walked, bicycled, flew huge kites, and picnicked. On a beautiful Sunday I counted more than forty small sail boats dotting the vast waters while my sister couldn’t hold her head up to share that view.  In the few days I was there, we cajoled her into a wheel chair, and we found a beautiful terrace facing that very same view and she was glad to sit there in the sun for a very long time.  Her twin got lost on the very long walk from her place trying to find that terrace, but we eventually found each other.

I told my sister who was sick I loved her.  I told her over and over again.  It’s all I could think of to say.  And finally when it was time to say good bye, I told her one more time and ordered her not to forget it.    “If you forget everything else, just don’t forget that!”  I said.  And she said, “I won’t forget.”

I had allowed lots of time getting to the airport, but MKE is not so big, not like YYZ or YUL – so I had lots of time to act like a human being.  And there it was, still, the beautiful place I had frequented years past, the Renaissance book store, selling second hand books, quality books.   I didn’t need an excuse to enter that hallowed ground, but in fact, I needed a book to read because the one I had brought with me, “The Elegance of the Hedgehog” by Muriel Barbery,  while I did not wish to abandon it, I found too difficult to read with all the sadness in my heart.  I found a paperback copy of Henry James’ “What Maisie Knew”, and that was my companion on the flight home.

When I was back at Billy Mitchell two weeks later, I had finished “Maisie” and was far enough into “Elegance” to be able to read it little by little just before I fell asleep each night on the pull-out couch in the apartment of the surviving twin.  On the flight home two days after the funeral, my heart heavier than ever with a loss I never imagined would be so huge, I gave no thought to whether Muriel Barbery, author, would comfort me or not.  But in fact, as I came close to the last pages, I found I was in her story, not in my own, and that was comfort enough – until it wasn’t.

©Elaine A. Zimbel 2010

The book reviews will follow soon: “The Elegance of the Hedgehog” which begins with a Preamble” and Henry James’ “What Maisie Knew” which begins with a “Preface”.

“Police probe death of infant girl”

Montreal police are investigating the death of a three-month-old baby girl, but stress that so far there is no indication of foul play…..Officers are expected to determine if the baby was sleeping with its parents or in a crib….”

Uh-oh…you know what’s coming…

Later the same day on the evening television news, a paediatrician is declaring that babies should never sleep in the same bed with their parents – they could suffocate.  Is this what is meant by “what goes around comes around?”

My four babies did not sleep in my bed, that was definitely a no-no.   My babies slept in a crib, alone in a room of their own. I didn’t sleep too well – new baby/new mother (every time) – but still I followed the rules.  My babies did not suffocate – they grew up and had babies of their own.  And their babies slept in the bed with them, and I was so sad, not from fear they would suffocate but from longing for what we had all missed, my babies and me and their dad.  I felt I had been cheated.  I felt embarrassed that I had been so stupid to obey, to succumb to the fear of what was natural and beautiful and as old as humanity.

So, we’re back to the fear thing, are we?  Perhaps it is even a criminal thing now that every human act may be criminal, every mistake may be a big one.  Watch out!

Just one question.  I will address it to the very same paediatrician who spoke for the cameras last night:  Sir, did you ever hear of “crib death”, now they call it  SIDS, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome?

The media is “just doing its job” – dutifully reporting what the police say.  O.K.  But then, why don’t they interview another paediatrician, one who perhaps advocates infants sleeping in the same bed with their parents?  Because if they don’t even mention that there are such experts, that there is another point of view on this subject, then everyone who believes what they hear on the radio/read on the website or in the paper, will suffer from fear of death in their own bed.

And that’s not the only thing to have fear of these days.  Shall we count them?  Oh let’s limit ourselves to raising children – how about old fashioned playgrounds with swings and slides and merry-go-rounds on asphalt pavement.   Yikes!! Concussion, broken bones, scraped knees. Oops, first I should have mentioned riding a tricycle without a helmet. omg.  Then go on up the years.  I do believe in helmets for bikes, I do believe in seat belts and car seats, I do believe in taking a chance on life.

From the moment we are born until the day we die, we could stop breathing for one reason or another.  Who is going to publish the voluminous catalogue of how best to limit the possibilities – never do this and never do that and always do this.  Take care!  And if something bad happens, well, it shouldn’t have,  You must have done something wrong or failed to do something you should have.  Someone has to be blamed.  It is simply not accepted that bad things happen.

Whenever a bad thing is reported, the very next line is about the investigation to determine the cause and who is responsible. The implication is that we can fix it so it will never happen again.  Fix the cause, punish the perpetrator. We can do that – we live in the modern world, science and technology – we know how to fix things.  We know how to fix people, one way or another.

So trust and rejoice that the world is getting safer for our children, relax -  but not too much.  Study the do’s and dont’s.  Listen carefully.  And above all,  Make no mistake, it is a culture of fear we live in.

©Elaine A. Zimbel 2010

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