It's a fictionalized account of Gabriel's Rebellion, a thwarted revolt of enslaved people in Virginia in 1800; it lyrically examines masculinity as well as the links between oppression and uprising. I should have read Hardwick's short, mind-bending 1979 novel, Sleepless Nights, when I was a young writer and critic. From our vantage in the present, we can't truly know if, or how, a single piece of literature would have changed things for us.
I wish I'd gotten to it sooner. I'm cheating a bit on this assignment: I asked my daughters, 9 and 12, to help. Auggie would have helped. What I really needed was a character to help me dispel the feeling that my difference was all anyone would ever notice. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic. Black Thunder, by Arna Bontemps. Pieces of headwear that might protect against mind reading crossword puzzles. Separating your selves fools no one. Sleepless Nights, by Elizabeth Hardwick. She rents out a small apartment attached to her property but loathes how she and her Polish-immigrant tenants are locked in a pact of mutual dependence: They need her for housing; she needs them for money. When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. I read Hjorth's short, incisive novel about Alma, a divorced Norwegian textile artist who lives alone in a semi-isolated house, during my first solo stay in Norway, where my mother is from. Now I realize how helpful her elusive book—clearly fiction, yet also refracted memoir—would have been, and is. Maybe a novel was inaccessible or hadn't yet been published at the precise stage in your life when it would have resonated most. When I was 10, that question never showed up in the books I devoured, which were mostly about perfectly normal kids thrust into abnormal situations—flung back in time, say, or chased by monsters.
Wonder, by R. J. Palacio. Wonder, they both said, without a pause. I spent a large chunk of my younger years trying to figure out what I was most interested in, and it wasn't until late in my college career that I realized that the answer was history. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin. The middle narrative is standard fare: After a Taiwanese student, Wei-Chen, arrives at his mostly white suburban school, Jin Wang, born in the U. S. to Chinese immigrants, begins to intensely disavow his Chineseness. For Hardwick and her narrator, both escapees from a narrow past and both later stranded by a man, prose becomes a place for daring experiments: They test the power of fragmentary glimpses and nonlinear connections to evoke a self bereft and adrift in time, but also bold. Heti's narrator (also named Sheila) shares this uncertainty: While she talks and fights with her friends, or tries and fails to write a play, she's struggling to make out who she should be, like she's squinting at a microscopic manual for life. But these connections can still be made later: In fact, one of the great, bittersweet pleasures of life is finishing a title and thinking about how it might have affected you—if only you'd found it sooner. I finally read Sleepless Nights last year, disappointed that I had no memories, however blurry, of what my younger self had made of the many haunting insights Hardwick scatters as she goes, including this one: "The weak have the purest sense of history.
But I shied away from the book. Without spoiling its twist, part three is about the seemingly wholesome all-American boy Danny and his Chinese cousin, Chin-Kee, who is disturbingly illustrated as a racist stereotype—queue, headwear, and all. Still, she's never demonized, even when it becomes hard to sympathize with her. The bookends are more unusual. But I am trying, and hopefully the next time I pick up the novel, it won't be in Charlotte Barslund's translation. Sometimes, a book falls into a reader's hands at the wrong time. At home: speaking Shanghainese, studying, being good. Palacio's massively popular novel is about a fifth grader named Auggie Pullman, who was born with a genetic disorder that has disfigured his face. If I'd read it before then, I might have started improving my cultural and language skills earlier.
I was also a kid who struggled with feeling and looking weird—I had a condition called ptosis that made my eyelid droop, and I stuttered terribly all through childhood. The book helped me, when I was 20, understand Norway as a distinct place, not a romantic fantasy, and it made me think of my Norwegian passport as an obligation as well as an opportunity.
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