Recommended Reading: Ghosts, Rooms, Blue
I recently read The Ghost of You by Margarita Saona which is exactly the kind of book I love and am always hoping for. It’s published by Laberinto Press which is this wonderful new-ish press in Edmonton run by the force that is Luciana Erregue-Sacchi (who is also the co-translator along with the author in this case). The book is already getting fine reviews, and well-deserved. For me, it fits on the shelf beside my beloved Clarice Lispector books, quite near books by Lydia Davis, C.D. Wright, Elisa Gabbert, Sarah Manguso, Kristjana Gunnars, Anne Boyer, Kate Zambreno, Mary Ruefle. And it’s not like The Ghost of You, per se, resembles any of these books, but I suppose in my way I’m organizing a very interesting imaginary guest list for a cocktail party. (It’s a library classification system that works quite well).
The first few lines in the second story in the collection, titled, “Fallen Angels,” (so you can see why it captured my attention):
“Who is telling this story? Who, you wonder. Or perhaps, that is what you would ask yourself if you could, because it has been a while since you were able to articulate such a sharp, pointed question.”
Whenever I read a short book, I’m inclined to revisit Kristjana Gunnar’s essay in Stranger at the Door on the subject. She ends the essay by saying that “at bottom, we cannot really say what we need to express: that is the import of the short book. The truth is always beyond us, and instead of packing our lives with words, we can draw back and say much less, but make each word count more, and fill each word with the mystery and awe language deserves.”
The Ghost of You is an intriguing short book, one that I know I’ll return to often.
Rooms: Women, Writing, Woolf by Sina Queyras came out in 2022 and I bought it then, read the first 50 pages and and set it aside. I was going through my blue period, tilting into darkness, and nothing I was reading was sticking. I picked it up yesterday and read the rest of it in one sitting. I think about Woolf a lot, and women and rooms, and yet Queyras had me thinking again about all of these things in new ways. I won’t say a ton about it, because it’s so fresh in my brain, but I’ll venture to say that this is a necessary volume. They say, “I am a flawed, working-class, queer writer, and also a flawed queer. I was never even gay in the right way. Always out of step.” And then, “I ask myself constantly….why do you return again and agin to Woolf? It is because the text made me!” And isn’t that a moment of joy for us all, to be in the presence of such a wonderful engagement with a text.
They talk about the intertwining nature of life and work, and “the wisdom of one’s work being throughly, beautifully, productively, ethically entwined in one’s life” They ask, “What have I longed for? Not for prizes, or fame, or bestseller lists, but for an authentic intellectual and creative practice. Time and money enough for work.”
Queyras also voices this: “One of the great questions is, how do we show up for each other? How do we appreciate the writers we love? Also, how do we manage the relationship to our own room and the access of those we love to rooms of their own, too?”
They point out, “in our society, a room comes generally at the expense of someone else not having one.” As I sit here in my reasonably instagrammable room I type out that sentence and I feel it. For a decade and a half I’ve worked for the most part in public libraries where I’ve taken a special interest in connecting houseless and other folks to the services they need. Through the pandemic and now it’s been especially harrowing work. The job has been other things and more than that but also that. And I admit that I come home to my pretty study space after hearing trauma-laced stories, and it feels just very wrong, you know? The brutal disparity.
The book ends with something I needed. Queyras says, “I bump up against something here that I have not had enough of as a writer: joy.” And “I won’t go back to joylessness.” This filled me with such relief for them. For me. I had come to this thought myself when I reached the end of that dark period. We had gone to Rome and I shook somehow the black dog there, and vowed when I returned home that I wouldn’t live without my joy again. So when I reached that point in the SQ book, I laughed a bit. If only I’d been able to finish the book earlier, maybe I’d have come to it sooner, joy that is.
Lastly, I treated myself to a photobook by Heather Evans Smith, titled: blue. Even though the subject is an investigation of loss through the colour blue, I find the book to be uplifting and inspiring in its meticulous and thoughtful beauty. Her bio reads:
“I want my photographs to tell stories. And I want stories that come from moments of life, like a still from an old movie. Movement and pain and the simple joys of being alive are frozen in time. Only a glance is needed to read the lines between people and find the story.”
You can view some of her work here.
I really enjoyed the specificity of the colour and the persistence of it. The photographs are grave and melancholy but also so sharp with purpose. The colour itself becomes a ghost in the mind, a reminder that one exists even in the presence of loss.
To return to the Saona book, I’d like to leave you with a passage from a story titled, “Dystopia II.”
“One day a woman saw a wall full of colour, children’s faces singing, a dove, the sun. She thought, “What if we paint it all? What if we cover everything in colour and scare away smog, fog, dust, and sadness? What if we paint it all? Would it not be a path to happiness?””
I’m sure you’ll want to read the book to find out what happens next…
