Each day leading up to the March 11 announcement of the 2009 NBCC award winners, Critical Mass highlights one of the thirty finalists. Today, NBCC board member Karen Long discusses fiction finalist Tracy Kidder's Strength in What Remains: A Journey of Remembrance and Forgiveness (Random House)

Two centuries after the 1807 publication of “Ode: Intimation of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” Tracy Kidder picked up four words from William Wordsworth to serve as the title for his book.

Strength in What Remains gathers in potency and aptness as it follows the remarkable life of one man, a survivor of genocide in Burundi. Deogratias is 24, penniless, and underweight, when he is thrown onto the cold, dirty shores of Manhattan in 1994, pretending to be a coffee bean salesman. He knows no one. He speaks no English.

In Latin, “Deogratias” means “Thanks be to God.”

He meets a Senegalese airport worker who speaks French and who offers him temporary floor space in a squatters’ hovel. This is a depressing start, as Kidder throws open Deo’s door to America, “reeking of urine and excrement . . . covered with empty cans and bottles and all sorts of paper trash.”

Deo finds his hunt for shelter bewildering: “What did it say about him that no one was willing to lend him a bed? The feelings that came from this weren’t entirely different from the feelings that came from having people try to kill you. You wondered who they thought you were and who you were in fact.”

Deo will be robbed at knifepoint, sleep homeless in Central Park, be cheated and mocked. But the reader does well to trust Kidder—that artery of luck and stamina that Kidder found in The Soul of the New Machine flows here, too, and lifts Deo off the streets, eventually into a safe home and class at Columbia University, where another incoming freshmen asks if he is the son of an African king.

How Deo he is saved, and how he heals himself, is a story you won’t read anywhere else. Kidder’s exemplary research never bogs down the narrative, and he avoids the pitfalls of smoothing out human complexity.

Kidder takes a suspect genre, the “as told to” story, and cleaves it. The first part is the adventure of Deo’s improbable survival, turning on such arbitrary details as his having left his door unlocked, which deflected a death squad’s rampaging search for him.

But what most elevates this book is its second half, in which Kidder explores “Gusimbura,” the Burundian notion that reviving painful memories is worse than rude. Deo is beset by nightmares, “a messy mind,” a weak stomach, and a sensitive heart.

Part of the answer for him arrives in the form of Paul Farmer, whose book, Infections and Inequalities, Deo discovers in Columbia’s library, and whose organization, Partners in Health, in Boston, gives him a job. This will no doubt tickle fans of Mountains Beyond Mountains, in which Kidder probed another seam of stamina and luck--Farmer’s daunting medical practice in Haiti. The link to Farmer is how Kidder came to know Deo.

“At Partners In Health, I think, Deo had discovered a way to quiet the questions he’d been asking at Columbia,” Kidder writes. “That is, he saw there might be an answer for what troubled him most about the world, an answer that lay in his hands, indeed in his memory. You had to do something.”

What Deogratias does should be left to the reader to discover.

Click here to read an excerpt from Strength in What Remains.

And here's a video of Tracy Kidder discussing the back story of Strength in What Remains.
 

Each day leading up to the March 11 announcement of the 2009 NBCC award winners, Critical Mass highlights one of the thirty finalists. Today, NBCC board member Rigoberto González discusses Benjamin Moser's Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector (Oxford University Press).

Called simply Clarice by those who adored and admired her in Brazil and throughout Latin America, Lispector worked hard to fuel her legendary status up until the year of her death from cervical cancer in 1977. No one knew better than she about the benefits of constructing an elusive and mysterious persona that generated interest and intrigue at a time when men dominated the literary scene. If males were going to claim the public, she was going to claim the public imagination. This strategy, however, also had a drawback: namely, that the readership fell in love more with the idea of a beautiful woman named Clarice than with the writer’s ideas.

Benjamin Moser works diligently to examine the many sides of Clarice Lispector--from the enigmatic (and sometimes difficult) woman who channeled her unconventional feminist thought and personal demons onto the page, to the surprisingly reclusive figure with a love-hate relationship to the spotlight, who nonetheless participated in political and social causes. Moser allows Lispector to remain a woman of daunting contradictions and unravels instead a complex portrait of an artist whose aesthetic and inventiveness were way ahead of her time.

Moser’s fluid and addicting prose rarely falters as he follows Lispector relentlessly from country to country, book to book, headache to heartache, keeping a respectful distance from the private dramas of the writer he admires, but mining thoroughly the subtle nuances and hard-to-find revelations within Lispector’s work. The intersections of fact and fabrication, life and literature, are skillfully pulled apart by this sensitive and intelligent biographer, who highlights, above all else, Lispector’s dignity and creative drive.

By presenting such a classy and accessible study of this popular Latin American author, Moser will undoubtedly renew interest in Lispector’s work, most of which remains untranslated into English or only feebly available. And for those who have not yet met or heard of Clarice, Moser’s impressive biography is indeed a memorable introduction.

More: Benjamin Moser in More Intelligent Life on Why You Should Know Clarice Lispector

From 1977, here's Clarice Lispector interviewed on Brazilian TV

Beginning today, Critical Mass will highlight on a daily basis the thirty books selected as the 2009 finalists for our annual awards in Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Criticism, Biography, and Autobiography. A full list of the finalists in each of six categories can be found here. Don’t forget to plan on attending the free readings by our finalists at the New School in New York on Wednesday, March 10, and our awards ceremony, on Thursday, March 11.

The latest in our series about the future of book culture, which includes essays, interviews, and free-range opining, is from NBCC member critic Michael Antman, a finalist for this year's Nona Balakian Award for Excellence in Reviewing.

APOCALYPSE LATER, DEGRADATION NOW

I tend to distrust apocalyptic predictions because, by definition, every one of them is dead wrong, except of course for the final one, by which time none of us will be around to acknowledge that at last someone got it right. My healthy skepticism dates back to high school, when some earnest young ecologists on a national doom-and-gloom tour warned my fellow students and me, gathered for the final period of the day in a lecture room, that humanity had no more than five years left if we didn’t immediately, and radically, change our wasteful ways. We walked out in the spring sunshine after that scarifying lecture and the environmentalists were promptly forgotten by all as we chose up sides for a touch football game, or flirted, or went off to Fluky‘s for hot dogs and milkshakes, and here were are two generations later, my classmates and I, still ticking.

Life goes on. The urge to create literature, bask in its pleasures, and critically engage with the best and worst of it isn’t going to disappear in the next decade or two just because digitization is inexorably advancing its hegemony over the printed word. However, the environmentalists who visited us that day were correct in the sense that our world, and the world we would leave to our own children, was being steadily degraded, and it could be argued that their lecture served as a self-denying prophecy in the sense that it forced some of us to take this degradation seriously. The same could be said of those who warn of the deleterious effects of digitization.

Interestingly, supporters of Amazon (both the company behind the Kindle and the rainforest it was named for) would claim that the printed book itself, in addition to being practically as antiquated as a Sumerian cuneiform clay tablet, is partially responsible for our environmental fix. Books and newspapers and magazines, they claim, lay waste to forests and clog landfills. By sheer coincidence, my office is right next door to one of the publishing industry’s biggest paper suppliers, and their executives consider this charge a calumny -- the paper industry has made enormous strides in sustainability, and certainly isn’t sawing down old-growth trees to transform them into this month’s Vogue. When I asked one of them why the paper industry didn’t do a better job of getting the word out about sustainability, his response was to shrug and say, in effect, “yeah, we really should.”

At the same time, the shininess of our brand new and indisputably marvelous electronic devices tends to blind people to the fact that they, themselves, are destined for landfills a lot sooner that most printed books are, and, unlike books, are manufactured from toxic chemicals like coltan (Google the phrase “blood coltan” if you aren’t familiar with the term.)

There is a broader environmental consequence to the spread of digital culture. Given that digitization tends to reduce everything to its least tangible manifestation, a stroll down the streets of a major American city a decade or two from today may turn out to be a uniquely bleak experience. There may be few if any bookstores, no newsstands, no newspaper boxes, no stacks of free newspapers and city guides, no comic book stores, no greeting card and stationery shops, no Internet cafes, no video game stores, no record stores, no video rental stores (the last two are practically gone already), and far fewer libraries, movie theatres, galleries, and poster shops to arrest our attention, engage our intellect, and delight our eyes. It will be as if a neutron bomb had destroyed everything with a cultural component, and left standing only the bank branches, office towers, parking garages, and fast food joints.

Ah, but there I go being semi-apocalyptic. That is neither my nature nor my intention. What I advocate, instead, is that those who have the most invested in the physical manifestations of our culture (that means you, paper company down the hall, and you, publishing house that can’t see beyond today’s price wars to tomorrow’s consequences, and you too, local librarian who’s oh-so-terrified of appearing un-hip) speak up more loudly and more confidently in support of the richness and beauty of the printed book, and work much, much harder on ways that it can co-exist with, and enhance, the digital. No, if digitization does indeed dissolve everything in its path, and printed books end up becoming a niche enthusiasm or amusing antique, it won’t mean the world is coming to an end -- only that it’s become a bit more bleak, and blank, and featureless.




 

A reminder to mark the date: NBCC Finalists will read from their work at the New School (66 W. 12th Street) on Wednesday, March 10, at 7 PM. Free and open to the public. Please join us!

NBCC Awards Ceremony: Announcement of the 2009 NBCC Award winners will take place at 7:00 p.m. in The New School University's Tishman Auditorium, 66 W. 12th St., New York City. The event is free and open to the public.

Kristina Marie Darling received master's degree in American Culture Studies from Washington University, where she also completed an undergraduate degree in English in 2007. Ten chapbooks of her work have been published, among them "Fevers and Clocks" (March Street Press, 2006), "The Traffic in Women" (Dancing Girl Press, 2006), "Night Music" (BlazeVox Books, 2008), and "Strange Gospels" (Maverick Duck Press, 2009), which was selected for the "New Voices" feature in Ploughshares Magazine. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in The Boston Review, The Gettysburg Review, Shenandoah, Gargoyle, The Colorado Review, New Letters, and other journals. She currently studies philosophy at the University of Missouri, St. Louis and hopes to pursue a doctorate in English Literature.