Summer Reading

In today’s New York Times, commentator Verlyn Klinkenborg raises the essential question every avid reader faces, for some inexplicable reason, the moment school ends and blockbusters fill the multiplexes: what to read. He answers it in characteristic Klinkenborg fashion—thoughtfully, without sure conclusion, but with insights that are as true as they seem familiar. Here is what he says about choosing the last book of the summer.

The book I want is a vortex. When I lower my eyes to it, I’m sucked deep into a place more plausible than the one that surrounds me. When I look up, I want the actual life around me to look strange and original, like a brand new page in a pop-up world.

This is asking an awful lot of a book, I know. Or it would be, if readers weren’t such willing collaborators, if we weren’t so susceptible to the power of suggestion. And yet there’s a practical, skeptical vein in most of us, too — even when seeking an August escape. There’s no such thing, for instance, as a placebo book. All the recommendations of friends and critics will carry us only so far. Ultimately, a book has to meet the test of our own experience, which is a reminder of just how much we live books out as we read them.

Nothing “about” a book can tell you whether this will be true love. Only the book itself can say. For the first few pages, my reading feels provisional, probing, just as it always does. But soon that feeling dissipates. The traces of uncertainty vanish. So, somehow, does the ink on the page, and I realize that I’m looking through the book as if it were translucent. This remains, after a lifetime of reading, a mystery and a joy.

“How much we live books out as we read them.” Indeed. This is why the choice of what to read during this slowed-down time of summer is so important—because we’ll remember those books long after we’ll remember a book we read, say, in October. We’ll remember those books in a different way, too. Not just as stories we liked or were disappointed by, but as lives that became woven in with our own—events that colored our thinking in the way that a dream can affect our moods long after we wake up.

One summer, my studies required me to read the collected works of Charles Dickens and a handful of other Victorian writers. I began with Dickens in June, certain I would hate him and determined to get the worst over with. The Brontës would be my reward in August. Something tells me I began not with The Pickwick Papers (because if I had, I would have been tempted not to continue), but with Oliver Twist, next in the chronology. I read every evening after work and virtually all day on Saturdays and Sundays, managing to finish a 900-page Penguin Classic each week (I was then, and remain, a slow reader), going through the familiar Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby; gagging on the maudlin Old Curiosity Shop; thankful for Sairey Gamp who showed up to brighten the otherwise dry Martin Chuzzlewit; and marveling at the four great novels that came almost in straight succession: Dombey and Son, Bleak House, Little Dorrit, and Our Mutual Friend. A more sustained reverie on the darkness of human nature—and the comedy that survives it—doesn’t exist, in my opinion, in English literature. Decades later, that reading of Dickens remains my most treasured reading experience. The fact that it occurred in summer is, I think, no coincidence.

By the time I reached The Mystery of Edwin Drood, sometime at the end of July, I was distraught. The world I had lived in for ten or so weeks was shutting down, closing its doors, and leaving me on the wrong side. I remember that time in my life vividly—the rattan chair I sat in for all my reading, the gypsy moths outside chomping the leaves that year, my absent-mindedness as I went to work after a night of Sairey Gamp putting drinks on her “manklepidge” or Flora Casby mincing about her drawing room or Bradley Headstone and his spontaneous nose-bleed. What happened then, and what happens with some regularity with most books I read, is what Klinkenborg describes as the disappearance of the ink on the page. He’s absolutely right: it’s that experience of “looking through the book as if it were translucent”. It is, as he says, a mystery and a joy.

My Bleak House, however, and my Little Dorrit are now a little less translucent than they used to be. So are my Atonement and my Sense and Sensibility, thanks to their film or television adaptations. Dorrit was slimmer before I saw Matthew McFayden; I always saw Jo’s street crossing from the other side of the street. Even in cases where the casting gets the character’s looks right—as is the case, I think, with Gillian Anderson’s Lady Dedlock who looks just like George Cruikshank’s Victorian illustrations—the movie image is just too overpowering, too vivid.

I suppose I could have refused to watch when these novels turned up on the screen, or on PBS via the BBC. But like many of us, I couldn’t resist another chance to inhabit the world I knew so well. It’s a small-scale Faustian bargain, though: hand the man your ticket, but the place you’re going to will never be the same. Or, more accurately, it’s Eurydice and Orpheus: look back one more time, and you lose the ability to inhabit that world without reservation or limit.

Am I making too much of this? Of course. It’s not life and death, after all. But it’s narrative, and that is a very powerful thing. The good news is that we have it better than Eurydice. We can pull the book down from the shelf and—as long as it doesn’t have the movie-tie-in cover—sink back into the fictional world as we first and then again and again imagined it. Our pictures of the books we read don’t stay the same, after all. They change with us, from one reading, one summer, to the next.

Tilda Swinton: The One (or Two) and Only

Nobody looks like Tilda Swinton—besides, maybe David Bowie, who shares her androgynous, fashion-forward persona. She was the best thing in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and is generally the best thing in any movie she appears in. As part of the star chamber that awarded the Best Supporting Actress Oscar to Penelope Cruz, Swinton did not disappoint. Her outfit was puzzling and unusual, and her handling of the whole thing seemed to say: Right, let’s just let Tilda keep the statuette, shall we?

Seeing her in the Oscars telecast reminded me of what might be the quintessential Swinton role, that of Orlando, in Sally Potter’s eponymous 1992 film. Based on the novel by Virginia Woolf, Orlando spans four hundred years as it tells the story of a young man born into wealth in Renaissance England. Yes, that was four hundred years, and yes, Swinton plays a man. But, if you’re keeping track, sometime around 1700, Orlando turns into a woman.


Potter’s casting of Swinton is an inspired choice. No one else could possibly have played the role (except, again, David Bowie--but Bowie’s acting chops are a bit below Swinton’s level). Even though Potter’s film is far from naturalistic—Swinton’s performance includes a handful of moments when she twitches her head imperceptibly towards the camera and delivers a one-line commentary on the action—Swinton deserves enormous credit for so thoroughly seeming to inhabit the skin of both a male and a female character. When Orlando is a young man, Swinton’s walk and movements—even the way she holds her head—are somehow clearly male. When Orlando is a woman, everything changes, softening, becoming somehow fuller. Swinton doesn’t simply reproduce stereotypes; this is the same individual rendered in two genders.


Potter plays around with gender—as she must, if she is to adapt Woolf’s novel for film—through the film. Quentin Crisp is creepily good as a long-haired Queen Elizabeth. Later, during the nineteenth-century portion of the story, Potter tweaks the Victorian trope of the injured female to be rescued by the man. She anticipates Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility by three years, as Orlando rescues Shelmerdine (easily the strangest name in all of literature) from his broken ankle. Billy Zane’s hair is almost as long as Kate Winslet’s Marianne’s.



But see for yourself. And read Woolf’s odd 1928 book. Though I first read Orlando more than twenty-five years ago, Woolf’s description of the Little Ice Age that allowed for festivals on the Thames during the Renaissance has remained vivid in my memory. Potter does a nice job recreating the scenes on film, though Woolf’s evocation wins the competition.

Orlando is indeed a writer’s movie. Orlando’s final incarnation is as a single woman, a single mother, and a writer. Taking the manuscript of her life’s story into the steel-and-glass office of a publisher, she runs into the characteristic writer’s experience: rejection. As the editor puts it:

“It’s very, very good. Written from the heart. I think it’ll sell. Provided you rewrite it. You know: increase the love interest, give it a happy ending. By the way, how long did this draft take you?”

Orlando’s reaction? Another one of those glances at the camera. The next shot shows her kick-starting her motorcycle and driving away with her child. Revision be damned!

Valentine Special: One Woman Walking

When men walk in movies, they are searching, exploring, striving. Think of the rather martial strides of Jason Bourne and the latest James Bond. Or of Ralph Fiennes’ determined staggering in The English Patient. Or perhaps best of all in recent cinema, James McAvoy’s five-minute walk through the destruction of Dunkirk, led, for almost all of that five minutes, by Joe Wright’s single tracking shot in Atonement.

But when women walk in movies, they are most often doing one of two things: showing off clothes, as in various montages in The Devil Wears Prada, or walking down the aisle, for which there are too many examples to list here. Every now and then, walking women are simply being passionate. Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility gives us a scene of Kate Winslet as the soulful young woman striding through nature, alone and wild. But for this scene, in which Marianne wanders a hillside in a storm, Lee is drawing on an old literary convention that connects the unpredictability of nature with the force of vague and unnamed emotions. Winslet’s Marianne does not desire anything or anyone in particular (she is seconds away from meeting Willoughby, when desire will commence on schedule). She is simply Being Emotional.

Very rarely, and quite strikingly, a woman walking in a movie appears purely as an emblem of female desire—specific, targeted desire for someone. The clearest example I have seen of this is a scene from Peter Weir’s 1982 film The Year of Living Dangerously. It’s a tracking shot of Sigourney Weaver’s Jill Bryant walking slowly, eyes cast down. The camera leads her, in medium-angle, through a Jakarta market until she reaches the door of Guy Hamilton’s office. She knocks on the door, steps back, and, when Hamilton emerges from the room, pulls him back against the opposite wall and begins a slow, passionate kiss. (Hamilton is played by Mel Gibson in his heart-stoppingly blue-eyed and handsome days—as good a reason as any for a passionate kiss.) The scene cross-fades to Weaver in a post-coital bed, and takes us quickly back to the 1960s Indonesian political crisis that forms the subject matter for the film.



The kiss takes nearly a minute. But Weaver’s walk accounts for fully half of the scene’s duration, and for all of its passion. Why? Because, unlike the women of the clothing montages we’re used to seeing, Jill is oblivious to an observer as she makes her way through the crowd. It’s not about what her body looks like, not about her clothes. It’s not really even about the man we come to realize she’s walking towards. It’s about her sexual desire.

Weir overlays this scene with a Vangelis-written melody that serves as the leitmotif in this opera-filled film. (Linda Hunt’s character, the photographer Billy Kwan, listens to Kiri Te Kanawa, among other things.) We hear it a bit earlier in the film, in A Scene of Kissing Dangerously, as Jill and Guy drive away from an embassy party, through a roadblock, presumably to bed. When the music starts up again, as Weaver looks up from her work, and the camera cuts to the tracking shot in the market, we know what to expect.

I admit that The Year of Living Dangerously forms the basis for my theory because I have seen the film so many times. Fascinated by it and by Weir’s direction, and intrigued by the films coming out of Australia in the 80s, I made a point of returning to it once a year for more than a decade after first seeing it in the theater. It became a kind of It’s a Wonderful Life for me, minus the ill-timed holiday grimness.

But surely there are other examples of the Walking Woman. In the near-final scene of Wright’s Bronte-ized Pride and Prejudice, Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfayden lope towards each other across a dawn field, clearly with one object in mind. Still, the scene is a different animal. Cross-cuts to Macfayden’s Darcy give Elizabeth Bennet’s desire a specific target, and dilute the woman-centered nature of the emotions on display. No, Weir’s scene stands alone.

Or does it?